In a recent essay for Compact magazine, University of Chicago professor Clifford Ando argued that his institution is “simply choosing not to be a university.” Its leaders treat it as a “tax-free technology incubator” and have borrowed enormous sums of money in pursuit of that goal. Now, according to Ando, Chicago is planning to consolidate departments, send students elsewhere for certain classes, and has even proposed using ChatGPT to teach several languages. 

Ando traces these changes to increased university investment in risky applied science research, with the hope that a breakthrough would lead to windfall patents. Chicago, he points out, now spends the equivalent of 85 percent of undergraduate tuition to service its debt. But Ando also points the finger at a broader cultural shift. Americans, in his view, have come to think of education as “a private, personal good, to be measured solely in terms of increase in lifetime earnings.” He decries this, righteously: education’s true purpose is to “create people as lifetime learners, seekers, and questioners.”

Ando’s vision of American university life as a “shared project” of learning is a worthy one. But we think the changes at Chicago and at selective universities across the country can also be understood as a simple change in the priorities of university student bodies. After all, the decline of the “lifetime learner” model coincided almost inexorably with a shift in the makeup of those student bodies — a shift that was clearly beneficial but that nevertheless changed the way students relate to higher education.

Yale became the first private university in the country to institute need-blind admissions in 1966. In the decades since, student demographics have come to more closely match those of the nation as a whole. Ivy League universities went from being havens for wealthy, WASP-y graduates of Northeast prep schools to institutions open to talented, ambitious students from all over the country. Students now reasonably believe that the purpose of their education is precisely that “increase in lifetime earnings.” Becoming a lifelong “questioner” pales in comparison to delivering a financially secure future for one’s family.

This fact — which is about the incentives that govern the college process, not amorphous cultural trends — suggests that the changes in American education cut to the core of the system. Students and universities engage in a college admissions market that is increasingly open and competitive. Like any marketplace, the preferences of the consumers will eventually influence the offerings. 

Those preferences create an unfortunate dynamic. Applicants and their parents prioritize earnings and certain amenities largely unrelated to the core function of the college: fancy dorms, shiny new buildings, gourmet food. Administrators at elite universities hurry to respond in kind. Why was the University of Chicago in so much debt? Because it was competing for top applicants with better-funded Ivy League schools — alongside places like Duke University and Stanford University — who are already fighting tooth-and-nail amongst themselves. It’s competition, not just culture, that threatens the kind of university Ando describes.

Is there a remedy? Taking university enrollment off the market, likely by way of an admissions lottery, would ease the pressure to field the nicest buildings and the coolest-sounding course offerings. It would reorient higher education towards lifelong education while not closing off the increase in earnings that makes universities so valuable to so many different kinds of people.

Competition, though, allows student preferences to play a role, which surely is good for something. It allows for colleges to craft bespoke student bodies and for students to find their way to schools that seem like cultural fits. It allows low-income students to compare and shop around for financial aid offers. Altering the university system in such a basic way would risk undoing the prosperity that made our country’s universities the best in the world, as well as the transformations that opened institutions like Yale to a much broader swathe of America.

Changing the incentive structure of American higher education is a difficult task, and changing the preferences of hundreds of thousands of applicants would be almost impossible. It might be that the research-university-as-close-knit-academic-community is simply a fish out of water, a relic of another age. All that is solid about college life melts into air, and all that is holy is profaned. 

But we shouldn’t be so pessimistic. Yale, in our experience, retains much of the spark that always follows a “shared project” of learning and seeking. We are lucky to do so, and we hope that such a spark exists across the country: at the thousands of community colleges and from the smallest liberal arts schools to the largest state universities. We must huddle around our little flame and shield it from the elements. Amid raging political and economic headwinds, that may be the best way to keep it.

TEDDY WITT is a sophomore in Berkeley College. His biweekly column “The American Crisis” explores history, politics and current events in America and at Yale. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu.

MILAN SINGH is a senior in Pierson College studying Economics and a former Opinion editor for the News. He is also the director of the Yale Youth Poll. His column, “All politics is national,” runs fortnightly. Contact him at milan.singh@yale.edu.