Since the nineteenth century, pundits have predicted, at best, an ambivalence toward the future of liberal education (Koch 1977) and, at worst, the doom of liberal education and liberal arts colleges in the United States (Jones, 2016). Although each decade has brought with it new predictions for the downfall of liberal arts colleges, the extinction has yet to occur. At each step of the way, the evolution of liberal education has outpaced the gloomy predictions.
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
