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  • Academia After the Pandemic
  • Maggie Doherty (bio), Nils Gilman (bio), Adam Harris (bio), Tressie McMillan Cottom (bio), Christopher Newfield (bio), and Timothy Shenk (bio)

How has higher education changed in the age of lockdowns—and what happens next? There’s no easy answer to these questions, and your perspective will vary depending on what you thought of academia before the pandemic. Were you a tenured professor trying to improve the system from within? A journalist watching from the outside? An adjunct fighting for your job? In late summer, I spoke with a group whose experience reflected the diverse character of the challenges facing the university today. The following transcript of that discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

—Timothy Shenk
Timothy Shenk:

Students across the country are coming back to college this fall for the first time in eighteen months. How has the university system changed since the last time they set foot on campus?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

At the start of COVID-19, I remember trying to figure out what we already knew about what external shocks and crises do to an institutional system like U.S. higher education. And we didn’t know a lot. We knew about shocks hitting a subsector of higher education, like during Hurricane Katrina; we knew about limited geographical events, like when a hurricane forces schools to scramble. But we didn’t actually know what would happen. And I remember thinking, it was precisely because we didn’t know that we were going to mismanage the whole thing.

But there isn’t a universal experience in U.S. higher education. What’s happening at a small, tuition-dependent, liberal arts college in the South that is the major employer for a small or mid-sized town is vastly different from what’s happening in a place with a cluster of five prestigious schools with a robust, diverse employment sector. Overall, most college leaders saw COVID-19 as an opportunity to do more of what they had already been doing. Schools that had wanted to respond to inequality doubled down [End Page 19] on that. Schools that had been trending toward profit-seeking, especially under the guise of a public institution—like Purdue and Arizona State—doubled down. So students are coming back to accelerated versions of the institutions they left.


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Remote college students at a lecture in 2020 (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Higher education leaders have learned two things: One, there is more appetite for certain types of degrees and credentials than they probably thought pre-COVID-19. A lot of people are willing to expand into what we, a few years ago, would have thought of as experimental degrees: job-oriented, market-oriented, mostly in partnerships with for-profit companies. Two, there is very limited consumer appetite for online education. The bulk of higher education really saw online education as an opportunity to respond to political crises and funding crises. But students want to be back on campus. A lot of higher education leaders tell me that their response to COVID-19 was really driven by customer demand, which shows how far the customer model of higher education has expanded. It was students and their families who wanted the “college experience” and the “on-campus experience.”

We’re not going to close again, even if it is the right thing to do. A lot of institutions say they couldn’t survive if they did. [End Page 20]

Christopher Newfield:

One of the things that has really concerned me is there’s no real discussion of learning quality, and how to equalize it. One or two percent of the country’s students go to the boutique universities that the world associates with the quality of U.S. schools, and everybody else is more or less fending for themselves. And we haven’t broached that issue at all.

There are two other things that I’m worried about now. First is the crazy increase in selectivity. UCLA rejected 90 percent of its applicants. Berkeley rejected 86 percent of its applicants. The famous privates are rejecting 95, 96, 97 percent of applicants. It’s going to turn...

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