You Don’t Have to Outrun the Bears

You know the joke. Two hikers round a bend and see a bear charging toward them. One drops his pack and starts tightening his shoelaces. His friend stares at him: "What are you doing? You can't outrun a bear." The first hiker takes off running: "I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you."

American higher education appears to be deciding that this is a strategy.

Here's the thing: there are multiple bears on this trail. Each bear is real, and both are big: enrollment down nearly 2 million since 2010, the population of 18-year-olds projected to fall 13 percent by 2041, public trust is eroding, and politicians are circling. Any one of these would be an existential threat. Together, they're a full-on charge down the trail.

And how are colleges responding? By lacing up their shoes and shoving each other into the bear's path.

As Jon Marcus writes in The Hechinger Report, four-year universities are lobbying to block community colleges from offering bachelor's degrees to rural adults who often cannot reach a four-year campus — while also encroaching on the dual-enrollment and workforce-training markets those same community colleges built. Selective schools are expanding early decision to lock in students before anyone else can pitch to them. Recruiters are poaching admitted students after deposit day, a practice the profession once banned outright. Public universities are discounting tuition to lure students away from public universities in other states. “It's the Wild West,” says one former admissions chief Marcus quotes — every hiker for himself.

Outrunning the college next door doesn't make the bears go away. It only determines the order in which everyone gets eaten. When Iowa's private colleges killed a community college bachelor's bill, no new 18-year-olds materialized. The people who lost were the working adults in education deserts who still can't get a degree — the very students who might have grown the market instead of merely redividing it.

Meanwhile, the students caught in the scramble aren't enjoying the show. Fourteen percent of families now put down deposits at multiple schools because they don’t trust the process will be settled by May. High schoolers navigate competing dual-enrollment providers, all hawking essentially the same courses. The infighting that's supposed to save institutions is teaching their customers to trust them less — which feeds the biggest bear of all.

The hikers who survive bear country don't sprint. They make themselves look bigger — together. As one community college leader put it: the future should be built on partnerships, not turf. Sectors that face declining demand by cannibalizing each other don't end up with a winner. They end up with a smaller and more chaotic sector.

Tighten your laces if you want. But at some point, higher ed should stop racing the hiker next to it and deal with the bears.