How should universities respond to cuts in teaching, demographic decline and greater competition? (And what should vice-chancellors read on the beach this summer?)

• Review by Nick Hillman, HEPI’s CEO, of Capitalizing on College: How higher education went from mission driven to market obsessed (2025) by Joshua Travis Brown

Having finally finished reading it yesterday evening, I have come to the conclusion that the one book every vice-chancellor, aspiring vice-chancellor and chair of council should read on the beach this summer is Capitalizing on College: How higher education went from mission driven to market obsessed by Joshua Travis Brown.

It is a study of eight higher education institutions in the United States that responded to the challenges affecting traditional residential higher education in four different ways – and (spoiler alert) each route has ended up creating deep problems of its own.

‘Come here’

The first route, which the author labels ‘the traditional strategy’, is based on increasing residential enrolments alongside universities’ endowments. The case study institutions (which are given the pseudonyms Boxborough and Havertown) came to boast shiny new buildings and top-notch amenities (including planning for ‘a nice saltwater pool’ because students ‘like to get a tan’), with the goal of ‘elicit[ing] a feeling.’

It all sounds rather wonderful and the strategy certainly worked, at least to begin with. As early as 2000, each of the case-study institutions had amassed an endowment of $100 million. But, in time, the author says, the old problems re-emerged. Filling student spaces meant offering tuition discounts and when combined with keeping the campus and academic offer cutting-edge, the same old problems returned: ‘neither school had escaped becoming the very thing the traditional strategy was designed to avoid: a small, private, struggling university that did not have a huge endowment.’

More bluntly, an interviewee from Boxborough says: ‘they ended up with no endowment and a campus they couldn’t afford to maintain. And they had to lay people off.’ Leaders from both institutions concluded that, except for those institutions at the very top of the tree, ‘tradition cannot compete in the market.’

Protecting the core

The second path, termed ‘the pioneer strategy’, is bolder and focused on taking higher education to where potential ‘adult, military, distance, international, online, vocational, and other marginalized students’ are, such as ‘shopping malls, high schools, hotel conference rooms, and military bases.’ Here the three case studies (pseudonymously called Lansdale, Malvern and Stoneham) all ‘soon found themselves in the midst of a growth boom the likes of which they had never experienced’.

As with the traditional approach, the primary original goal was to transform the core residential campus, with the peripheral additions serving as ‘the fleet that kept the flagship afloat.’ Or as one professor put it more bitterly, ‘We’re working so you can build more dorms.’

But what goes up tends to come down. Quality issues, the challenge of conveying deep institutional values in a hotel conference room and competition from others (meaning the first-mover advantage lost its value) wiped away much of the early benefits: ‘Student enrolments cratered, and the excess revenues used to transform the residential campus evaporated.’ As with the traditional approach, the institutions following the pioneer approach merely delayed a crisis rather than averted one.

‘“Yes” first and “How?” second’

The third approach, ‘the network strategy’, makes both the traditional and pioneer strategies look conservative. The case study institutions (which are given the names Pepperell University and the University of Winchendon) were very ambitious in building new markets away from the core – but found it even harder to balance money with their original (religious) missions.

One professor caricatured the new enrolment approach as ‘Double enrollments, triple enrollments – get any student from anywhere, anyone who will pay, from any country. It doesn’t atter who they are, what their background is, or what they want to do.’ One senior leader talked of wanting someone to be ‘the Registrar of Yes.’ As a result, in the two decades after the 1990s, both the case study institutions quintupled their enrolments.

In this model, the residential core is, again, a loss leader subsidised by other activities, including transnational education, which are likened to the legs that support a tabletop. One facilitating factor was the absence of powerful traditional academic bodies; one professor claims this meant the leader of his institution could ‘just think up shit and do it.’

But unsurprisingly perhaps, this was also not a recipe for stability. Excessive complexity, excessive competition (meaning parts of one institution were competing with other parts of the same institution for students and resources) and various mis-steps caused chaos: new campuses ‘siphoned off the financial support existing legs were offering the residential core.’

‘It feels like a Ponzi scheme’

The final case study institution (called Ardmore University in the book) is a Protestant university founded more recently than the others. (To me, it also seems by far and away the most thinly disguised of the eight institutions: the anecdotes about its links to TV evangelism and the family that founded and controlled it rather give the game away even for people on this side of the Atlantic.)

Struggling with debts amounting to over $100 million in the early 1990s and with over 100 infractions noted by accreditors, the institution looked on the cusp of failure. But it turned away from traditional philanthropy towards making a margin on each student, while coming to embrace online education as a route to ‘explosive’ growth (resulting in ten times more online students than residential ones). But success rested upon features that seemed to sit uneasily both with traditional higher education delivery and with the ethical foundation of the institution, including call centres for student support services that sound rather unpleasant places to work and heavy reliance on adjunct teaching staff. One member of staff explained the logic: ‘We’re only going to do it if it’s going to be profitable, right? If we build a library, how’s it going to make us more money?’

Why you should read it

This is not a perfect book for it is repetitive, includes some weird diagrams that confuse rather than clarify and even boasts a rather off-putting title. But it is undoubtedly worth the effort of reading it because it is rich in juicy quotes, full of thoughtful analysis and, despite its US focus, highly relevant for UK audiences.

It is for those sun-tanning vice-chancellors and their chairs of council to decide just how on point the contents of the book are for our own higher education institutions, but I nonetheless note that both the UK (from 2030) and the US (from 2025) face severe drops in the number of school leavers, which is likely to prompt action.

Perhaps in the end, it is even more important that policymakers read this book than for institutional leaders to do so, given that institutional leaders only have to choose from such an unpalatable menu of options because of the decision to underfund the costs of higher education teaching. The author of the book has a lot to say about marketisation, neoliberalism and capitalism but such pretentious analysis tends to overlook the plain and simple fact that it is conscious underfunding of traditional higher education (under more than one administration) that is the main culprit.

When I had the privilege of meeting the author of Capitalizing on College during his recent trip to Oxford, I urged him to start work on a companion UK study. It would be fabulous if he or someone else took up the mantle.