Few appreciate how fundamentally different the fiscal future of colleges and universities in the United States will become. The 2017 tax law changes will increase pressures on higher education to deliver better outcomes for students and families, while simultaneously reducing available federal funds, families’ abilities to leverage rising home values to finance higher education, and state support for higher education due to the costs of underfunded pension programs and continued rising health care costs. Colleges and universities continue to accelerate their expenditures for enhanced facilities, athletic programs, and student affairs support programs to aid in the retention of lesser prepared, less healthy, and increasingly mental health-challenged students.
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
