Four futures for higher education after neoliberalism

Posted on July 27, 2021 by Bryan Alexander

How might higher education change if society moves beyond the neoliberal order?

Scholar Chris Newfield recently published a fine set of scenarios for future colleges and universities. It is very much worth your time to explore. Here I’ll set the stage and sketch it out as an introduction.

Newfield is the great scholar of how American states have defunded public higher ed. In a series of books he has investigated the politics and economics in great detail: Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class, and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. He spoke on the topic brilliantly with the Future Trends Forum in 2017:

He uses this research to build out a futures vision in a recent Radical Philosophy article.

“Universities after neoliberalism: A tale of four futures” starts with a classic four-scenario creation process. To explain: one way to generate a scenario is to assume one or several change drivers are at work, then extrapolate a future vision based on their taking…