$400K for AI Cheaters Luxury Camp: How many colleges will survive?

"I just don’t see a world in which parents continue to indefinitely fork up nearly half a million to send their kids to AI Cheating Young Adult Luxury Camp," tweets Tyler Austin Harper, a professor turned Atlantic writer. "Some will, but how many? Enough to sustain most colleges?"

He envisions a "black-swan-esque event where significant chunks of higher ed collapse suddenly." Colleges are playing chicken with parents, he tweets. "The wager seems to be that college is so entrenched as the default that parents will continue to pay for it even as the value proposition and quality collapse due to AI. I think that bluff gets called."

Syracuse University teams are The Orange.

The Syracuse University is in trouble, reports Douglas Belkin and Roshan Fernandez in the Wall Street Journal. Total cost of attendance at the private university increased to $98,544 this year. Enrollment fell short.

Syracuse borrowed "nearly half a billion in debt to build desperately needed new dorms," they write. To fill the dorms, the university may need to lower admissions standards, risking its prestige and reducing its appeal to students whose parents can pay tuition.

 “The stream of students willing to pay something closer to full price is drying up,” for moderately selective private colleges, said Robert Kelchen, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville professor.

Trump's policies have restricted the flow of full-pay foreign students, cash cows at Syracuse and elsewhere.

"Lesser-known colleges with nominal endowments" were the first to fail, leading to "a surge of mergers and closings among small private schools," Belkin and Fernandez write. "But the cracks in the business model of higher education are now prompting a realignment much further up the food chain."

More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, reports Hechinger's Jon Marcus. State universities are struggling too: Some are dropping niche majors, laying off staff and closing campuses. Southern Oregon University needs to slash spending to stay open. Minnesota State Mankato is eliminating jobs and raising tuition to stay afloat.

On the flip side, the Greenway Institute -- a low-cost, no-frills, hands-on engineering school -- will open on the site of a closed arts school in Montpelier, Vermont, Marcus reports. Students will pay $25,000 a year, offset by paid jobs on campus, for two years, according to the plan. Then they'll "go on to real-world workplaces for an additional two years while continuing to get support from faculty." 

Elite schools will survive: Many have huge endowments that fund financial aid, and there are plenty of parents willing to pay for prestige and networking. Southern universities with good football programs are doing well. (Overall, the number of high school graduates is rising in the South, and declining significantly everywhere else.) State flagship universities, subsidized by taxpayers, provide good value. So do community colleges. (Yes, completion rates are low, but so are costs.)

That leaves a lot of high-cost, high-risk colleges and universities that will be competing with community colleges, online programs and apprenticeships for a shrinking pool of 18-year-olds.

Confidence in higher education is declining sharply, notes Reagan Allen on the Martin Center blog. Republicans have been skeptics for years, but now Democrats are wobbly. Only half of Democrats had "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education, down from 61 percent in 2025, in a recent Gallup-Lumina survey.

"Among Americans who lack confidence in higher education, 31% pointed to political agendas, 30% cited cost, and 25% said colleges are not adequately preparing students for the workforce."