With 2025 nearly upon us, here are five things I expect to happen – or perhaps not happen – in education and higher education next year.
The College Closure Apocalypse Will Not Arrive. Again.
It seems no one noticed that it’s now been a decade since the former Harvard professor Clayton Christensen made front page news by declaring that half of all colleges would close within ten years. Later, he said it would be more like nine years. That never happened, and still is not happening. In fact, there’s very little evidence to support that it’s even forthcoming.
Instead, 2025 will be like each of the ten or eleven years before it – some schools will close. They will be tiny art schools or affiliated with churches that can no longer cover the costs. Some schools will merge to save money or expand their reach. Some will be caught in scandals or mismanagement – the usual stuff that unravels things.
In other words, even though some pretty smart people keep saying it’s coming, do not bet on any major recalibrations in the higher education marketplace in 2025.
Higher Education Won’t Face a Major Enrollment Squeeze.
This prediction is related to the first one in that part of the reason we should not expect significant school closures, is that colleges and universities won’t be squeezed by declining enrollments – at least not as heavily as predicted.
One reason most schools won’t be harshly squeezed on their enrollments this coming year is that they’re getting better at keeping, and graduating, the students they already have. According to recent data from the National Clearinghouse, “The national six-year completion rate for the fall 2018 cohort was 61.1 percent, the highest six-year completion rate of the cohorts tracked in this report. This year’s six-year completion rate grew over the last cohort (+0.5 pp) thanks to a decrease in students stopping out (-0.4 pp; 30.2%).”
At the same time, enrollments in community colleges, the front door to college for millions of students, are up – rebounding since the massive declines forced by the pandemic.
But also, the most recent predictions for demographic declines of high school graduates have been routinely weakened and the most recent predictions call for a national drop of traditional freshmen-age potential enrollees of 13%. Over 15 years. Or about .86% per year. That may squeeze some schools, but probably not enough and not soon enough to show system-wide impact next year.
The AI Revolution is On Hold.
Too much has been made of generative AI in education. And the expectations of a transcendent moment will remain delayed in 2025, perhaps indefinitely.
For students, generative AI is cool. But in education it’s a one trick pony. It’s a good trick. But it’s just one. And that trick is often unreliable if not flatly incorrect. Raise that by the increasing possibility of being caught and disciplined for using AI to bypass or shortcut school assignments, and generative AI use among students will likely stagnate.
For educators, many will continue to struggle with, and question, its realistic uses in actual classrooms. As an example, a recent survey found that just “26% of teachers and 47% of district administrators said AI will be useful in the classroom within the next two years.” When only one in four teachers and less than half of administrators expect AI to be even “useful” in their classrooms over the next two years, don’t expect a thunderclap of AI use next year.
For-Profit Schools Will Rebound.
Due mostly to a change in the Presidency, for-profit schools will start a renaissance next year. Policies that aimed to tie tuition payments and federal loans to actual job outcomes, for example, are likely to be rolled back. It will become harder to discharge student loans, even in cases of demonstrated fraud, as another example. Policy reversals such as these will lure investors back to the for-profit game, and their marketing efforts, and linked enrollments and profits, will return.
This won’t be much of a turn-around, however, since it has been underreported that enrollments at for-profit schools had already shown growth before the election. Even so, expect the trend to accelerate in 2025.
High School Students Will Be Even Less Prepared for College.
It seems that forever, college professors and administrators have complained that incoming students cannot write, or critically examine written material, or use other foundational skills for living and learning – that high schools are not doing enough to prepare students for college work.
In 2024 we saw many complaints that today’s college students cannot read books. They do not have the attention span or persistence to get through more than a couple of pages of text, at most. And that they increasingly feel that any expectation to do so is unfair and/or unnecessary.
In 2025, lack of preparation for rigorous college work will grow more acute as the first class of college freshmen come to campus with three solid years of AI writing crutches. Many will have written exactly no papers on their own throughout their entire time in high school. All they will know how to do is click “summarize,” then ask ChatGPT to reply.
For the colleges that care about rigor or integrity, this will be a burden and drive professors insane, of course. But what may be different in 2025 is that, for the first time, colleges may be able to access data about their new charges’ lack of skills and abilities. AI grading and review programs are getting better and more accessible, providing quantifiable comparisons between peer groups. The colleges that use the reliable AI detection technologies will also have data about what students are – or likely are not – actually writing. As they do, expect the volume of criticism to escalate.
Overall, expect 2025 to look and feel much like 2024 has, especially in K-12 systems. Colleges, especially for-profit colleges, will face more change. But even then, the change will not be new and will probably be limited.