There are a couple of highly interesting papers on this topic during the last few weeks. The most interesting one was “How universities came to be – and why they’re in trouble now” by Philip G. Altbach.
Higher education worldwide is under strain, facing deep financial and political challenges. In the U.S., universities are dealing with major federal funding cuts and political pressure on teaching and research. In the U.K., money troubles are pushing some institutions toward collapse. Global enrolment has exploded from 6 million in 1950 to 264 million in 2023, and by 2024 most countries—except in sub-Saharan Africa—were sending over half of school-leavers to higher education. So we don’t have anymore an elite research university but education for the masses.
As higher education became accessible to the masses across the world, research-intensive universities based on the original Humboldtian model have come to represent just a small proportion of all higher education institutions.[…] the rise of populist politics has compounded some of these pressures. Populism has many causes —Rejection of experts, science and evidence-based policy is part of many populist movements.
Even worse there are now less higher qualified scientistis that will flow to the private sectory. A similar view is found at the blog of Clara Collier
… something happened to German universities at the turn of the 19th century — they developed a new system that combined teaching with research. Within a few decades, everyone in Europe was trying to copy their model. German scientists dominated chemistry and revolutionized modern physics. They came up with cell theory, bacteriology, the whole laboratory-based model of scientific medicine
The model’s historical origin also illuminate why modern universities may be in trouble: if the balance between mission, funding, autonomy, teaching, and research shifts too far, the institution risks losing its raison d’être. All the financial and structural pressures that force institutions to prioritise revenue, prestige, cost-cutting and global competition rather than education. In addition we have a legitimacy crisis, where universities are no longer seen as the unique centres of knowledge creation and public good—they compete instead with other knowledge platforms and feel more like businesses.
While the above article suggested that universities decline when they lose their grounding in broad knowledge, mission, and unity of purpose, a new NYT article suggests decline happens when finances and market pressures force institutions to compromise on programmes, services, and expectations — undermining their offer to students. As we may expect from a current US persepective, it doesn’t stress “ideas” as much as “money + market”.
In the same vein is another Atlantic article on the disruption of the federal research-funding ecosystem (especially via the NIH) which ties into the broader theme of financial/mission distress. It complements the notion that universities are vulnerable not only to enrolment/tuition pressures and mission drift, but also to external shocks in the research funding system. Many research universities have built major commitments around securing federal research grants and the indirect cost (“overhead”) payments from them. The Atlantic piece argues that when those are threatened, the whole institution becomes fragile. That ties back to the origin‐story of the modern research university (the teaching + research model) — if the “research” side collapses, the model itself is under threat.
This injects more urgency: it’s not only decades of mission drift and funding pressure, but also sudden regulatory/policy upheavals.
