Education Was Never an Industry. That Is Exactly the Problem.

Wrong Tool. Right Problem. Fifty Years Wasted.

This is not a new argument for me. I have been making the case for years that governments, industry, and education are not separate concerns but interdependent systems, each one necessary for the others to function, each one weakened when we blur the distinctions between them.

What has always struck me is how invisible that interdependence remains in the conversations that matter most. Budget negotiations treat education as a line item rather than infrastructure. Workforce policy treats it as a pipeline rather than a foundation. And higher education, to its considerable shame, has too often solved for the wrong premise, prioritizing tradition at the cost of relevance. The cost of that invisibility is now impossible to ignore. This piece is my attempt to make the argument in a way that finally forces it into the open.

That is what education is supposed to produce. Not a credential. A person.

I have been leading at a university for almost fourteen years. I have watched enrollment grow from a few hundred students to thousands. I cut tuition in half while other institutions raised it annually. And I am telling you plainly that the crisis facing higher education is not a business problem. It is a purpose problem. And no amount of pricing strategy or enrollment marketing will fix a purpose problem.

There is a question that keeps surfacing in boardrooms, congressional hearings, think tanks, and faculty senates. It sounds like a policy debate. It presents itself as a budget argument.

The real question is simpler and more uncomfortable than any of those conversations allow. What exactly do we think education is for?

Because, depending on how you answer that, everything else either makes sense or falls apart completely.

If education is an industry, then every piece of conventional wisdom about it is correct. Cut the inefficiencies. Compete for market share. Optimize the customer journey. Measure return on investment. The logic is clean, and the metrics are familiar.

But if education is not an industry. If it was never designed to be one. If it was built to do something that markets cannot do, and governments cannot fully mandate, and employers cannot outsource. Then we have been applying the wrong framework for decades and wondering why the patient keeps getting sicker.

I am also telling you that higher education is not innocent in this mess. We helped create the confusion. We took the bait. And now we have to own that before we can lead our way out of it.

Before We Go Further

Arguments about higher education attract assumptions the way a ship attracts barnacles. Let me scrape a few off before they slow us down.

I am not arguing that all learning should be free, that every institution deserves to survive, or that business has no role in education. The argument is about the framework governing education, not the price tag attached to it. Public investment in education as a public good and zero-cost education are not the same thing, and conflating the two has derailed this conversation for long enough.

I am not defending the traditional residential model. I am not making a partisan argument about the environment. Understanding the physical systems your economy depends on is not an ideology. It is due diligence.

I am not arguing that AI is the enemy or that higher education can fix this alone. The claim is interdependence.

Now. With that cleared. Here is what I am actually arguing.

Higher Education Had Its Chance. Now What?

Let me address the critics directly, because they are not entirely wrong, and this argument does not get stronger by pretending otherwise.

Higher education did take the wrong bait. We did confuse prestige with purpose. We did price ourselves out of the population we claimed to serve. We borrowed the vocabulary of industry without understanding that industry solves a fundamentally different problem than education does. The result is an institution expensive enough to function like a luxury product but expected to serve as a public good. That charges like a business but governs like a medieval guild. That indictment is fair, and I am not here to dispute it.

But I want to push back hard on three conclusions that flow from that indictment, because each one sounds like progress, and each one makes the underlying problem worse.

The first is that employers dropping degree requirements proves that education does not matter. Roughly a third of U.S. companies have eliminated bachelor’s degree requirements for some positions in recent years. That sounds like the market correcting for a broken system. But a Harvard Business School study published in 2025 found something more complicated underneath the headlines. The gap between companies announcing they dropped degree requirements and companies actually hiring non-degreed workers at scale remains enormous. Most hiring managers still default to the degree as a proxy for capability because they have not been given better tools for evaluating candidates. The credential became decoupled from the capability, which is precisely the problem the piece is diagnosing. The answer is not to abandon the investment in human development. It is to make that investment actually produce what it promises.

The second is that skills-based alternatives make the four-year degree obsolete. They do not. They make the four-year degree as a default, as the only path, as the credential that gates access to economic mobility, obsolete. That is a meaningful distinction. The question has never been residential versus online, four-year versus certificate, traditional versus alternative. The question is whether the thing we are producing actually develops the human capacity it claims to develop. Format is irrelevant. Purpose is everything.

The third is that AI will replace most of what universities teach anyway, so the urgency here is misplaced. This gets the logic exactly backwards. AI is extraordinarily capable at executing defined tasks, synthesizing information, and producing outputs that look like expertise. What it cannot do is develop judgment. It cannot build the capacity to ask the right question before attempting to answer it. It cannot produce the civic competence that comes from sustained engagement with ideas, evidence, and people who disagree with you. Those capacities are not being automated. They are being revealed, perhaps for the first time with real clarity, as the only things that cannot be. An education system that responds to AI by doubling down on credential delivery is one training people to compete with the one thing they will never beat.

Higher education is culpable. The critics are right about that. But the answer to a system that lost its purpose is not to abandon the purpose. It is to demand the system find it again, and hold it accountable when it does not.

The Three Pillars That Hold a Modern Society Together

Every stable, functioning, forward-moving society rests on three foundations. Remove any one of them, and the structure begins to crack. Weaken all three simultaneously, and you get exactly what we are watching unfold right now.

The first pillar is defense. Not just military force, though that is part of it. The full architecture of national security. The ability to protect borders, maintain sovereignty, and project stability. Defense is how a society buys time. It cannot build the future by itself, but it can prevent others from destroying it. What most defense hawks seem to forget is that military readiness has always depended on an educated citizenry. The officers who designed the logistics of D-Day were engineers and mathematicians. The analysts who broke Axis codes were linguists and mathematicians trained in universities. The G.I. Bill, after World War II, was not charity. It was a strategic investment. The country understood that the same people who won the war needed the tools to build the peace, and that meant education at scale, quickly, with public commitment behind it. Defense and education have never been separate systems. They are the same system operating on different timelines.

The second pillar is industry. The capacity to produce, to innovate, to generate wealth, and to put people to work. Industry is how a society sustains itself materially. It funds everything else. But industry answers to the market, which means it optimizes for the present. Left entirely to itself, it will underinvest in anything whose return is diffuse, delayed, or shared. That is not a moral failure. It is a structural one. Industry needs an external system to prepare the people; it cannot prepare itself.

The third pillar is education. And here is where the entire framework breaks down in the 21st century, not because education is less important than the other two, but because we have fundamentally misunderstood what it is supposed to do.

Education is not the destination. It is the lens through which industry must see its workforce and government must see its citizens.

When that lens is clear, industry gets workers who can think, not just execute. Governments get citizens who can evaluate, not just comply. The downstream benefits of a strong, honest, relevant, independent education system are so diffuse and so embedded in everything else that they become nearly invisible. Until they are gone. We are beginning to feel what it looks like when that lens goes cloudy.

What Education Was Actually Built to Do

The land grant universities of the 19th century were built on a radical proposition. That a democratic republic could not survive without an educated citizenry, and that the government had an obligation to create institutions that served that need. Not the market’s need. The republic’s need.

When Lyndon Johnson signed the Higher Education Act in 1965, he declared that this nation could not rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American. His language was explicitly civic. Education as a social contract. Education as democracy’s operating system. That framing has been almost entirely abandoned. And we are paying for it.

I still harken back to the day I hosted The Power Dialog at the University of Maine over a decade ago. A structured forum that brought young people into the same room as the policymakers shaping their future. Not a lecture. Not a panel. A designed conversation between the people inheriting a system and the people running it. What I learned from hosting those sessions is that the hunger to engage, to understand, to hold systems accountable, is not something you install in people. It is something you either create conditions for or you suppress. Most of what we call higher education suppresses it without knowing it does.

The obligation of an educational institution is to produce human beings capable of self-governance. Culturally competent, civically engaged, environmentally literate, and career-ready. Those four things together. Not as separate tracks. As a unified purpose. The institution that delivers all four is not idealistic. It is the most practically useful thing a society can build.

Here is the part that contradicts everything I just said and is true anyway. As long as governments treat education as a consumer subsidy and industry continues to quietly route around us, building bootcamps and internal academies because they no longer trust us to produce what they need, tuition-driven institutions that stop thinking of themselves as businesses will simply cease to exist, and well-endowed institutions will risk irrelevance with the 90% of the population they do not serve. You cannot fulfill a mission you cannot afford to keep, nor if its value is criticality diminished. The goal is not to choose between purpose and survival. The goal is to refuse to let survival become the only purpose.

On the Environment… This Is Not an Ideology. It Is a Balance Sheet.

I want to be precise here because this argument gets hijacked by political framing, and I refuse to let that happen.

When I say environmental literacy is a prerequisite for a functioning economy, I am not speaking from a moral position or a partisan one. I am speaking from the same place a CFO speaks when they flag a liability on the balance sheet. The science here is not ambiguous. In 2009, a team of twenty-eight researchers led by Johan Rockstrom at the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified nine planetary boundaries, measurable thresholds in Earth system processes, within which human civilization can safely operate. As of the most recent assessment, six of those nine boundaries have been breached. Not approached. Breached.

These are not projections about a distant future. They are measurements of current conditions, peer-reviewed, replicated, and updated. Biodiversity loss, freshwater depletion, land-system change, biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus, novel chemical entities, and ocean acidification have all crossed the lines that the science says mark the boundary of a stable operating environment for human economies.

The economic consequences are not theoretical either. Degraded ecosystems reduce agricultural resilience. Disrupted freshwater cycles raise production costs and trigger regional instability. Supply chain exposure to climate-related disruption is now a standard line item in corporate risk assessments for the Fortune 500. The Swiss Re Institute estimated that ecosystem collapse could wipe more than ten percent of global GDP by mid-century. That is not environmentalism. That is risk management.

An industry that treats environmental education as a niche interest is discounting its own future at a ruinous rate. A government that treats ecological literacy as optional in its workforce is building policy on inputs it cannot accurately model. And a university that graduates students without the capacity to understand these systems is sending people into a world they are not equipped to navigate, regardless of their technical skills or AI fluency.

Environmental literacy is not a value judgment. It is a job requirement for anyone making decisions that will still have consequences in twenty years.

This is why Unity Environmental University exists. Not to advocate for a political position but to produce people who understand the systems they operate in, who can read the evidence, weigh the tradeoffs, and make decisions grounded in reality rather than ideology. That is what we are here to produce.

The 21st Century Exposes Everything

The reason this argument is more urgent now than at any previous moment is simple. The 21st century has stripped away every excuse for not asking the fundamental questions.

1. Artificial intelligence is doing to knowledge work what industrialization did to physical labor.

2. The jobs that looked permanent are evaporating faster than curricula can track them.

3. Skills that took years to develop are becoming obsolete before the diploma is framed.

4. The credentials that promised a middle-class life are arriving with diminishing returns.

Stefan Bauschard made a version of this argument recently, drawing a sharp and necessary contrast between the military’s willingness to rebuild itself for AI and higher education’s tendency to form committees. He is right that the urgency gap is real and damning. The Pentagon did not spend three years studying whether AI was relevant. It integrated AI into operations, restructured command hierarchies, and made hard decisions about what to keep and what to discard, all while the war was being fought. No faculty senate was convened. No position paper was commissioned.

But I want to go one level deeper than operational reform. The military rebuilt itself because its mission was clear and its adversaries forced accountability. When the battlefield changes and you do not adapt, you lose soldiers. The consequences are immediate and visible.

Higher education has been able to avoid that forcing function because the consequences of its failure are diffuse, delayed, and historically generational.

1. When we send graduates into a world they are unprepared for, no one calls it a casualty.

2. When civic participation declines because people cannot evaluate evidence or engage in reasoned disagreement, we call it polarization, not institutional failure.

The accountability is coming. The only question is whether we lead the reckoning or get consumed by it. And here is the dimension that nobody in this conversation is addressing directly enough. In 2026, with AI generating persuasion at an industrial scale, a person who cannot think critically is not just a weaker citizen.

They are actively exploitable in ways that were not possible ten years ago. The same technology that can accelerate learning, extend access, and augment human judgment can also manufacture consent, simulate expertise, and flood every information channel with content designed to bypass rather than engage critical thought. The connection between educational purpose and democratic resilience in the AI era is not abstract. It is the most concrete thing on the table.

The 21st century does not give you credit for good intentions. It asks only what you built and whether it worked.

Why Governments & Industry Need This Argument to Win

Strong, independent, purpose-driven education systems are in the direct interest of government and industry. Not as a matter of charity or social responsibility. As a matter of strategic survival.

Governments need citizens who can think. Not just voters who can be mobilized but people who can evaluate competing claims, distinguish evidence from noise, hold institutions accountable, and participate in the kind of sustained civic deliberation that democracy requires. When that capacity degrades, government becomes more expensive, more coercive, and less effective. The social contract does not hold without the human infrastructure to sustain it.

Industry needs workers who can adapt. The humans who will be genuinely valuable in an AI-augmented economy are the ones whose education gave them something AI cannot replicate, at least not yet. Contextual wisdom. Ethical reasoning. Cultural competence. The ability to ask the right question before attempting to answer it. Those capacities are not developed in twelve-week corporate training programs. They are the product of sustained, rigorous, purposeful education by institutions that are not optimizing for quarterly enrollment numbers.

And both need a stable operating environment, which brings us back to the planetary boundaries. A supply chain that depends on predictable weather, reliable water, and functioning ecosystems is not an environmental concern. It is a business continuity concern. Industry leaders who are serious about their fifty-year horizon already understand this. The ones still treating it as a regulatory nuisance are taking on risks they have not priced.

Higher education is not the solution to all of that. But it is the one institution whose entire purpose is preparation. If we gut it, commodify it, or reduce it to a credential-delivery mechanism optimized for speed and volume, we lose the only system we have that can help human beings adapt to genuinely novel circumstances across multiple domains at once.

What Evolution Actually Looks Like

I said higher education is complicit in its own crisis, and I meant it. So let me be equally direct about what accountability requires from us. It does not mean becoming more like businesses. It means becoming more honest about what we are and more disciplined about delivering on it.

At Unity, we cut tuition in half. Not because it was comfortable, but because access is not a value you can hold while charging prices that exclude the people you claim to serve. We became modality agnostic, not because residential education is inferior but because the students who most need us do not have the luxury of living on a campus for four years. We are building modular credentials. We are embedding AI into our institutional infrastructure as a genuine operating architecture, not as a press release. And we are doing all of this because our mission demands it, and we cannot wait for the world to catch up.

That is the difference between institutional evolution, which means something, and institutional reform that is theater. Every university president looking at declining enrollment and thinking about brand repositioning should ask a harder question first. What would you do differently if you genuinely believed your graduates were going to inherit a world that needs them to be capable, adaptable, ethical, and environmentally literate people? Not just employed people. Capable people. The answer to that question is the strategy. Everything else is noise.

What I Am Asking For

1. For University Leadership: Stop letting the wrong people define the terms of this debate. When someone says higher education needs to run more like a business, the correct response is not a defensive explanation of academic values. It is a clear, confident articulation of what education actually produces and why no business model replicates it. Then go do that thing. Visibly. With accountability attached. The institutions that survive the next decade will be the ones that led with clarity of purpose, not the ones that survived through enrollment marketing.

2. For Industry Leaders: The most important investment you are not making is in the independent educational institutions that produce the kind of judgment your own training programs cannot. You cannot hire adaptability. You can only hire people who were given the conditions to develop it. Fund those conditions. Not by building corporate universities that teach your own tools, but by investing in institutions that produce human beings capable of operating across contexts you cannot yet anticipate, and not necessarily the ones with the highest denial rates.

3. For Policymakers: The G.I. Bill passed quickly because the crisis was visible and the political cost of inaction was existential. The crisis of educational purpose is slower and less photogenic. But the cost of continued inaction compounds. Restore public investment in higher education as a public good, not as a consumer subsidy. Create a non-partisan national standard and fund it for every citizen. The distinction matters enormously. A consumer subsidy optimizes for individual transactions. A public good investment optimizes for the health of the system over time. We need the second one.

4. For Everyone: The person who cannot think critically in 2026 is not just underprepared for the labor market. They are a vulnerability in the democratic system at the exact moment that system faces its most sophisticated threat. That is not a reason for alarm. It is a reason for urgency. And urgency is something education, industry, defense, and government all share, whether they have admitted it yet or not.

The Lens

Education is not what you do before you enter the world. It is what makes it possible to live in it well.

When that lens is ground correctly, industry sees a workforce capable of more than execution. Governments see citizens capable of more than compliance. Defense draws from a population that understands what it is defending and why. And the society that emerges from that clarity is one that can face genuinely novel challenges without dissolving into fear or fracture.

When the lens is cloudy, everything else blurs. Industry makes short-term decisions that undermine its long-term interests. Governments cannot generate the civic trust they need to function. Defense wins battles abroad while losing the social coherence at home that makes those victories mean anything.

We did not build higher education to make money. We built it to make citizens. To make thinkers & doers. To make people who could look at a complex, rapidly changing world and engage it with intelligence, integrity, and purpose.

That mission has never been more urgent. And it has rarely been more endangered.

Education is not the “End unto itself.” It is the lens through which a better tomorrow becomes possible. Governments and industry ignore that at their own peril.

The institutions willing to be honest about all of this, honest about the purpose, honest about the failure, and honest about what genuine evolution requires, those are the ones building something worth the effort.

I am staking my career on that being true. I hope I am not alone.

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