In the US, we have described our higher education system as “the best” for at least 100 years. So it’s all the more important to be humble and reflective about the worrisome trendlines taking shape. Today, a majority of American adults say in surveys that college is “not worth it”.  And a major international survey, the 2024 Human Progress Report, tells us that US consumers are more pessimistic about higher education today than most other countries surveyed.

How did this happen? We obviously borrowed the four-year degree model from Europe, where it had thrived for several centuries, and once it took hold here, Americans came to believe that it was, in the early days, a ticket to erudition, social acceptability and, by the 20th century, a sure-fire path to “a good job”.

One of my own direct ancestors was one of the first graduates of the first American university, Harvard University, in 1673. John Wise used his degree to raise his status from poor son of an indentured servant to eminent minister and spokesman for the emerging democracy. That’s the stuff the American Dream is founded upon.

But 350 years of lore is like a force field protecting the four-year degree from a needed redesign. We face a reckoning not only because the Trump administration is waging war on elite universities but also because enrolment and birth rate declines are forcing colleges to be more things to more people.  

����Vlog

College enrolment , reportedly as rising costs made a four-year degree less affordable and as more learners, rightly or wrongly, began to doubt its relevance to the future of work. Enrolment is recovering a little now, but largely because colleges are beginning to adapt their models.

Elite colleges don’t need to change: their applications, partly fuelled by international interest, are higher than ever. But everyone else does. And I see two ways that non-elite colleges are meeting the moment by responding to changing demands from consumers and employers for shorter-form, “just-in-time” learning and training. 

����Vlog

First, community colleges are building out their certificate programmes and linking them to financial aid. Among the innovations, 100 community colleges are piloting a fast-track version of college to get started on a career, “” – which can also stack to degrees.

Second, , taking a cue from the success of European programmes. In fact, the past few years have seen a policy tourism boom as American policymakers and non-profits have visited Switzerland and Germany to learn how to resurrect the original earn-and-learn model back home. , held back by a lack of funding for the education credits and employers’ impatience.

These strategies require closer links to employers, who have been hard to pin down in large numbers. But learners’ demands for career experience while still in college are a response to employers’ stipulations that entry-level applicants should have two or three years of experience – particularly as AI has helped students sharpen their résumés to the point that they all look the same; work experience is a differentiator.

I predict that the next 10 years in higher education globally will see an effort to bring curriculum development into line with work-based opportunities and assessment into closer lockstep with employers’ mastery requirements. The main mechanism for this currently is industry certifications, which fields like cybersecurity and healthcare are starting to bake certifications into their courses. But these only exist for job roles where employers can agree on the necessary qualifications.

����Vlog

Harvard was founded in 1655 because the Puritans, newly arrived in Massachusetts, were “dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust”. This was the first American talent pipeline challenge.

The employers were quite involved in setting entry requirements to guide the nascent college, ensuring that my 17-year-old forefather could translate and interpret the great works for his flock, in a period when the printing press was just arriving in America. , “When any Scholler is able to read and understand Tully, Virgil or any such ordinary Classicall Authors, and can readily make and speake or write true Latin…and is Competently grounded in the Greeke Language…hee shall be capable of his admission into the Colledge.”

In the pre-industrial era, the jobs that students went to college to train for were well aligned with a liberal arts education. But technology has scrambled degree requirements now, and the funding and curricular models haven’t kept up. In the US, it is difficult for a student to get government grants or loans unless they are pursuing a traditional degree programme. As a result, only 38 per cent of adults have a four-year degree, even though we tell families their children need that credential to get “a good job”.

I love the higher education system that set my own family up for 350 years of success, and I love how the degree model allows us to explore the life of the mind. But we all need to recognise that higher education needs to include more pathways to financial freedom.

����Vlog

Kathleen deLaski is founder and board chair of the . She is author of Who Needs College Anymore?: Imagining a Future Where Degrees Won’t Matter (Harvard Education Press, 2025).