Every few years in the US people ask whether college is worth it and whether it is accomplishing its goals. In 2026 the answer seems to be firmly yes, no, and it depends.
But what are those goals?
And for whom?
I am beginning to think that the contradictions are so great as to be insurmountable. I believe we are in a moment of competing paradigms, to use Thomas Kuhn’s term, and that the inevitable battles ahead are going to be intense. Can we “save the appearances” as Simplicius, Plato, and others did so assiduously, adding more and more complex fixes to explain the irregular orbits of heavenly bodies? Can the Ptolemaic earth-centered theory be maintained despite all the evidence of contradictions?
In other words, is the quest to harmonize the goals doomed to fail because the paradigms are in conflict?
A few weeks ago I participated in a conversation titled What Is College For Today? It was hosted by the Cambridge Forum. (Since 1967 “Cambridge Forum has invited guest speakers to inform, explore and challenge audience preconceptions on a range of current and timeless subjects, through salient civilized discussions.”). There was agreement that this issue is urgent, and that different kinds of colleges serve different populations and for different goals, but that access should be more open than it has been. (You can watch it here, through their partnership with GBH.)
But the goals?
Just a few feet away from my desk I see two books on my shelf with titles indicating that this is far from clear. One is What’s College For? The Struggle to Define American Higher Education by Zachary Karabell from 1998. (That Karabell is not to be confused with another similarly surnamed author, Jerome Karabel, author of the eye-opening 700+-page The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from 2006.) The other is What is College for? The Public Purpose of Higher Education, edited by Ellen Conedliffe Lagemann and Harry Lewis from 2012. And there are countless other books talking about the end of education, the goals of school, the purposes of higher education and so forth. Some describe but most prescribe.
The fearless Neil Postman wrote not only Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969/1970) but also The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995), which I am rereading now (and of course the anti-TV Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985). He argues against the “false gods” of economic competition, technocracy, and measurement and in favor of meaning, ethics, and stories of responsibility.
And thirty years later, where are we?
The false gods are worshipped even more, if possible, and discussion of those other goals (democracy, Earth as home, language and meaning, community, truth) seems especially quaint.
David Labaree, historian of education, calls the US system of higher education “a perfect mess.” He lists the many goals, without favoring them, and suggests that we resist changing this system, which has served as a model globally. Our motley assortment at various times has existed to
promote the faith, enrich developers, boost civic pride, educate leaders, produce human capital, develop knowledge, provide opportunity, promote advantage, supply a pleasant interlude between childhood and adulthood, help people meet the right spouse, and enhance state power. Oh, and yes, it has also served as a minor league for professional sports, a major venue for public entertainment, and a massive jobs program. (Labaree 2017, pp. 182-183)
It is a truly American hodgepodge of individualistic choice, “a system without a plan” (Labaree 2017, p. 182), unlike higher education in many countries where it is much more centralized—and supported. We have a free-for-all with opaque funding (sticker price versus cost of attendance versus net price versus….) and shocking levels of debt, even though community college is tuition-free, to some extent, in around thirty-five states. (In Indiana, where I live, tuition is free for certain fields.)
For more than twenty years I have been teaching and researching about education, and I teach a class called The Culture of College. I often ask my students, “What is college for?” Last year they gave answers including networking, getting a job, making friends, having a major, and “academics,” which sometimes even included learning. (I wrote a Substack post about it last year.) One student told me recently that their parents sent them to this school to get good grades and to go to law school.
This is at a highly selective private university; class mobility is a goal for some, but class maintenance is the aim for others: while not every student is paying the unbelievably high full tuition, many are.
Ask at other places, and you will hear other answers: it is about social mobility, leveling the playing field, providing opportunities for those who had been excluded to enter the middle class. It is for citizenship, because we need an educated citizenry. It is for job training, and skills development. It is for credentials.
It is about sorting, providing limited access, discerning “merit.” This is why arguments about so-called grade inflation are so heated. There is an idea that college is to produce a meritocracy who then have the responsibility and the opportunity to rule the rest of us, in Plato’s idea of an elite. Michael Sandel, the philosopher, has challenged this idea of a meritocracy as have many others. Michael Young, who coined the term meritocracy, intended it as satire. What does it mean for the haves to get more and the have-nots to be left behind?
I feel like I write this paragraph every year, and in every book.
But in response to an article from the New York Times in April 2026 titled “Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems”, by Alan Blinder, and then to the report itself, it is essential to post it again.
A study commissioned by Yale argued that colleges and universities have done a poor job in selling their purposes to the public. They frame the purposes this way: “universities exist to preserve, create, and share knowledge” (p. 4). But at least one of their ostensible motivations for commissioning this study is true: The US public has lost faith in college. So maybe better publicity would do the trick? Or tougher grades?
But I think in fact the problem is that the goals are incoherent and often contradictory.
The Yale report laments that “In recent years…universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable” (Adams, Gage, et al. 2026, p. 4). Obviously contradictory aims cannot all be met, so failure is foreordained.
Maybe the era of the “multiversity,” as Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, coined the term in the 1960s in his lecture The Uses of the University, is at an end.
In the 1960s public higher education was similarly under threat. There was a concerted effort for instance by Ronald Reagan as governor of California to reduce funding to the University of California system, which he saw as an oppositional force. Reagan fired Clark Kerr. He reduced funding, and threatened to dismantle the Department of Education. (The opposition didn’t start with Project 2025 and the current “occupant” of the White House, who actually resides in Florida.) Student debt rose, in part because of this, but for multiple other reasons too.
We don’t have to look far to see that education is often positioned as the antidote to authoritarian regimes, who embrace book-burning and who inevitably target intellectuals, and ban objectionable books. Examples abound, from Nazi Germany and China’s Cultural Revolution to the fictional worlds of Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury. These books are now, in the irony-murdering world of 2026, themselves often banned.
The tech bros such as Peter Thiel have systematically promoted suspicion of higher education, as others such as Sal Kahn have fostered suspicion of publicly funded K-12 schools, though opposition back more than a century as people—-parents and children—-opposed mandates for compulsory education. “Government schools” might as well be a slur.
Certainly the publicity that private universities have attracted in the last two years, with protests about Israel and Gaza and Palestine, and squelching of protests, with accusations of wokeness and challenges to the idea of free speech…These are all real.
But I’d like to suggest that as Christopher Newfield says in his courageous book The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2018), there was a great mistake, involving treating universities like businesses. And also that there may be a fatal mismatch in the goals, illuminated to many people’s despair, by the rise of AI. (More on that anon.)
What is to be done? Like many, such as David J. Staley (2024) and Steven Mintz, I have been writing about potential new directions. The closing of Hampshire College, as announced last month, is a reminder that colleges need to attract customers.
But who are the customers?
Are the customers employers? Are schools designed to prepare workers for industry, which is why schools resemble factories? (John Taylor Gatto says yes. Audrey Watters in 2015 claimed this history was “invented.” Davis, Conroy, and Clague argue in 2020 that this metaphor “should be treated with caution.”)
Factory or not, the sector of education is enormous, including that of higher education.
And for whom does it exist?
Are the customers the public? In what sense? Is it to reap the benefits of research? Could the research be done outside universities, and in self-contained research institutions? One of the distinctive dimensions of what Charles Eliot in 1869 called “the new education” was incorporation of research and the beginning of graduate education. That’s not usually what people think about. ( Cathy Davidson named her book The New Education, in homage in 2017.)
Because…who would fund that? Few people realize that tuition helps fund research at research-intensive institutions (the model for all institutions) because all of the grants and investments from public and private sources is not enough to fund all of the scientific research and medical research that we need. And the growth in administrative roles, which is rightly mentioned and deplored as “administrative bloat,” is often because of the need to support the research program. (Lampooning the titles is fun, for instance Office of the Vice Provost for Visioning and Enterprise Development and Brand Management and Saturday Sports.) And at top-tier research institutions, the prestige of the institution comes from the research profiles of the faculty, so students have an interest in maintaining the status of the institution, even if they never interact with it themselves.
Is higher education for the purpose of character formation? At some point this was the claim, especially when most institutions were religiously supported.
Is it a finishing school, as it was for the sons of the wealthy? Is it a highly resourced summer camp for spoiled children? Is that why the dorms are so fancy, and the climbing walls abundant?
What is the role of athletics? Athletics lose money on almost every campus, and in the cases where athletics is so successful that it earns money, it often is at odds with the academic mission, both in terms of donations and time and energy and building attention.
In my own case, in the last several years I have had an increasing number of athletes in my classes, and they are officially excused from so many classes that it’s hard to square the academic responsibilities with the athletic responsibilities, as these young people juggle essentially two full-time jobs.
Some argue that athletics at public institutions attracts the support of the citizens of the state, whose tax money supports the university, and without which there would be no way to make the case for those who don’t attend.
Community colleges attempt to broaden access, with the understanding that there is a financial premium for college attendance, but really only for college completion, because it is the credential, rather than the content, that is the currency. In that sense, the purpose of college is to attain a credential that is better than others. Such an “arms race” (military metaphors are apt) breeds ever-increasing credential inflation. The New York Times had an article 10 years ago about how file clerks are now going to need an BA to stand out. (It Takes a BA to Find a Job as a File Clerk , 2013) even though people needed only a high school diploma to be able to do the work. This is called “underemployment.” Randall Collins has written about credentials in an increasingly stratified society: The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979 and 2019). If the society is stratified, getting some students into higher-esteemed and higher-paid positions will help those individuals but will do nothing to repair the system. John Marsh has written about this in his thank-goodness-someone-articulated-my-discomfort kind of way: Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality (2011). It’s not about the learning.
Is college worth it? Only if you get the degree. But most people think it’s not worth the cost. Is a College Degree Worth It in 2024? | Pew weighs in.
And is it a private or a public or a commercial good? A social good?
Not good at all?
We’ve put more of the burden on individuals, without transparency about all the public supports, so it is no surprise that most people regard it as purely a private good.
If higher education is primarily for the purpose of getting a decent job straight after finishing, in increasing lifetime earnings, or preventing unemployment, then the investment must be returned. Many analysts discuss this issue, for example Akridge and Hummels and the Federal Reserve of New York.
Then we might ask which specific institutions, and programs, and majors, offer the best investment. Special education has the lowest unemployment rate, as of February 4, 2026, for the year 2024, at 0.7%, though with low salaries, and the highest rates are anthropology (7.9%), computer engineering (7.8%), computer science (7.0%), fine arts (7.7%), performing arts (7.0%)—some highly remunerated and others not.
Increasingly institutions must compile this information.
The current political atmosphere also politicizes this.
Fields such as gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and anthropology are seen as challenging the position of the current administration, especially in red states. Do they analyze or promote certain perspectives? Should they be supported? Eliminated? Renamed? Consolidated? Do they attract sufficient students? Do their graduates find jobs? Do they earn enough?
Beyond undergraduate education, which occupations deserve support for graduate degrees? “Professions.” The US Department of Education is capping loans for “professional” programs, defined problematically. But they recognize only eleven fields.
If school is seen as purely transactional, and if learning can happen effectively and enjoyably outside school, then the return on investment is seen in purely instrumental terms, which I hear all the time about things like success and completion. If we take an older adult returning to school to secure a promotion at work, and they have a job and children, then they want to be as efficient as possible, and understandably so. Their fixation on getting it done makes perfect sense, and it doesn’t mean that they don’t value learning, but it does mean that their reason for attending may not primarily be about learning. Can these values be aligned?
It has become one of my principal preoccupations to figure out how to align them and to ensure that I am not engaged in the moral injury of doing the opposite of what I think is right despite many of the incentive structures in the institution on the part of many different parties.
A student at my university emailed the entire student body offering to save students the pain of actually having to learn anything through an AI agent startup called Kerra. It would do the work for tired, stressed-out students. “You’re paying $90k a year to be here. The goal is the degree, the network, and actually enjoying college—not memorizing orgo at 3am or some useless frameworks for foundations of marketing. Kerra is how you get the GPA you want without sacrificing the four best years of your life.”
It was taken down immediately.
So-called Einstein, another agentic AI, was advertised to students as able to complete entire online courses, especially by logging into the Learning Management System, Canvas. It was quickly removed after a cease-and-desist order from the company that owns Canvas, Instructure.
But these efforts are calling into the open the temptation to get something for nothing.
They provide opportunities to obtain the appearance of learning, and the payoff of the appearance of learning, without the effort—or the learning.
I’ve been studying cheating and plagiarism for more than 20 years.
At the time, we were quaintly concerned about plagiarism using things from the internet or test copying. Two decades earlier it was copying from actual books. A decade ago it was contract cheating and essay mills, where you could pay for a ready-made essay (cheap) or have one custom-made, or you could hire someone to impersonate you and take the whole course.
Now the AI bot can sign in, make comments on the discussion board, take the quizzes, write the papers, take the tests.
Freeing you to do….all the other stuff.
My own position is that despite all the confusion, muddiness, and cynicism, there is still a value in college, which cannot be substituted by Googling or asking Claude questions or getting microcredentials.
This has to do with gathering with others, experienced and less so, and learning deeply and confidently, increasing the ability to learn, and gaining confidence and insight about learning to learn. Bridget Pearce has listed dozens of capabilities, dispositions, knowledge, and skills. The University of Georgia has identified six “institutional competencies” (critical thinking, analytical thinking, communication, social awareness and responsibility, creativity and innovation, and leadership and collaboration)—high-level general learning, rather than arbitrary lists of facts or skills.
People might attend college for the purpose of learning well and permanently, which is what the credential is supposed to certify. (It also signals, in economists’ terms, the kind of person who can complete tasks and persevere.)
But focus on credentials, points, and grades commands the bulk of our attention. In many ways we have mistaken the metric for the purpose, as Goodhart’s law states: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” This along with game theory explains why we are bound to be disappointed: Can game theory explain grade inflation and AI cheating?: a non-technical conceptual analysis and proposed research program (Pritchard 2026)
Widespread frustration has to do with misalignment of incentives and non-cooperation among faculty and students (and, I would say, administrators and the public).
Given this, I do not find it likely that we will be able to fix the “grade inflation” or cheating tendencies.
If teachers were like coaches, therapists, or doctors, the goals would be aligned: improvement, for the benefit of the client.
But teachers and professors occupy multiple, and contradictory, roles, as both coach and judge, as doctor and police.
When our goals clash, as they obviously do now, nobody will be satisfied.
The only possible option is to change the incentives, and (for me) to persuade everyone that learning is the goal. I try to do that in my courses, while recognizing all the other goals that students understandably bring into the room.
And we’ll continue to struggle to maintain our view that all the planets actually revolve around the sun.
