If recent responses to the STEM fad by many academic leaders from liberal arts disciplines—i.e., claiming that admissions offices just aren’t working hard enough to recruit students in the arts and humanities or that STEM should be repackaged as STEAM or STREAM—aren’t effectively addressing what’s actually occurring in higher education today, what should administrators be doing in order to position their programs for better success once today’s STEM bubble bursts? There are five strategies that forward-looking academic leaders ought to adopt.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
