Whatever else the month of May signals—and there are numerous options—among the perennials are reflections on the state of higher education to go along with commencement ceremonies. Unlike the exuberance of the typical graduation speech, however, the tone of this year’s reflections is bleak, dire even. American higher education is in a state of existential crisis. 

The term “existential crisis” can here be used in two ways. The first is the simple sense of whether colleges and universities will continue to exist. According to one study, eighty-nine have closed or merged since 2020, with the pace expected to increase significantly in the next decade. This problem is particularly acute for private schools, including Catholic, under three thousand students. It is unclear how many will survive the dreaded “demographic cliff,” a drop of 13 percent of high school graduates by 2041. More importantly, higher education is also suffering from an existential crisis in the philosophical sense, a loss of meaning concerning its reason for existence. The public has noticed. A recent poll by Pew found that seven out of ten Americans believe that higher education is heading in the wrong direction, fourteen points higher than six years ago. Those who went to a four-year college are more skeptical than those who did not, and Republicans a bit more (77 percent) than Democrats (65 percent). There is clearly a breakdown in trust between the citizenry and its institutions of higher learning.