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Todd Diacon: Welcome again to another episode of the Toddcast from �Ը������� University. My name is Todd Diacon and I serve as the president of �Ը������� University. Today we're going to take a deep dive into higher ed and the transitions and changes in higher ed, and there's really no one to do that with better than Bryan Alexander. Bryan's a senior scholar at Georgetown University, he's a consultant, a speaker, and an author. I saw him speak to a crowd of, I don't know, a thousand people about six weeks ago at a national conference, and it was just a really delightful and informative hour. So Professor Alexander, welcome to the Toddcast. It's really a pleasure to have you here and to talk about your latest book, which is Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis. So thanks for joining the Toddcast.

Bryan Alexander: Thank you for hosting me, President Diacon. I'm delighted to be here. It was great meeting you in person in Colorado, I think.

Todd Diacon: It was in Colorado.

Bryan Alexander: Exactly. And it's very good to connect with you.

Todd Diacon: So again, thanks for joining us. We now have a historian talking to a futurist. Sounds like the start of a joke, doesn't it? So I was just wondering if we could just begin with — what is it that you do in this futures field? I think in your book you also refer to it as strategic foresight. What is your field, Professor?

Bryan Alexander: Well, futures as a profession is based on trying to help people think more creatively and strategically about the future. The profession really dates back to the 50s and the early 60s, when people started doing this work in military fields and then branched out to the business world, and has really gone everywhere since. Quite a few governments do futures work, or they will call it, as you say, strategic forecasting. The term forecast is often preferred because it describes possibilities, options that are available. Prediction assumes something will simply happen, A following B. We do this work in all kinds of ways. We make media — we write books, people make videos, they give talks. We do this interactively through workshops, and then sometimes through consulting, just trying to work with a given population. Most futurists specialize in some particular aspect of the future — so Michio Kaku specializes in the future of science. I have friends who work on the future of war, or the future of packaging, or the future of work. My specialty is the future of higher education. I do research continuously, 365 days a year, and then I translate that through every mechanism I can — through social media, through interviews with fine folks like yourself, through scholarly books — in order to help people think more creatively and strategically about the future.

Todd Diacon: Do you teach courses in that field?

Bryan Alexander: I do. At Georgetown I teach in a master's degree program called Learning Design Technology, and one of the classes I teach is the future of higher ed. I also teach classes in technology and in simulations, where I work in the future in as many ways as I can.

Todd Diacon: Wow. Let me just say that your book, Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis, is such a great book. I think I read a notice about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education, immediately ordered it, and it really is a wonderful study of, I guess, where we've been, where we are, and where we're going. How about we just start off with you talking a little bit about the topic and the thesis — and let me just say, Professor Alexander, that yesterday I got a phone call from a colleague who's the president of a similarly sized public university in a different state. He said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I'm going to talk to Bryan Alexander tomorrow about his new book, Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis.” He goes, “Oh, that sounds heavy.” I said, “Well, you know, it's really as much a how-to guide on how to confront the future.” So it didn't strike me as a heavy book, but it certainly strikes me as an important study. So how about you talk to us a little bit about why this topic, how you got interested in it, sort of the thesis, and we can start unpacking that as we talk.

Bryan Alexander: Well, thank you very much for the very kind question. And thank you for being kind about my attempts to wade into the past. And this isn't the scariest thing I've written — my previous book, called Universities on Fire, was about climate change and higher education, and that, in some ways, I offer some inspiration, but also a great deal of dread. This book is more narrowly focused. It dates back more than a decade. Around 2011, 2012, I noticed that we had an enrollment downturn in total national enrollment — so all the students enrolled in American colleges and universities. That number had grown for decades, for a generation, you know, since the early 1980s, really. And for the first time, we had a little downtick. It was about 1%. This is according to National Student Clearinghouse data. And it struck me — I thought, okay, this could be noise, this could be a statistical aberration, but it might point to something else. And so I quickly did a blog post about this, just to put a stake in the ground and say this could be a peak — we may have passed maximum enrollment in higher education. And then I tracked this, and for the next few years, this kept happening. Enrollment declined 1%, 2% — again, not a large number, but a striking number, and also striking in that it happened in absolute terms, but also in relative terms, as the American population continued to grow. So the proportion of Americans that were going through post-secondary education was shrinking even a little more. Fast — then the pandemic happened, and we dropped by, depending on your measure, 5%, 6% that year. And I was really struck by this and tried to understand how this could be. Now, for all our viewers and listeners, it's important to remember that this downturn, this decline, lasted more than 10 years. Now, the past couple of years, we've actually seen enrollment rebound. But it's happening in unusual ways. The major way it's happened is by community colleges teaching high school students what's called dual enrollment. And that is the major source of our enrollment growth now, which is not something people talk about a lot. I kept coming back to this decline and wondered how it happened, what caused it, and how it might continue. And so I brought in a whole series of forces, which we can talk about — one of them being demographic change, another being changing attitudes in American culture towards higher education, changes in the labor market, some political transformations. And so what I ended up with is the sense that we may, if we're lucky, have just survived a dip — a long dip, more than a decade — and we may return to a period of incremental growth. Or we might not. We might see numbers continue to decline. This past academic year, we saw international enrollment decline. The data on that is all over the map, but generally it seems like international students who were already enrolled in American colleges and universities tended to return, but we had fewer new students. We'll see how that goes this fall. And the reasons for this are pretty obvious, having to do with global perceptions of American culture and American politics, and that takes us down a little bit as well. So it might be that we continue down that slope. But — and this is the hopeful part — I think we have a wonderful opportunity to redesign and rethink American colleges and universities, so that we can better appeal to students and we can better appeal to the world as a whole. And really, when we think of peak, I mean this in two senses. One is the statistical sense — you reach a peak and you climb down from that. But maybe, if we do things right, we can have a peak as in peak performance, where we can rebuild the quality of our institutions to a great new level.

Todd Diacon: So if we think about the elements that characterized the peak higher ed period — we're clearly talking about enrollments. I've now read the book twice, and so my memory is it's also research funding and Pell grants, federal and state funding growth pretty consistently from the end of World War II for the next, I don't know, 40 to 50 years. And then what I believe you refer to as the college-for-all commitment. So peak higher ed is reached because we have enrollment levels, we have federally funded research, we have state support for public universities that's growing in the post-war period, and then a growing commitment to college for all. So talk about that last part.

Bryan Alexander: This is one more thing I would add to this — a large thing, and then a not-so-large thing. Another large thing is the total number of institutions. We've been growing that number for decades, and we seem to hit a top on that. We've been walking down from that ever since — especially for-profit institutions dropped a lot. But we're also seeing a rash of small private colleges closing, and we may see public university systems in some states, like Pennsylvania, start to reduce their number of campuses. We've already seen that in Vermont, for one example. The not-so-large part has to do with scholarship. The proportion of the professoriate that does research has, in many ways, been shrinking — that is, we've transformed the academic labor force from majority tenure-track to a minority tenure-track. So the amount of output may be decreasing. Furthermore, we have a whole series of scandals and crises about the quality of that output. In the humanities, we've had now 20 years of problems with a lot of content that's not cited at all. In the social sciences, we have a whole bunch of issues of replication not happening, which has really struck psychology very hard. And in the medical sciences, we've had issues with evidence-based medicine, which is leading to an overhaul of research. So it's possible we may have passed peak research — it's possible. But to go back to the question of college for all — we're right now in an extraordinary moment, a very fluid and open one. For listeners and viewers who may not have experienced this, especially younger folks, we went through an interesting period over the past 100 years, where we went from college being something for elites or a few professionals, to being college for everybody. And starting in the 1960s, and really taking off in the 2000s, we had a national consensus that the more college experience any student gets, the better — that privately, someone who goes to �Ը������� is more likely to graduate, they're more likely to have a better job that pays more money, they're more likely to be physically and mentally healthy. And on the public side, they contribute to their local economy. But those graduates are also more likely to vote, to participate in civic life. It's just a win-win. And this is a bipartisan consensus — there is the signing, for example, of the No Child Left Behind Act, co-signed by George Bush and Ted Kennedy. It was a really bipartisan idea, and this trickled down throughout society. So we had high school guidance counselors, high school boards, preparing all students for an academic future, even if they didn't go on — that was considered to be the best thing possible. President Obama, in his first term, repeatedly called for more and more people to get more and more college experience, whatever kind — community college, associate's degrees, certificates, PhDs, master's, the whole thing. And we peaked at that. And that cultural consensus has now broken down. We're seeing more and more people make the case that college is not for everyone. And for a while, this was individual lone voices — the investor Peter Thiel, for example, paying a handful of people not to go to college. Then you had some very loud voices — famous TV host Mike Rowe was trying to encourage people not to go to college, but to work in the skilled trades. We've had the sense that the skilled trades, including, say, plumbing, HVAC, electricians' work, woodcrafts, are woefully underserved right now and need more people. There's the specter of student debt, which is terrifying to a lot of people, and there's objective truth to that — it now stands at roughly $1.7 trillion. And now we don't really have that cultural consensus. Partly it's political — if you poll Americans and ask what they think about higher education, Republicans are reliably way more skeptical, if not actively hostile, than Democrats and independents. So there is some of that — you can see it with the current presidency targeting higher education. But it applies across the board. Last year, there was an amazing editorial in the New York Times which urged K-12 systems to not prepare so many students for college. The author of that editorial wasn't a political crank or an outlier — she was Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers and a noted Democratic Party activist. So we don't really know where we're headed right now as a culture in terms of higher ed. Do we think college should be just for some? And if so, for whom? And the more I looked into this, the more I found other signs of it. Your viewers and listeners might, or might not, be familiar with the idea of the paper ceiling — the idea that you're working in a job, say in state government, and you've excelled and built a reputation and should ascend to the next level, but you can't, because you lack a credential — so you have to go back to college. Well, one of the things that's happened is we've seen state and city governments across the country removing academic credentials from job applications for certain jobs — and this, again, has happened in red states and blue states, blue cities and red cities alike. So where we go from here is a really good question. Are we in a college-for-some-of-us mode? We have to figure that out.

Todd Diacon: So we reached peak higher ed. We reached it roughly in the timeframe you mentioned, defined by enrollment levels, public support — both in terms of research funding, state subsidies — but also just a culture of expectations. So now we've passed that peak. And then you introduce, in your book, that we're in a moment of what you refer to as the polycrisis. So could you talk to us a little bit about the elements of the polycrisis? And then I just want to ask you — it's the historian in me — have there been previous polycrises?

Bryan Alexander: Well, that's actually one of the challenges with the term — depending on how broadly you define it, you can stick a polycrisis label on all kinds of periods. But just to explain, the term comes out of poli-sci and macroeconomics. It refers to a time or situation where you have multiple overlapping crises. They may come from different domains, but they exacerbate each other. So today, for example, we might point to the demographic transition, which is something our societies are struggling to handle — when a society produces fewer and fewer children and lives longer and longer. It's possible that this has intersected with international warfare — President Putin in Russia may have launched the attack on Ukraine partly because his population of fighting-age men has been declining and declining. So at some point, that might not be able to occur. We can think as well about the climate crisis, which is having impacts across the world, but that intersects with other fields — such as, for example, if you look at roads, rail lines, and bases in the far north. In the Canadian tundra, in Siberia, in Scandinavia — well, a lot of those were built on permafrost, and that frost is no longer so perma. So we're starting to see economic side effects of having to rebuild and redesign rail lines, for example. You can see this playing out in multiple areas. So for me, the historian Adam Tooze is one of the biggest advocates of this term, and he uses it to describe the present time — partly to describe this mechanism of all these interlocking crises, but also because we don't have another term for where we are now. It is the post-Cold War, but it's 30 years since the Cold War — is this the end of the unipolar world? We don't have a good term. But I think, for higher education, this term helps us think about all these multiple overlapping forces. Here in Ohio, the demographic transition is proceeding very, very quickly — your population is aging up, the number of children is shrinking, and that's happening throughout the Midwest, as well as the Northeast, big chunks of the South, some of the high West. But we can also tie this into the arrival of generative AI, and how that has some kinds of impacts on higher ed. To this, we can add the geopolitical struggle between the United States and China, and now the United States and Iran, and how that has certain impacts on academia, and so on. The term polycrisis lets us wrap this up together in, I think, a useful way. Historiographically, I could find a polycrisis in 1914, or in 1789, depending on where you are. You can make the case, though, that the total human civilizational footprint now is simply much more expansive. We have more people than ever before. We are more globally interconnected than ever before. We have a larger physical footprint — the built environment of humanity is larger than ever. We now occupy parts of the ocean and aerospace. So it may be we've reached a point of great complexity, where the term polycrisis may represent a kind of quantitative change that leads to a qualitative new phase of development.

Todd Diacon: I really appreciate that. And one of the things I was thinking about when I read your book, and just listening to you now, is: in some ways, the polycrisis is just the flip side of everything that led to peak higher ed. Right? So if enrollment growth was a marker of peak higher ed, enrollment decline is part of the polycrisis. If massive public funding of state universities for half a century was a marker of peak higher ed, a decided turn away from that is a marker of the polycrisis. If public support, in terms of opinion, of higher ed as a public good was a mark of peak higher ed, it's now opinion turning away from the value of college. So as we think about that polycrisis — the reason I mentioned earlier that I'm a historian — I'm literally here at �Ը������� University, and two things come to mind. One is, I'm literally sitting two blocks away from where four students were shot by National Guard on our campus. So, my guess is you could argue that was a real crisis at �Ը�������. Now, but I guess what would be different now is — massive enrollment growth in that period, still very healthy levels of state funding, to the point that at that period, two-thirds of the revenue of �Ը������� University came from the state of Ohio.

Bryan Alexander: Two-thirds?

Todd Diacon: Two-thirds. And today it's 22% at �Ը�������.

Bryan Alexander: That's higher than many.

Todd Diacon: If you think about �Ը������� University in the 1960s — we have a multi-campus system — we inaugurated 60 buildings in the decade of the 1960s. 60 buildings in 10 years at �Ը�������. So now we're on the other side of that, and I think that's a very interesting part of your book — what are you going to do when you're on the other side of that? And particularly at places like �Ը������� — we're not Ohio State. We are a large, 30,000-plus university, but we're a regional university. And I really appreciated your discussion of what schools like �Ը������� are going to do in a post-peak higher ed moment. And then, in my own historical work, Professor Alexander, I tend to focus on structure and agency — you're in a certain set of structures, how much room to maneuver do you have within that set of structures? And you definitely talk about that in Peak Higher Ed. So could you talk to us a bit about, in this particular moment we're in, how are we going to survive this looming academic crisis? How much agency do people at �Ը������� have — do I, as president, do other state university presidents — where is the relationship between agency and structure in this?

Bryan Alexander: You know, I love your example of the reduction of state funding as an example of the polycrisis. And I worry that this will continue and deepen, in part because state governments, as political entities, are often dealing with so many competing pressures. The demographic transition is one — thinking about a state government that has to figure out how to pay for, among other things, increased senior services, Medicare, Medicaid funding, state pensions, as that population grows and grows. We have some major constraints that are bigger than us, that are hard to work with. The largest is simply the fact of the escalating climate crisis, which is going to influence us — it's going to ratchet up and get worse year by year, and it's going to have all kinds of impacts across every domain of human endeavor — everything from psychology to the physical plant of campuses to geopolitics to economics. I could think as well about the political constraints that we face — in Ohio, of course, you are working under SB1, which is a very comprehensive law put in place by your Republican-majority government. Many other viewers and listeners to this program will be in other states that have other political compulsions on them, be they in Texas or in Florida. And of course, everybody in the United States has to deal with the federal government and its various cuts to research funding, its investigations at different universities, and so on. The big macroeconomic picture — escalating income inequality and wealth inequality, the transition of our labor market continuing to move away from industry towards service. A lot of these are things that we have to surf as best we can. But we do have so much agency and creativity. And for me, I keep coming back to what I think of as moments of reinvention. So if we go back to the 1960s, we can think about the Higher Education Act. We could think about the huge push that then-President Johnson made to get more financial aid for more students. We could think about the resulting drive to take normal colleges and teachers' colleges and turn them into baccalaureate institutions — baccalaureate institutions becoming master's programs, master's programs growing a full research portfolio out through the PhD — the expansion of the community college system, which is a wild idea. It's the biggest sector of American higher education right now, doing more to educate more people with far fewer resources. And you think, starting in the 1980s and 90s, the big drive for online education, or what we used to call distance education, which is now an enormous chunk of the post-secondary landscape. You could even — and this is hard to think about — but even think about spring of 2020, when the COVID pandemic hit, how colleges and universities rapidly and thoroughly changed up their operations — moving everything online, changing academic calendars, moving graduation dates, altering the physical plant of a campus. We did that in a hurry, weeks if not days, with no extra resources at the time. My point is, first, that higher education has within it a deep wellspring of innovation and creativity, where we can really pivot and do great stuff and experiment at a large scale, even if the experiments don't necessarily work. We have that intellectual power, we have that capacity in our 4,000 or so colleges and universities across the US. So that's one area where we have that kind of agency. A second, though — and this is so important — is for institutions, to the extent that an academic institution is dedicated to teaching and learning. You think about community colleges, most liberal arts colleges, most state institutions, and the parts of research institutions that are focused on teaching and learning. We owe our students so much — we owe them the best possible experience we can give them. And if we take that seriously — that's a big if — but if we do, that opens the door for all kinds of innovation, all kinds of services to offer, all kinds of reinvention. For example, I worked with Ithaka S+R, did a project with a bunch of community college libraries, and they were investigating the services that libraries were offering. It was astonishing — not only were they lending out media and providing access to licensed content and to printed materials, but they were also lending out hardware — computers, laptops, and tablets. They were providing childcare services. They were considering how to provide civic educational resources to students who wanted it. It's an incredible amount of services to offer. That may be the direction we can be headed in. In the global context, American higher education is by far the most student-centric — we are a standard of care, it's just off the charts compared to any college or university in Europe, Latin America, Asia. We are definitely the gold standard here. And we can double down on that standard of care by offering more wraparound services to give students the best possible experience. I think, on top of this, in the research enterprise — and this is where things can really kick off — as the world faces the polycrisis, the academic sector can be an indispensable guide. We have so much intellectual capacity. I mentioned climate change — let's talk about AI. If you want to think about how AI is impacting the world — if you're a lawyer, if you are a state government official, if you are a biologist working at a plant, you're trying to figure out what AI means — think about the resources that the academy has. We have computer scientists, obviously. We have people in media studies who can help. You think about — is AI like a person who interacts like a person? Psychologists can assist. Have we been here before? Historians are available. How do computers tell stories? We have people in the humanities, and so on. I think, in many ways, part of the agency that we can exert now is to help educate our students and our communities — indeed the world — on where we're headed, and to offer people ideas. I think that's an incredible opportunity, and indeed a great responsibility, for academics.

Todd Diacon: How does it look if you did nothing? If you're an institution of higher education, post-peak higher ed, and you're not an elite university and you're not the flagship public university — if you do nothing, what happens?

Bryan Alexander: Well, it depends on who you are. A year and a half ago, I would have said, if you're an elite university, you're probably okay. So if you're a Stanford, a Columbia, a Harvard, you're probably all right, because you have enormous reputation, enormous wealth, fantastic networks behind you. But of course, these institutions are now targeted. Some small colleges and universities that are elite have managed to escape some of those challenges. Last summer, the One Big Beautiful Bill had a carve-out for endowment taxes aimed at small colleges and universities, so some of them get to enjoy that security. Otherwise, I think, in many ways, a lot of colleges and universities are facing a downward path. You have said — and this quote has been so important to me — that we've overbuilt our post-secondary sector for capacity. We have more supply than there is demand, if you will. And so, as a result, we should expect a good number of colleges and universities to cut programs, to cut services, to cut faculty and staff, to shrink their footprint so that perhaps they sell off buildings, to see their population shrink — not only their faculty and staff, but also the total number of students who go through their doors. And this might be what economists refer to as a market correction — perhaps a campus drops from 20,000 students to 15,000, and it stays there, it rests there in a plateau for years to come. That may be. Or it may be that it continues and circles the drain. And this is where we have colleges that are merging, often in unfavorable situations, or where they close. I mentioned before the state of Vermont, where we lived for quite some time. The state went through this demographic transition very, very quickly — they're closing elementary schools right now. And so they combined three different public universities into one in order to try to save resources. The jury's out right now if that was a success or not. The state of Pennsylvania has two public university systems — a massive build-out that was great in the 60s and 70s, but now it's just an overhang based on the population that actually lives in Pennsylvania. So do you close or merge some of these institutions? If we don't do anything, this is where I think the downward path lies ahead. And this can be a tricky thing to wrestle with, because any individual within the academy, within such an institution, might feel that what they do is unique and should be protected at all costs. So if I'm teaching 18th-century literature, which is what I got my PhD in, then I think, regardless of the economics, I should be able to keep teaching that. If we have ten research librarians, we should keep them all, because it's that precious. At some point, the economics begin to bite. And if the state doesn't leap in to help, if extra donors don't leap in in a sustainable way, then cuts begin to happen. And there's an argument that says you can't cut your way to sustainability — I think it's often true, but sometimes people will end up in that direction. So what we might see, overall, for the sector, is winners and losers. We might see some small colleges continue along their way, some state universities shrink, some private ones close, some state systems merge in different ways. Unless we turn this ship around, unless we take advantage of that agency that we've discussed, the whole sector might just continue to shrink bit by bit by bit, which would be awful.

Todd Diacon: Yeah, I always say — okay, you can't cut your way to prosperity, but you can spend yourself into oblivion. So, one of the things I think about as a historian is the period that I have occupied. I graduated high school in '76. I earned my PhD in '87. In the fall of '87, I took my first tenure-track job as a historian. Everything that I took to be a given in higher ed — how it works, how it's operated, the structures, faculty senate, all of that — was really, in a historical context, the product of postwar America. And so one of the things I keep trying to say to myself and others is: there's a lot of change happening. We've combined separate colleges into combined colleges. We've shut down buildings, and we've leased those buildings to a K-6 school, or we've turned over the operation of our student health center to a nearby public medical school. And these are things that feel very different. On the other hand, if you look at the history of �Ը�������, all of these things that we built up happened in roughly the late 50s to 1970s. At �Ը������� University — I think in '61, don't quote me, but I think it was 1961 — we created something like nine new PhD programs in that one year. And the next year, we created our first MFA, and faculty senate began in 1968. My point is that there is a lot of change happening, and it feels like what we are changing were given on two tablets on Mount Sinai. But they really weren't, right? They were built up. �Ը������� University — I don't know, from the mid-50s, I think it was from '55 to 1970 — we went from 7,000 students to 30,000 students. If you think about that.

Bryan Alexander: Wow. That's astonishing.

Todd Diacon: The way I look at it as a historian is — these changes are not comfortable. They're not comfortable for me as a president. We don't run deficits at �Ը�������. We never do that. We never draw on our savings to balance a fiscal-year budget, and we have to reduce the number of our employees to make sure that doesn't happen. That's not comfortable. But I think part of it is, in addition to the discomfort from very real decisions that impact very real people, I just wonder if part of the discomfort is: we are undoing something that seemed to be given for all of our time in higher education, and now we're changing. So I don't know if you encounter much of that attitude, or if in your own work you think about that.

Bryan Alexander: I do. I do. How change happens, but it assumes that there was never change before the change that's happening now. I think this is an American habit, where, once a new thing had been added to the mix, we tend to romanticize the old things and we naturalize them. There's a great quote — I'll paraphrase — from the wonderful British writer Douglas Adams: anything that was invented until you turn 15 is exciting and cool. Anything invented until you're 30 is even more exciting, and you could probably get a career off of it. Anything invented after you were 30 is an abomination, against the natural order of things. We do tend to expect that, and a lot of our incentives are aligned with that. So if we had roughly 30 years of continuous growth — Clay Shirky once said we should think of the 1980s through 2010 or so as a golden age for American higher ed — well, that's 30, that's six five-year cycles of strategic planning. That's how many graduating classes, that's how many buildings, how many programs. So we have that assumption of continuous growth baked in, and when that growth stops, we're not really prepared for that — that's a generation of habits built in. And I think, in many ways, we're still trying to get past that. I think the big expansion of American higher education, I often think of it as a mid-Cold-War thing — it kicks off with the GI Bill and the big push for science education after Sputnik. But then really, in the 60s and 70s, it really takes off. Now, in this era, we have other major historical forces that might push against this — if we have, for example, the shift away from Keynesian economics, which powered the global economy from the 30s through the 70s. Well, now we're in neoliberal economics — contested term, I know — but basically more and more free-market affairs, which describes the change of funding in public universities. We can also think about the huge rush of globalization, especially after the end of the Cold War, and how powerful that was, and how that changed so much of higher education. Think about how many faculty have research partners around the world, how many international students. Well, let me ask — say, the year before last, what proportion of �Ը�������'s student body was from abroad?

Todd Diacon: Yeah, we actually usually lead the state public universities in the percentage of our students who are international. And at peak, about 11% of our student body was international, at one point. �Ը������� University enrolled more Saudi students than any other university in the United States, for example. And we have seen — this has been a decline of about five years now — but we went from roughly 3,000 to about 1,800 international students. So that's a big shift.

Bryan Alexander: Yeah, that is a really big change. Absolutely. But if you think about the historical arc to get to that point — imagine a campus in the 1920s and saying, yeah, one in nine of your students will be from abroad — that'd be wild, that would be shocking. But of course, these students have several major roles. One is that they bring the globe to a campus — you get a student who may be from Cleveland, gets to meet someone from Saudi Arabia or from South Korea, which is fantastic. But also, economically, they tend to pay full freight, if not a little bit more, so they're a great shot in the arm to a budget. And, in fact, we can think about that as a wonderful transition, but also an expression of globalization. But right now, we're in the stage where globalization is kind of wobbly. It's an open question if we're seeing a reduction of globalization, that nations are stepping back — you could think about Brexit in Britain, you could think about America First in the U.S. You could think about globalization rerouting around the U.S. — these big trade deals between Europe and South America, Canada and India, Europe and India, while China continues to grow its economy centered on itself. This then has an impact on us, as that historical moment proceeds. And so, again, that does throw us back to our agency. We have these opportunities to interact. We may lose these international students. We may have a harder time having our faculty do peer research with peers in China, in Russia, but they may have an opportunity to do more with researchers in India or in the Middle East and North Africa. We have a lot of opportunities to respond to this. But the historical situation is quite striking this way. To go back to neoliberalism one more time — I know that term is contested, and we can over-egg that pudding, if you will — but there's one more feature of it that's especially important: the shift to the individual as the major economic actor and beneficiary. So thinking about higher education as an economic transaction between an individual and the provider — individual being the student, provider being �Ը������� — instead of thinking about it as a public good or community good. And that shift is one that occurs in our policy, but also in our culture, with students thinking of themselves as the CEO of me, or what I'm hoping to do is become an influencer or become a startup founder, not to be a community leader or a community organizer. Famously, you have baby-boom-generation students saying, in the 60s and 70s, they went to college to find meaning in life. And now their successors are there to find a job. That changes, as well, how we think about higher education.

Todd Diacon: Well, this is a thoroughly delightful opportunity to explore really important issues, and I appreciate your appearing with us on the podcast, Professor Alexander. Just as we begin to wrap up, I was just curious — what are you working on these days?

Bryan Alexander: A lot of my work right now is going to AI. So I'm pitching a new scholarly book on the subject. I write a Substack called AI in the Academy. When I go to a campus and give a speech and say, “Here — these are the 92 trends that I track in higher education,” people look at me and go, “Yeah — 91.” “Forget that — 92, AI.” Let's talk about that. AI is endlessly fascinating right now, and deep. So I'm working a great deal on that. I'm also continuing my work on climate change and higher ed, which is very, very important — they're challenging to do now. And also, in Peak Higher Ed, I have one strange chapter where I imagine two divergent types of thinking about the future of civilization. And that's an idea that haunts me, and I would really, really like to dive into that and turn that into a big project. So that's where I am right now.

Todd Diacon: Well, the book is Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis, by Bryan Alexander. Such an important book — to me, it's really a manual, in part, for how to pull some agency out of a structurally complex and difficult situation. I know that I have learned a lot from reading the book. I hope others who are listening and watching this will also read the book, because they will benefit from it as well. So I really want to thank you for appearing on the podcast. And I want to thank all of our listeners for participating in this really deep discussion about the changes that we face. I'll just finish by saying that a lot of these changes — they're not comfortable. But we do have some control over them. I'm a historian that's attracted to periods of transformation — I've written two books about that, on the history of Brazil. What I've discovered is I'd rather study those moments than actually live through them. But it's with the help of people like you that we address the current situation. So, Dr. Alexander, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you for joining us on the podcast.

Bryan Alexander: Thank you so much, President Diacon. It's been a real pleasure talking with you.