Opinion | The End of College as We Know It

Oct. 4, 2026 2:52 pm ET

What’s the matter with universities? Syracuse missed its 2026 enrollment target and may run a $30 million deficit. Minnesota is cutting its budget by $225 million over two years. Tulsa is slashing tuition by more than half. Colleges enroll 4.2% fewer undergraduates than last year. Cornell, Yale, Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis put out plans—not radical enough, if you ask me—to reimagine the university. Wossamotta U?

Colleges are known for left-leaning professors, speech suppression, bizarre courses—Occidental College taught “The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie”—and easy grading more than critical thinking, judgment and problem solving. It’s easy to blame artificial intelligence, but problems run deeper:

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Andy Kessler is the author of Inside View, a column he writes for The Wall Street Journal on technology and markets and where they intersect with culture. He won the 2019 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary. He is the author of several books including Wall Street Meat and Eat People. He used to design chips at Bell Labs before working on Wall Street for PaineWebber and Morgan Stanley and then as a founder of the hedge fund Velocity Capital.