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In today's issue: Why one university's troubles hit a nerve across higher ed; the fix for AI and assessment turns out to be low-tech; test scores are quietly back.
EVENT
🗄️ Program reviews are in the news as colleges try to figure out which degree programs to cut and add in response to new federal regulations, shifting enrollment patterns, and a changing workforce.
"Rethinking Your Academic Program Portfolio" is the topic of our virtual Next Office Hour this month, where I'll be joined by:
Richard J. Helldobler, President, William Paterson University
Elena Magrini, Head of Global Research, Lightcast
Kelly Otter, Dean of the School of Continuing Studies, Georgetown University
Here are the details, where we'll take your questions and the chat will be open:
🗓️ Thursday, September 10
⏰ 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT
👉 Register for freeand get a recording afterward (supported by Risepoint)
Higher Ed's Winner-Take-All Era
Illustration: Shutterstock
Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journalpublished a front-page article about Syracuse University's budget shortfall, enrollment struggles, and efforts to compete with universities such as Boston University, Northeastern, and NYU.
It was just the latest in a steady drumbeat of tough headlines about the university. Whenever I post about one of those headlines on social media—as I did on Sunday—the response overwhelms my feeds. Hundreds of comments. Hundreds of thousands of views.
Why does one university's troubles hit such a nerve?
The answer has less to do with Syracuse today than with what Syracuse—and comprehensive institutions like it—used to be.
To understand, come back with me to the Saturday before Thanksgiving in 1992. My friend Will and I took a road trip to Syracuse. I was a sophomore at Ithaca College, and it was the first day of our weeklong Thanksgiving break. Our plan was to see the Syracuse-Miami football game in the afternoon, then he'd drop me off at home in Pennsylvania that night on his way to Maryland.
I grew up a Penn State fan, but nothing prepared me for the Carrier Dome that afternoon.
Miami was ranked No. 1. Syracuse was No. 8. The game was broadcast nationally on ABC. A sellout crowd of nearly 50,000 people packed into the Dome for the game. It was the kind of atmosphere that made it feel like twice that many. Syracuse lost by two field goals, but they ended that season ranked No. 6 and won the Fiesta Bowl.
If you wanted big-time football in the 1990s, sure, you could go to Alabama or Notre Dame or Penn State. But you could also go to Syracuse.
Yes, going to college in Syracuse meant cold and snow, but it was still a major city in upstate New York. When we needed a big place to go during college, we went to Syracuse. It had the Carousel Mall. It had concerts at the Dome.
The university itself in the 1990s felt in some ways like New York's flagship, even as a private institution. The state’s sprawling SUNY system lacked a defined flagship like California, Texas, North Carolina, and Michigan had, as well as big-time sports. Syracuse also attracted students from New York City and its suburbs, giving it reach into the nation’s largest media market (where many grads from its Newhouse communications school went to work).
I’m a Gen Xer, and for many members of my generation growing up on the East Coast, Syracuse was woven into the culture. We knew it through the 35 Syracuse students tragically killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. We knew it through Jim Boeheim and Carmelo Anthony, who led Syracuse to the NCAA basketball championship in 2003. For those who worked in higher ed, Syracuse was also the definition of a comprehensive university, with nationally known programs, major research ambitions, and big-time sports.
Now Syracuse has become the most visible—and probably largest—example of what happens when a well-known institution loses market power in an increasingly winner-take-all higher education system.
Syracuse is also an example I often use in talks with high-school students and their families about why they shouldn’t put too much stock in acceptance rates.
The Wall Street Journal included a graphic (see below) showing how Boston University, Northeastern, and NYU have all become more selective over the last decade while Syracuse has not.
But acceptance rates tell only half the story. The number really driving them is yield, the percentage of admitted students who enroll.
Nearly three decades ago, Syracuse had a yield rate similar to Duke’s. Today, Duke enrolls around 60% of the students it admits. Syracuse enrolls around 20%.
As yield dropped, Syracuse had to admit more applicants to fill a freshman class of nearly 4,000 students. The acceptance rate rises as a result. It then looks less selective. The perception of selectivity weakens. More applicants begin to treat Syracuse as a backup, and the cycle feeds itself.
Here’s the important distinction: acceptance rates and yield measure market power, not educational quality. Syracuse students don’t suddenly get worse professors because fewer admitted students choose to enroll. But for a university that depends heavily on tuition, perception eventually becomes financial reality.
So what happened to the perception of Syracuse from the 1990s?
The explanations I heard in comments in my social feed generally fell into four buckets:
🏷️ Price. Syracuse now costs nearly $100,000 a year, putting it in the same neighborhood as BU, Northeastern, and NYU. But only 21% of Syracuse undergraduates pay full price, compared with 40% or more at those peers. When prices converge but demand doesn’t, families ask harder questions about value.
📍Place. Plenty of commenters blamed the weather. I don’t buy it. Boston is cold, too. The bigger disadvantage is access to the dense networks of employers, internships, and cultural opportunities that urban universities can build into their pitch.
🏟️ Sports. Syracuse remains in a power conference, but football and basketball no longer provide the reliable national exposure they once did. The university hasn’t been shut out of big-time athletics. It has simply lost some of the competitive and cultural relevance that once powered its brand.
🎯 Scale and execution. Enrolling nearly 4,000 freshmen is a difficult target to hit every year, especially with a yield rate around 20%. Syracuse also didn’t offer Early Action until this admissions cycle, Regular Decision notifications were slow, and outreach to admitted students lagged. Those are basic enrollment practices that competitors mastered years ago.
None of these factors alone explains Syracuse’s position. Together, they expose the vulnerability of a university built to operate at scale in a market where students have more choices and fewer of them see Syracuse as their first one.
So what happens now? Mike Haynie, who became Syracuse’s chancellor this spring, has been unusually candid about the university’s challenges. In June, he appointed a special committee to examine Syracuse’s academic scale and financial model. Its report is due this fall.
Some higher ed leaders tell me Syracuse is attracting so much attention because Haynie has been too transparent. They mean it as a warning that he can’t control the narrative as a result, but I see it as a survival strategy with the campus constituencies he needs.
Now Haynie’s candor must be matched by choices he’ll need to make in the year ahead. In many ways, these are similar to choices other university leaders will need to make:
Choose where you can win. Syracuse has already moved to close or pause 93 academic programs, 55 of which enrolled no students. That is necessary portfolio maintenance. The harder work is shifting resources toward the programs and experiences that distinguish Syracuse rather than continuing to define excellence by how much it offers.
Turn location into an advantage. Micron is planning to invest up to $100 billion in a semiconductor complex in nearby Clay. Syracuse is already building research and workforce partnerships around it. Now it can make paid internships, co-ops, applied projects, and industry connections central to the undergraduate experience, not only in engineering but across business, policy, communications, and the humanities.
Decide what athletics is supposed to accomplish. Syracuse cannot recreate 1992 simply by spending its way back into the national conversation. Athletics can amplify the university’s identity, but it cannot substitute for one. The question is what level of investment is sustainable and where Syracuse can realistically compete.
Get smaller on purpose. A smaller Syracuse might occupy the medium-sized space increasingly missing from the market. But enrolling fewer students into a cost structure built for 4,000 freshmen will only deepen the deficit. Getting smaller would require redesigning programs, staffing, facilities, and debt around a different model.
Bottom line: The institutions that gained market power over the past two decades made clear choices. Syracuse is now being forced to make its choices in public.
It has been here before. In 2011, Syracuse left the Association of American Universities before the group's research metrics could force it out. It was an early sign that a university built to do everything could no longer keep pace everywhere.
Every comprehensive university should ask the same question before the market asks it for them: If we can no longer be everything, what will we choose to be?
Blue Books Aren't the Answer
A new MIT report out last week argues that AI should push colleges to rethink assessment, including greater use of oral exams, portfolios, projects, and other ways for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned.
Driving the news: The report, which stopped short of recommending a single institution-wide AI policy, landed on some surprisingly old-fashioned ideas: more learning with other people, more authentic demonstrations of what students know, and less reliance on traditional grades.
Why it matters: I heard similar themes last week at one of my salon dinners for university leaders in Seattle.
A vice provost for AI at a research university argued that learning still requires struggle. Others talked about giving students harder, real-world problems rather than assignments AI can easily complete.
The opportunity isn't to find assignments AI can't do. It's to get better at asking students to demonstrate what they can do.
The big picture: Perhaps AI’s biggest impact on college won't be making education more technological.
It could push higher ed in the opposite direction: more conversation, more demonstration, more human judgment, and more learning with other people.
Bottom line: AI might not kill assessment. It might finally force colleges to make it better.
DATA POINT
The Common App released its year-end report on the 2025–26 application cycle, and there are some important signals in it for this year’s seniors and their families getting ready to apply.
See a full animation of some of my takeaways on Instagram, but here are two important data points from the report: Apps are up, again. And test submitters surpassed those who did not send a score, for the first time since before the pandemic.
SUPPLEMENTS
📄 Reading 51,600 Transcripts. As I saw reporting Who Gets In and Why, one of the most time consuming parts of admissions is simply understanding the high-school transcript. At the University of Georgia, the admissions office typically standardized transcripts by hand. But this past year, the office worked with the state agency that already standardizes grades for Georgia's merit scholarships, so transcripts from roughly 23,000 in-state applicants now load automatically into a searchable database. That allows UGA to look back at enrolled students and see which high-school courses actually predicted success on campus. (U.S. News & World Report)
💼 The Case for the Co-Op. University of Cincinnati students earned $99.5 million on co-op assignments last year, up nearly 6%, across 9,614 placements with 1,798 employers. The average student cleared $13,130 in a co-op semester, roughly a year of in-state tuition. Arts and sciences appears in the earnings data for the first time, a sign the model UC built for engineers in 1906 is reaching the majors families worry about most. (Gap Letter)
➗ The Calculus Signal. A growing argument in K-12 says the age of calculus is over and high school math should shift to statistics and real-world relevance. Education Next pushes back, and the objection matters for colleges: calculus is not just a course, it is the proxy that signals a student can handle elite coursework. Statistics is worth expanding, but swapping one for the other doesn't fix the real problem, which is how few students reach any advanced math at all. That traces back to weak elementary foundations. If schools stop pushing calculus, the students who skip it lose ground to the ones whose parents made sure they took it regardless. (Education Next)
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