Higher Education and the Noah Moment | American Enterprise Institute

The storm clouds hovering above public and private universities in the United States are neither divine judgement nor a day of reckoning. Rather, they signal a wave of uncharted policies and practices institutions must learn to navigate or risk being swept away by swelling tides. Especially during a season when Americans’ confidence in higher education is swaying in the wind.

Federal examples of the changing landscape include the Department of Education reshaping higher education through federal loan limits by narrowing the definition of a “professional degree.” Another is a new Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rule that caps the visa stay at four years for foreign students pursuing a graduate degree in the United States. For students pursuing a Ph.D., this could result in an estimated reduction of 112,000 international students and a $3.4 billion loss to the U.S. economy. 

At the state level, demographic trends are already reconfiguring college classrooms. These shifts include a declining population of 18-year-olds matriculating in college and a gender gap that now leaves women outnumbering men by 3.1 million in 2021. Closures of small colleges across the nation, and the layoffs from it, coupled with the closure or merger of 24 colleges in Massachusetts which is often regarded as the smartest state in the nation, reflects broader changes.

AI remains an ongoing challenge for higher education. A 2026 Digital Education Council survey identified that only 17% of U.S. and Canadian students believe their professors can help them develop skills in this area. Even broader, many are questioning whether higher education can do AI well and are evaluating students’ dependence on it.  

Add in broken state aid systems, or the “missing middle,” those families earning $50,000–$125,000, which categorizes them as too rich for need-based aid, but not rich enough to pay the entire tuition without a financial burden. For students able to borrow money to pay for college, approximately 12 million struggle to replay their loan. Welcome or not, these socio-economic and political factors place new demands on college and university leaders. 

A perfect storm is upon us. Higher education has spent the last several years assessing the storm clouds, but the problem is not what we can see. Our problem is responding too slowly to the atmospheric pressure.  

Given the perfect storm, leadership and purposeful partnerships remain two essential strategies to navigate the troubled waters of uncertainty and societal mistrust that characterize these times.  

With these troubling factors in mind, we co-hosted a higher education policy summit in Washington, D.C. on July 29, 2026 through an innovative partnership between the American Enterprise Institute and Johns Hopkins University. We titled the event Leading Colleges and Universities in a “Back to the States” Era. Our goal was to foster organically diverse conversations regarding the condition of higher education in the United States.  

The compass for guiding our policy summit was Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went From Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed (Oxford University Press, 2025), which is authored by one of us. To help institutional leaders navigate this uncertain time, our bipartisan policy summit assembled voices from across the learning, government, employment, and philanthropy sectors.   

In attendance were partners from seven sectors:  

1. President (mission driven),  
2. Trustee board or governing body (margin obsessed),  
3. Government (regulatorily addicted — federal, state, and local)  
4. Employers (recruiter craze) 
5. Investors (ROI focused),   
6. Civil society (faith, civic, and educational non-school institutions), and
7. Students (consumer oriented).  

Findings from this event will appear in an AEI policy brief later this fall.

None of the problems we identified at the summit are a single fix, nor are the proposed solutions easy. But they do encourage innovation, proactive actions, and cross-aisle collaborations. 

Here are a few high-level takeaways from the summit. 

• Survivors of this storm will be hailed as visionaries a decade from now because they found dry land. The colleges that sank will be remembered as the unfortunate ones. (Although this assessment is a bit too simplistic). 

• Innovators will combine mission and innovation in creative ways that challenge, but they will also be stigmatized for generating new pathways and products for students.  

• Winners will be those who adapted early to the importance of inviting stakeholders from seven diverse sectors in the shipbuilding process. The seven stakeholders cannot solve the higher education crises at once, or alone.  

No matter the perspective one holds regarding the future of higher education, stakeholders need to stop observing the storm clouds as merely a passing nuisance and use the clarity of mission-driven purpose as its guide.