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America’s colleges have had a rough go of it in recent years. After the Great Recession sent students flooding back to campus, schools have faced one evolving crisis after another: COVID, government interference, protests, and the chaos of AI tools in the classroom. Despite some positive enrollment trends, schools are also staring down a very near future where there will simply be fewer 18-year-olds to fill their seats.
Students have not had it much easier. This spring, graduates are leaving their respective alma maters and entering a job market that is beleaguered with uncertainty. AI has promised to upend entire industries; it’s already changing how employers are thinking about entry-level jobs. There used to be a sequence of events—or at least students and families perceived a sequence of events—that went something like this: You go to college; you graduate with a degree; you get a good job. It was that simple. But that story was never quite right. Finding work after graduation has never been guaranteed, but with rising tuition costs, and institutions that have explicitly tried to marry their programs to the needs of business, it’s easy to see why people might think that it should be.
Is the purpose of college just to get a good job, or is there more to it? And though the nation’s colleges and universities have been in rough spots before, is it finally time to start rethinking their entire model? On this week’s Radio Atlantic, the Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost and I sift through the fraught landscape of American higher education.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
Adam Harris: It’s graduation season. That means celebrating with family and friends, sweating through outdoor ceremonies that may have been better held inside, inspirational graduation speeches, and in a lot of cases, the beginning of the job hunt.
But this year, a subpar economy, constricting job market, and the uncertainties around how AI might be killing entry-level jobs have combined to make that search particularly precarious.
Now, it’s not the first time students have graduated into a bad economy. In 2010, then-President Barack Obama told graduates at the University of Michigan that they may be in for a tough time ahead.
President Obama: The fact is, when you leave here today, you will search for work in an economy that is still emerging from the worst crisis since the Great Depression.
Harris: And the economy has gotten better and worse in some ways since then. But AI presents new challenges that some graduates are sneering at—and sometimes quite literally.
Like last week, when the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned AI in his commencement speech at the University of Arizona—
Eric Schmidt: I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear—
[Sounds of audience booing]
Harris: —or at a recent commencement speech at the University of Central Florida, where the audience booed a comparison of AI as the next Industrial Revolution—
[Sounds of audience booing]
Gloria Caulfield: What happened?
[Music]
Harris: —and cheered seconds later when the speaker tried to get things back on track.
Caulfield: Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives.
[Sounds of audience cheering]
Caulfield: All right. Okay. We’ve got a bipolar topic here, I see. Okay.
Harris: This change in our world is happening as universities deal with more immediate concerns, federal funding cuts that are choking budgets and a looming demographic decline among them.
This is Radio Atlantic, and I’m Adam Harris, in for Hanna Rosin this week. For a long time, education was my beat as a reporter. I worked at The Chronicle of Higher Ed, I covered it for The Atlantic, and I wrote a book about it. And I think that it is fair to say that American higher education is at a crossroads.
The models for small colleges and big research universities alike are just not working as they once did. Students and families often still see college as a path to a better life, but they’re worried about debt and what sort of jobs they might be able to get on the back end.
Meanwhile, in states across the country, politicians are trying to barge their way into classroom discussions.
Where do America’s colleges go from here? Joining me to discuss is Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost. Thanks for being with us.
Ian Bogost: Glad to be here.
Harris: Ian, you write about technology and culture for us, but your day job is as a computer science and engineering professor at Washington University [in] St. Louis. I want to explore whether higher education’s model is broken right now, but first, it’s graduation season.
Bogost: It is.
Harris: As a CS professor in the time of AI, what is the mood on your campus like?
Bogost: I think it’s the same as all campuses: It’s in every pair of ears and every mouth of every student, no matter what they’re studying. I think for folks graduating in computer science and related fields, they’re realizing that the job market that they may have thought they were gonna get four years ago isn’t the same one.
But everyone everywhere else is also wondering, How much harder is my job search gonna be compared to what I thought it was based on this technology that didn’t exist when I began school?
Harris: And so those headlines about the AI job market, they feel real.
Bogost: They do. They feel real to students. They feel real to faculty and administrators. And it’s not just because AI is killing jobs. It’s not really doing that yet. But macroscopically, we’ve seen layoffs that are not necessarily because of AI, but because AI is an excuse to make cuts.
And it was already really hard for young people to get entry-level jobs, even in fields such as finance and technology that felt like they were sure things. It’s even harder now than it used to be, and they’re finding themselves just really highly pressured and feeling like success is much harder than it was a few years ago for their peers that graduated before them.
Harris: Yeah. I often think about those previous bad job markets, right, the times where it was still hard—’08, ’09, the Great Recession hit. At that time, we saw those finance majors switching over to things like computer science. What are we seeing now? Where do they go for a sort of major now?
Bogost: Yes. So computer science is weird because we’re now in the 20-somethingth year of growth in the high-tech sector overall, and that was driving enrollment growth—really kind of out-of-control enrollment growth—in CS degrees all over the country. So this is almost kind of the first time that we’ve seen declines.
And I think those declines may be justified for other reasons that we don’t need to get into right now. But it hasn’t happened before, and that means that no one knows quite how to address it.
So that leaves folks going into professional degrees: medical school, law school. That’s sort of kicking the can down the road a little bit. And then you also see finance consulting. I think management consulting remains an area that people see as a sure thing if you can get in. It was always really hard to get into McKinsey or what have you, and now it’s even harder.
So there is a sense of general constriction, of contraction that I think is maybe more like that 2008 downturn than it is like a traditional—the early ’90s recession, for example, which I remember. It was like, Well, this is a little bump, and then we’ll get back to normal.
Harris: It’s interesting the way that these conversations about college so quickly move over into employment, right?
Bogost: Right.
Harris: But college is about so much more than getting a job, right? Historically, it’s about—
Bogost: It’s supposed to be. We hope it is.
Harris: We hope it is, right? You would hope that it’s a place where you learn something new about yourself, right? You develop into this new person, right? But I think part of the reason why some of that is looming larger today than it did maybe not that long ago is because college costs more than it did not that long ago.
Ian, you went to [the University of Southern California] for undergrad.
Bogost: I went to USC. That’s right.
Harris: Can you guess the difference between tuition costs now and when you graduated?
Bogost: I had some kind of scholarship. It was substantial, but it wasn’t the full thing. And I remember at one point going into the financial-aid office or whatever it was—the bursar’s office, where you went in person—and I remember writing a $9,000 check for tuition that term. And it’s gotta be at least $70,000 a year now.
Harris: You’re exactly right. (Laughs.) It’s about $75,000 a year now. And, right, with a $9,000 check, it was about $20,000 when you graduated.
Bogost: Yeah. That difference, too—it’s a lot of money for anyone, but even for very wealthy people, it feels like a lot of money. I think it feels different. It’s like when you buy a Porsche or an Hermès or something, you have expectations for it, and those expectations are different than if you buy a Dodge, right?
Harris: Yeah, and that’s a good point, too, ’cause a Dodge is a reliable car, but it’s not what you were expecting. If you’re going to a publicly funded college, right, tuition might be $11,000 for the year for in-state students. But it’s almost as if you have a different expectation.
Bogost: Well, and even at a state school, we’re seeing more and more students from out of state that are paying maybe not $75,000, but maybe $50,000, maybe $40,000, and you get a different community that are thinking about what they’re getting out of their University of Texas, University of Georgia, whatever degrees—Michigan degree—that wasn’t just, Well, I’m going to state, and I’m getting that in-state tuition, or I’m getting the scholarship that came with being a good student, having B’s, or what have you, depending on the state that you live in.
So that pressure, that financial pressure, of buying something that’s supposed to deliver a return on investment, it’s not just that it’s acute now; it’s that it’s been building for years and years and years.
Harris: So that $75,000 tuition at USC now is not actually what students are going to end up paying—in most cases, right? There will be some full-pay students, but very few students actually pay that full freight, right? So what is that difference between that sticker price and then what students actually end up paying?
Bogost: It’s very murky, right? So you’re right that an average student might not pay the full sticker price, at least in terms of tuition. Room and board usually are—they cost what they cost. And then there’s awards. A lot of schools have full-need financial aid, much of which doesn’t come from loans in the wealthier schools, the private schools now.
But I want you to imagine that you go to the store to buy something and I tell you, This is $10, Adam, but actually, most people, they don’t pay $10; they pay $3. Your question is, Well, why and who and how? How does that all work? So even though it’s true that that $75,000 may not be what many or most people pay, the fact that that’s the case, I don’t think that makes Americans feel any better about the cost they’re actually paying, and in fact, it feels duplicitous. They feel tricked.
And while that may still allow them to afford college in some way, it doesn’t improve the overall sense of confidence that Americans have that college is for them, that they’re getting the most value out of it, because the guy next to you might have paid half the price.
Harris: Yeah. Understanding how sort of the students and the parents might view that investment, how do universities explain how much that investment is going to cost, right? How do they explain the numbers?
Bogost: Well, allow me to take just a brief step back. College and university education in America is pretty weird, and it’s weird because we have mated together, we’ve put together a credentialing system, where you get a degree that’s supposed to move you on to a skilled domain of employment—we’ve mated that to this kind of coming-of-age service, where you become who you are as a young person. You leave home, maybe, for the first time. Maybe you just go across the state. Maybe you go across the country—we live in a big country—and you’re kind of discovering who you are and what’s available to you as a person.
And colleges and universities have always struggled to balance those two sides of education, not to mention the whole research apparatus that’s present at a university like mine or at Yale or Harvard or Michigan, which isn’t necessarily the case at a smaller school.
So all of that feels like it’s kinda broken. That balance has broken down. And it becomes very difficult to say, Well, you’re coming here to learn how to be a citizen and to live together with other people and to make some mistakes as a young person and then figure out who you are. And it’s also gonna cost you $75,000 a year, plus room—like, $300,000, $400,000 all in to get that.
That kinda broke the system, I think. So now it’s much harder for us to make the case that the whole investment is worthwhile, not just because of the outcome it produces in employment terms, but the outcome it produces in sort of whole-person terms.
Harris: How are you seeing that brokenness sort of showing up in the students that you get?
Bogost: Everything is about professionalization now. Yeah, that’s what we’re seeing on the ground.
And granted, I work at a school where there’s a lot of aspirational young people striving to become doctors or lawyers or consultants or what have you, but it does feel that way almost everywhere. From day one, every question is, What is this for? How is it gonna improve my lot? How is it gonna get me closer to the internship, to the job, to the next thing?
And I don’t blame the students for this at all. We’ve trained them, over years and decades, to be looking toward the next step in their lives, the next aspiration, the next accomplishment, and they don’t even know how to stop doing that. And we don’t really know how to stop doing it either anymore.
And then you throw in a weird economy, with AI and with a very difficult entry-level job market besides, and the whole thing just is so brittle that it starts to crack.
[Music]
Harris: When we’re back, does the economic model of universities still work?
[Break]
Harris: Ian, when we left off, we were talking about the challenges students faced in paying for an education and deciding what to be educated in, right: computer science, finance, something like that, something that’ll lead to a career. But I wanna look at it from the school side because the institutions themselves haven’t had an easy go recently, right?
The big research institutions have seen federal funding cuts or have been threatened with funding cuts since the president returned to office. The financial picture’s bleak at small liberal-arts colleges. And they have this sort of looming demographic cliff, right? There aren’t as many 18-year-olds, or there won’t be as many 18-year-olds as there are now. So what do the economics of higher education from the institution side look like right now?
Bogost: At a high level, it’s rocky. It’s rocky everywhere. But it’s also quite uneven. So even, you mentioned the demographic cliff, when there are fewer students to attend school; there’s fewer students to pay for it no matter what they’re paying. But in some parts of the country, that’s impacting schools more than others. Tennessee, for example, is fine. They’ve got plenty of 18-year-olds to go to their schools. And that may not be the case in New York or California.
The research funding is very complicated. Universities, which have both an educational apparatus and a research apparatus, may be taking in as much as a billion dollars a year or more—from the federal government, largely, but from other sources—to fund research in science and medicine and all of the domains where faculty work.
And as those cuts have not even necessarily become active, but become threatened, like, Oh, we don’t know. Is that money gonna come in next year? Is it not?, that’s caused schools to move money around, to make cuts, to try to figure out a way that they would balance their books in the face of those losses, not to mention spending all the time required to figure out how to do that.
And then at smaller colleges, you mentioned that small liberal-arts colleges have had a rocky time; some of them have closed. That’s true. The very wealthy ones, though, they’re fine, and actually, because they don’t have a large, federally funded research apparatus, they’re almost untouchable by those funds.
So at a high level, what I would say is that we’ve had to think about our budgets in a new way, in an inconvenient way, in a time-consuming way, that’s also created a lot of strife and kind of wasted a lot of time and money inside of almost every college and university in America since President Trump took office again at the start of 2025. And all of that is having this strong effect on everything else that’s happening, all of the stuff we’ve already talked about.
Harris: Yeah. Earlier this year, mentioning kind of sticking with those small liberal-arts colleges and their model, you wrote about small liberal-arts school, right, and how they’re this accidental winner of the war on higher ed. What did you learn by going to those campuses, and which campuses did you go to?
Bogost: Right, so I went to the fancy places, largely, the small, private liberal-arts colleges, such as—I went to Amherst. I went to Davidson in North Carolina. I went to Smith. I talked to many others. I went to Vassar. I talked to Pomona.
One thing that I learned is that it’s very different from the research-university perspective. When faculty are doing research, it’s often just funded directly by those schools, which is great. They can employ undergrads. They can help them figure out how to become researchers. They’re able to pursue their research without kinda thinking about, How are we gonna get a grant to make it happen? They can focus on the classroom experience.
But then there’s only, like, 1,500 or 2,000 students total, so how much of America can that serve, compared to 50,000-plus students at Ohio State?
Harris: Yeah. There was a time, right, when that was the central model of higher ed, where James Madison is learning from George Wythe about how to be a lawyer. And we had this big bill in the 1800s that sort of changed that, right? It brought education, higher education, to the masses. It put colleges where there weren’t colleges before—in Ames, Iowa, and Auburn, Alabama, right—called the Morrill Act. But the Morrill Act also led to some of this professionalization and the job. Can you talk about that double-sided coin of the Morrill Act in our history?
Bogost: Yeah, so many of our listeners may be familiar with a land-grant university, and that’s one of the things that was created by the Morrill Act. So you go to Michigan State or the University of Georgia or UC Davis, and a lot of them were agricultural-focused, ag schools; some of them became kinda science- and tech-focused. Virginia Tech, I think, is a land grant in Virginia, for example. And the idea was that we would expand access to higher education by also making it much more professionalized, much more vocational and focused on professional outcomes.
And that was kind of one brick in this wall of imbalance that is, like, 150 years old that has continued to develop, whereby previously, in that James Madison model, you were basically elite—you were aristocracy—and you were kind of living an intellectual life, probably because of wealth and because of privilege. And yeah, you may have gotten to go to Dartmouth and spent a little bit of time there before going back home to your father’s law firm or railroad or what have you. But you weren’t getting access to a new kind of life. There wasn’t this upward mobility that college eventually promised.
And that is a balancing act that we’ve been running ever since, that balance between This is a professional experience that is being pursued in order to improve your lot economically, and to improve the country, or the state of the country, as a whole, and the kind of dream or the fantasy of the college man or the college woman as someone who bears a certain kind of aristocratic sensibility, that is experiencing a kind of collegiate life that has always really been associated with the elite and the wealthy. Even if you go to Texas A&M or something, there’s still that sort of sensibility that that’s what college is in America, is this access to a kind of leisure-class experience.
And those things have coexisted, but they have broken down, and they’re breaking down even more over the last couple years and much more rapidly than they had previously.
In a prior era, you might have pursued an engineering degree instead of a degree in history at a land-grant big university that had everything. But that was still a choice you were making. You were probably also doing a minor or something like that, and you had a kind of a full life. And now it’s really become much more tilted toward professional education, even outside of the schools that were explicitly established to produce economic benefit.
Harris: Kind of considering that switch towards that shift where students are really thinking about the economic benefit of college, that’s grown into the way that the public thinks about the economic benefits of college, right?
There was a time—it’s a well-worn conversation—where, when we used to talk about college, it was as a public good, right? It’s George Washington getting up in front of Congress and saying that there’s nothing that better deserves your patronage than the arts and the sciences, because knowledge in every country is the surest basis of public happiness, right? There was this idea that college, it was good for everybody. It was good for our economy. It was good for people knowing kind of who they were and why they supported the things that they supported, particularly democracy.
Have colleges abandoned that purpose as well as there’s sort of this professionalization, or are they trying to hold on to it while people think of college as something else?
Bogost: Colleges and universities are big places. They’re giant bureaucracies that employ thousands or tens of thousands of people and have communities that are even larger than that. Sometimes they’re connected to hospital systems. Often, they’re the largest employers in a city or a region. So it’s always difficult to make singular statements. They’re not like companies or organizations. They’re almost more like cities.
But one thing I’ll say is that by the mid-20th century, after the GI Bill, after World War II, and into the 1960s, when more and more and more Americans started going to college for all the reasons you just mentioned—not just to improve their financial lot, but to change their relationship to knowledge and to become citizens in a different way—by the mid-century, certainly by 1965, 1970, there was a sense that this was truly gonna be for everyone. And the white-collar knowledge economy that opened up as a result of the expansion of college to kind of any American who wanted it, not just through the Morrill Act, but through the access to every kind of educational prospect, that seemed like it would continue to build for forever.
And it didn’t. Already by the 1970s, in California under [Ronald] Reagan and then nationally, we saw a kind of dampening down of funding, and that’s continued ever since. It’s just become more and more unaffordable relative to inflation and costs.
And just last year, for the first time in a long time—I don’t know exactly since when—we saw the occupational prospects of skilled trades, where you might get an associate, plumbers, electricians, and what have you, they had an employment advantage over college graduates for the first time since the 1990s, when that data started to be tracked, which was exactly the thing that we were getting away from in the mid-century.
So the simple answer to your question is, so long as the economic situation was in reasonable balance, it was much easier for colleges and universities to make this argument about becoming a citizen, pursuing knowledge for its own sake, building a community around those values, and selling that idea to parents and to students and to Americans in general.
And we only realized when it started to break down how tenuous that was—and maybe we didn’t even realize it then, and it’s only now that the whole thing feels like it’s really and truly on the rocks, that we don’t really know how to go back, because so much time and so much distance has been lost since it was viable.
Harris: Yeah. There’s a little bug in the back of my head that anytime I hear there’s an employment advantage for the skilled trades, for plumbing and welding, there is a hearkening back to the time of tracking, right? But what we are seeing with this expansion of Pell Grants for really short-term programs, right, these pushes for going to trade schools—what do you make of these current arguments that we are seeing that we need more folks going into trade schools because of the return on investment in your education?
Bogost: It’s so complicated. So much has happened. I think one thing that’s happened is AI or other kinds of technological change have made people think, Well, wait. Hold up. Is the knowledge economy even gonna be a thing? And we did start to see the local plumbing operation, that became the new kind of local blue-collar millionaire class. Instead of the guy who owns the 10 car dealerships, it’s now the guy who owns the big plumbing or electrician operation.
I think folks are looking at that. I also think there’s a strong desire among everyone, including young people, to feel like the world is in their hands, that they’re connected to it, and that they have an impact on it.
Everything became so abstract. We sometimes talk about this idea of email jobs. The knowledge economy became just moving symbols around. You don’t really know what you’re doing and why. Even if you can get one of these entry-level jobs, does it have a purpose? Does it matter? Do you even know what you’re doing? Whereas fixing someone’s sink, at least in theory, you can understand why it would be desirable and good and contribute to the well-being of your community.
Those factors are at work, but also, I think it’s just like, you look at that $75,000-a-year number, and even if you don’t know, or even if you know that maybe you wouldn’t pay that much, you’re like, Well, hold up. There have gotta be some other alternatives. What might those be? And that created doubt. That created doubt, and that doubt led people to at least fantasize about thinking about different paths.
And then, of course, you have all the Peter Thiels of the world saying, College is worthless. You should just be getting on with it and becoming an entrepreneur like I did with someone else’s money.
So there’s a number of different pressures that certainly didn’t exist when I was going to school. It was like, Well, I’m gonna go to college, and everything will be okay. I don’t know how, and then it was. And that’s just not the case anymore.
Harris: Yeah, and when you have these alternate paths to the supposed American dream, right, why go to Harvard when you can just create Facebook and become a billionaire?
Bogost: Yeah. We’re in the 20-somethingth year of that underlying notion of how elite power and wealth gets developed. It goes back to Bill Gates, who also dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft with Paul Allen.
But that’s the message, right: The way to become a billionaire is not to go to school. And that’s just in the water now. That’s long enough ago that a young person today looks at wealth and power, and does not see it being connected to knowledge for its own sake.
Harris: Hmm. Returning to that AI anxiety and jobs, how do you think students looking at entering college soon should be thinking about all of this?
Bogost: I think the best approach is to realize that—this is my humanities, liberal-arts background coming through here.
Harris: (Laughs.) We love it.
Bogost: We don’t know what the future holds. It is changing rapidly. The best thing you can do is build a great deal of knowledge in a large number of domains at a basic level, and prepare yourself for change, rather than preparing yourself for a sort of singular professional life that is sure not to come about in the way that you expected and is sure not to persist in that way for your whole career.
That promise was always a good one. It maybe got a little bit out of phase with reality, and it felt a little abstract, and some of the pressures, beyond “wokeness” and the politics associated with whether or not you should do a gender-studies degree or something like that, it got a little bit out of phase with reality—by which I mean we needed to connect those ideas in a much more concrete way to individual students’ futures. But it’s still the right answer.
I still think it feels hard to jump into the deep end of that pool because it costs $75,000 a year or because it’s not clear how to do it, and we need to provide the structures inside of these schools that say, Okay, when I say that, this is what I mean. These are the opportunities available to you. And it’s about connecting your computer-science education to your urban-planning education, and we’re gonna give you real structures to make that happen in a way that give you new opportunities—just to pick some random examples. We could do a much better job of that, but Americans could also do a much better job being open to the idea that the future’s gonna be different than the present.
Harris: Hmm. That’s good advice for all of us.
Ian, thank you so much for joining me today.
Bogost: Oh, thank you.
[Music]
Harris: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Genevieve Finn fact-checked. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
I’m Adam Harris. Thank you for listening.
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