When Universities Do Not Make It: A Hard-Learned Lesson and a Framework for Survival in the Age of AI
There is a question I have been asked more often in the last few years than any other: What are the signs that a university is not going to make it? I do not answer this question lightly.
I was part of the executive leadership team of a university that closed its doors. It was the most challenging professional experience of my life, not because of strategy, spreadsheets, or governance mechanics, but because of people. Faculty who had given decades of their lives to an institution they loved. Staff who believed deeply in the mission. Students whose educational journeys were disrupted in ways that statistics cannot fully capture. Once you sit across the table from people who have given their all to the institution's mission and vision, and you must terminate them in 5 minutes using a script for HR and legal purposes, you will not be the same. It was and is the worst thing I have had to do to date. I had to do that many times. When every decision or teach-out agreement you make impacts hundreds of students and their academic journey, it leaves a strong mark on your life.
University closure is not theoretical to me. It is personal.
Since then, I have had dozens of conversations with presidents, provosts, board members, and senior leaders at institutions facing challenges. Many of them are good people. Many of them are faithful stewards. And many of them are living in denial.
This reflection is intended for executive leaders, faculty, staff, and students at small- to mid-sized universities in America. It is not written to shame anyone. It is written to tell the truth. If an institution exhibits one of the warning signs outlined below, it is facing serious challenges. If it shows more than half of them, there is a very real chance it will not survive the next five to ten years. Or the following year. You may call me dramatic, but once a university faces a cash-flow issue or a payroll deficit, things tend to decline rapidly from there.
The Most Common Warning Signs of Institutional Failure
After living through a closure and walking alongside institutions now at risk, several patterns repeat themselves with unsettling consistency.
1. Sustained Enrollment Decline Without a Credible Reversal Strategy
Enrollment decline alone is not fatal. What becomes fatal is denial. When leaders explain away multi-year losses as temporary or cyclical without fundamentally redesigning programs, delivery models, and value propositions, time becomes the enemy.
High-risk signals include multi-year enrollment losses attributable to demographic shifts or economic cycles, extensive tuition discounting without meaningful diversification of revenue streams, recruitment efforts that are reactive rather than strategically designed, and marketing investments that are disconnected from genuine academic or programmatic transformation.
When enrollment drops faster than an institution's ability to reconfigure its cost structure or reimagine its value proposition, insolvency becomes a question of timing, not possibility.
2. A Curriculum That Has Not Meaningfully Changed in a Decade or More
Many institutions are still offering programs designed for an economy that no longer exists. Degrees look familiar, comfortable, and increasingly irrelevant. Rebranding old programs without rethinking learning outcomes does not solve the problem.
Institutions that struggle are rarely lacking in content. What they lack is relevance. The warning signs here include degree programs that look substantially similar to those offered ten or twenty years ago, learning outcomes framed around content coverage rather than the development of human capacities, and minimal integration of emerging literacies such as AI fluency, data interpretation, or interdisciplinary problem-solving.
If students graduate with credentials but without clear pathways to economic agency, vocational purpose, or civic contribution, the market will eventually notice and respond.
3. Pedagogy Built for Information Scarcity in a World of Cognitive Abundance
This is the most underestimated and most dangerous signal of all. Lecture-driven instruction, recall-based assessment, and content transmission models no longer justify the cost of higher education. When students can access information instantly and synthesize it with AI, pedagogy must change or legitimacy erodes.
Universities in danger typically continue to rely heavily on lecture-based, content-transmission models of teaching. They treat artificial intelligence as a policing problem rather than as a cognitive partner in the learning process. They assess memorization and recall when the world increasingly demands synthesis, judgment, and wisdom. They confuse academic rigor with cognitive friction, rather than recognizing that rigor should produce cognitive growth.
When knowledge is abundant, and cognition is augmented by technology, institutions that fail to rethink how learning happens lose their fundamental reason for existence.
4. Governance That Moves Slower Than Reality or a DMV line
Boards that prioritize harmony over clarity and leadership teams that avoid hard decisions to preserve short-term stability often guarantee long-term collapse. The pace of external change has outgrown traditional governance rhythms. To share a bit of my bias, I place all, if not most, of the responsibility of a failing institution on the board. They exist to protect the institution's mission and vision and to hire and fire the president. When an institution fails, it is primarily because it has failed to do both.
Struggling institutions often have boards and leadership structures that prioritize consensus over clarity, avoid difficult decisions to preserve short-term harmony, lack members with deep experience in innovation, technology, or organizational transformation, and treat survival primarily as a financial problem rather than a systems problem.
When governance cannot keep pace with external change, institutional decay accelerates, first quietly, then suddenly.
5. Financial Models Built on Hope Rather Than Mathematics
Heavy tuition dependence, deferred maintenance, short-term borrowing, and growth assumptions without structural reform are all signs that the financial engine no longer functions independently.
The warning signs here include overreliance on tuition revenue as the primary income stream, deferred maintenance and chronic underinvestment, masked as fiscal prudence, short-term borrowing to cover operational gaps, and strategic plans that assume enrollment growth without articulating the structural changes that would enable such growth.
Universities rarely collapse due to a single challenging year. They collapsed because the underlying mathematics ceased to function, and leadership delayed confronting that reality.
6. Faculty and Staff Exhaustion Without a Shared Vision of the Future
Burnout paired with cynicism is a dangerous combination. When faculty energy is spent preserving the past rather than building the future, institutional execution breaks down.
Cultural signals are as important as financial ones. High-risk institutions often exhibit burnout paired with cynicism rather than creative tension, faculty governance structures focused on preservation rather than renewal, innovation driven by a few isolated champions rather than institutional alignment, and a pervasive narrative of loss rather than purpose.
When the people inside an institution no longer believe it has a future worth building, execution collapses, no matter how sound the strategy on paper.
7. Weak Connection to Workforce, Society, and Human Formation
Institutions that cannot clearly articulate how learning connects to work, service, and purpose slowly drift into irrelevance. Credentials alone are no longer enough.
Universities that drift toward irrelevance often treat employers as adversaries rather than partners in the educational mission, lack credible pathways from learning to meaningful work or service, frame education purely as credentialing rather than as human formation, and struggle to articulate why they exist beyond appeals to tradition.
Institutions survive when they serve a clear societal function that cannot be easily replaced. When that function becomes unclear, vulnerability follows.
8. Treating Artificial Intelligence as a Threat Instead of an Inflection Point
Banning AI, policing its use, or delegating it solely to IT departments misses the moment entirely. AI exposes whether an institution truly understands learning.
This is becoming an increasingly decisive factor. At-risk universities ban or restrict AI tools without simultaneously redefining what learning means in an augmented world. They delegate AI strategy to IT departments rather than positioning it as a central concern of academic leadership. They focus on detection and prevention rather than on pedagogical design and opportunity. They miss the chance to rethink cost structures, scale, personalization, and access.
Artificial intelligence does not merely disrupt operational processes. It exposes whether an institution fundamentally understands what learning is and why it matters.
9. A Brand Without Substance or Substance Without a Story
When universities cannot clearly explain who they are for and why they matter now, ambiguity becomes indistinguishable from weakness.
Institutional failure often occurs when the brand promises transformation but delivers familiarity, when the institution does meaningful work but cannot articulate it clearly to external audiences, when messaging targets prospective students while ignoring the concerns of parents, employers, and donors, and when the value proposition is internally obvious but externally invisible.
In competitive markets, ambiguity is functionally indistinguishable from weakness.
10. No Compelling Answer to a Simple Question
Why should this university exist ten years from now?
If leadership cannot answer that question in plain language, the institution is already in trouble.
The final and most telling sign is this: If a university cannot clearly articulate, in plain language accessible to any thoughtful person, why it should exist ten years from now, it very likely will not.
Institutions positioned for survival can answer with clarity: Who are we for? What human capacities do we develop? Why do we matter in a world being reshaped by artificial intelligence? How are we structurally different, not merely rhetorically unique?
The Hidden Reality No One Likes to Say Out Loud
Many universities today are sustained by generous, nostalgia-filled donors who love what the institution once represented. Their support matters. It buys time. But it does not fix broken models.
A business model that cannot sustain itself without emotional subsidy is not a sustainable model.
Eventually, demographics shift, donors age, and sentiment alone cannot carry an institution forward. Survival requires structural relevance, not just historical affection.
The Most Deadly Failure of All
After everything I have seen, the most deadly sign of institutional failure is not enrollment decline or financial stress.
It is the failure to rethink pedagogy in the age of artificial intelligence.
Pedagogy is the operating system of the university. When it is designed for content delivery, fixed pacing, and isolated cognition, everything else begins to collapse.
By the time financial indicators turn red, the real damage has already been done. Students disengage quietly. Employers move on. Faculty optimize for survival rather than renewal. The institution becomes hollow before it becomes insolvent.
AI does not merely disrupt universities. It reveals whether they ever understood learning in the first place.
Why Neogogy Is Not Optional
This is where Neogogy enters the conversation, not as a theory, but as a survival framework.
Neogogy begins with a simple but uncomfortable truth: Learning must be redesigned for a world where knowledge is abundant and cognition is augmented.
Instead of treating AI as an enemy, Neogogy treats it as a cognitive partner. Instead of certifying time spent, it prioritizes demonstrated capability. Instead of assessing memory, it evaluates meaning, judgment, and wisdom in context.
Under a Neogogic framework:
Faculty move from content gatekeepers to learning architects and mentors. The role shifts from delivering information to designing transformative learning experiences and guiding students through complex cognitive development.
Assessment becomes resilient to AI rather than threatened by it. Evaluation focuses on synthesis, judgment, application, and the development of wisdom, capacities that cannot be outsourced to algorithms.
Learning pathways become adaptive, modular, and personalized. Education is no longer bound by rigid semester structures or one-size-fits-all curricula, but responds dynamically to individual learner needs and contexts.
Credentials reflect formation, not just completion. Degrees signal the development of human capacities and demonstrated competencies, not merely the accumulation of credit hours.
Institutions reclaim value that cannot be automated. Universities focus on what makes them irreplaceable: mentorship, community, formation, and the cultivation of uniquely human capacities.
Most importantly, Neogogy restores legitimacy. It provides universities with a defensible answer to the question that students and families are already asking: Why does this matter now? Because AI has made pedagogical emptiness impossible to hide.
For universities and schools willing to engage seriously with this moment, Neogogy offers a pathway forward. It provides a language for discussing pedagogy in an AI-enabled world, a set of principles for designing learning experiences that develop uniquely human capacities, and a vision for institutions that are not merely surviving but genuinely serving the next generation of learners.
A Final Word to Leaders, Faculty, and Students
Universities rarely fail because they change too fast. They fail because they change too slowly while convincing themselves they are being careful.
If your institution recognizes one or two of the warning signs above, there is still time. If it recognizes more than half, denial becomes the greatest risk of all.
I write this not as a critic standing outside the system, but as someone who has lived through its most painful outcome and who still believes deeply in what higher education can become.
The conversation we need to have about the future of higher education is not primarily about budgets or buildings. It is about purpose. It is about what we believe education is for, and whether our institutions are structured to deliver on that belief.
The future of the university is not guaranteed. But it is still possible.
It will require courage, honesty, and a willingness to redesign learning itself.
That work cannot wait.
