The kids at Birmingham-Southern weren't thinking about balance sheets when they signed up. They were thinking about the baseball team, maybe the old brick buildings. But last year their D-III College World Series squad ended up playing for a ghost, a school that vanished after 168 years of operation. The old diplomas mean nothing. The transcripts will float in limbo, like old bugs fossilized in amber.
This isn't just about Birmingham-Southern. It's about the 1000-plus schools that closed since 1996, leaving students stranded. It's about the 500 more teetering on the edge right now. The birth rate collapsed during the subprime mortgage-triggered recession in 2008, and now those missing babies are about to hit college age. In the intervening years, schools bloated themselves on easy federal loan money, building lazy rivers and climbing walls while jacking up tuition. Starting in 2026, the bill comes due.
The numbers tell the story plain enough. State funding for higher education dropped $13 billion between 2008 and 2013. Arizona slashed its support by half. The University of Washington went from covering 80 percent of costs to 38 percent. The burden shifted to students and their families, who dutifully mortgaged their futures on degrees worth less each year.
Walk the campus of the University of Texas at Arlington, like I did as an assistant professor. You'll see vast parking lots, brown grass, and rectangular buildings stuffed with unmotivated students watching the 2025 equivalent of Breaking Bad during lectures. The bad old president resigned over cozy dealings with an online diploma mill. This is higher education in America—a racket running on borrowed time and borrowed money.
The small schools will go first. A thousand universities enroll fewer than 250 new students per year. Lose just 25 kids and that's a 10 percent revenue hit. The demographic cliff looms—four million high school graduates this year, dropping to 3.5 million by 2037. And these aren't just numbers on paper. The University of Wisconsin-Madison gets just 14 percent of its funding from the state now. UT Austin scrapes by with 11 percent. These "public" universities turned into private businesses wearing state jerseys.
Look at the student loan numbers. We're talking $1.75 trillion in total outstanding debt, with Pennsylvania borrowers carrying $39,375 each on average. The schools got paid. The kids got stuck with the bill. Meanwhile, here in the Keystone State, Penn State sits on a $4.5 billion endowment. Pitt hoards $5.5 billion. They keep building new admin buildings while raising tuition every year. The schools can't cut costs fast enough. They're trapped by tenured faculty and aging buildings they can't sell.
So they'll do what they always do—raise tuition again. The elite schools will be fine. Harvard and Yale can charge whatever they want. But for the other 80 percent, the ones accepting nearly everyone who applies, it's a death spiral. Higher prices mean fewer students. Fewer students mean higher prices. Round and round until the whole thing hits rock bottom, a junkie no longer able to secure a fix.
This isn't about saving these schools. It's about admitting the system is broken. We warehouse kids for four years, loading them with debt for degrees that mean less and less. The community colleges do better work for a fraction of the cost. Trade schools and apprenticeships make more sense for many. The online programs aren't the answer either—they're just band-aids on gangrene or leprosy scars. Completion rates at places like Western Governors University tell the story. They invest in flashy financial aid offices but skimp on actual teaching. The graders make a couple hundred bucks to supervise 50 students, reading papers between their real jobs. Students get PowerPoints and AI instead of professors, multiple choice instead of mentoring.
These schools claim they're expanding access. What they're really doing is expanding debt. At my old department, most history students never saw a professor—they were all remote, watching pre-recorded lectures in their pajamas, 60 quizzes a term keeping them busy while they learned nothing. Let the weak schools fail. Let employers find new ways to evaluate talent. Let students find better paths forward.
The guillotine’s falling. The only question is how many heads it takes. Birmingham-Southern was just the start. More will follow, probably hundreds more. The students should take a hard look at those balance sheets. The parents should ask hard questions about dwindling enrollments. The politicians should stop pretending more band-aids will fix this.
We built this system on demographics that no longer exist and employment promises we can't keep. The schools that survive this disaster will be smaller, leaner, focused on real value. The rest will join Birmingham-Southern in the graveyard of dead institutions, their empty buildings monuments to our folly.
The tragedy isn't that these schools will close. The tragedy is that we let this happen, that we built this house of cards on the backs of students who trusted us. They deserved better than climbing walls and lazy rivers. They deserved better than watching their school die mid-semester, their dreams dissolving with it.
Education isn't dying. Knowledge isn't going away. But this bloated, debt-fueled system we built? Its time is up. The sooner we admit that, the sooner we can build back from the ruins of what’s left.