Take Me Home

If you’ve been watching the World Cup, you’ve probably had “Take Me Hoooooome, Country Rooooooads” stuck in your head this week. I know I have. In our house it’s inescapable, because my youngest watches every match, every highlight, and every minute of analysis he can find.

Match after match, players and fans have stayed in the stadium long after the final whistle, arms around each other, singing about “the place I belong.” Nobody planned it. It just happened, which is probably why it works.

And it’s been something to watch people from every corner of the world come here. They’ve filled our stadiums and wandered our cities. They’ve stood in line for ranch dressing and drunk all the beer in Boston. They’ve celebrated in American towns many Americans have never visited themselves. And over and over, in video after video, they say some version of the same thing: this isn’t the America I expected. This is not what I see on the news.

Then, as I took my nightly scroll, my phone showed me a different kind of anthem from “the locals.”

LinkedIn decided I needed to see yet another post from another retired higher ed leader telling the system that they’re doing it all wrong, one that then listed ten universities making budget cuts, one after another, like a roll call. Missed enrollment targets. Structural deficits. Restructuring. Realignment. You know the hymn.

The comments were a buffet. One person said the real problem was AI. Another said it was the neoliberal takeover of the academy. Another blamed the NCAA. Another said everything wrong with higher education comes from calling it a marketplace in the first place. A sitting college president replied that we were already past the moment to act. Someone added that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Someone else dropped in, without a source, that a college closes every week in America.

Everyone agreed the patient was dying. No two people agreed on the disease.

Then, buried in the thread, someone asked the author a simple, sincere question: what are your ideas? And to his credit, he gave an honest answer. It’s hard to say, he wrote, because so much of it is context-specific. Similar headwinds don’t always require the same solutions.

Hold onto that. We’ll come back to it.

So. I don’t disagree with most of the observations in that post. Higher education really is facing enormous challenges. It’s part of why I started writing this Substack. There will simply be fewer traditional college-aged students over the next decade. Some colleges will close. Some will merge. Some will get smaller. Those are real, painful realities.

But I read those posts differently than I would have a year ago, because in a few weeks I will drop off two freshmen at two different colleges. When a stranger on the internet announces that higher education is dying, I’m not reading an industry take. I’m reading about the places where I’m about to leave my sons.

I think that’s the quiet life-quake happening for so many families around me. Higher education stopped being a sector and started showing up in our mailboxes, our feeds, and our kids’ heads.

And every one of these posts begins from the same assumption: that someone wasn’t paying attention. If only presidents would wake up. If only admissions offices would innovate. I don’t understand how higher education leaders can be cast as the smartest and the most oblivious people in the room at the same time. I don’t think higher ed has been asleep. I think those of us who had no reason to pay attention were, and now that we’ve caught up, we’re calling our own surprise a crisis.

The cliff wasn’t the surprise. Living through it is.

Go back through this Substack and you’ll find my share of look-at-all-the-problems pieces too. But lately I’ve wondered if we’ve gotten a little addicted to stories of decline. The “who even gets in anymore” conversation at cocktail parties and swim meets is getting tired, and I say that as someone who has contributed to it at both.

What if this isn’t collapse? What if it’s recalibration? Because recalibration has a funny way of looking like failure while you’re living through it.

Higher education has spent decades in a season of more. More campuses, more majors, more residence halls, more students. Maybe this season asks a different question. Not how do we get bigger, but who do we serve best, and what are we uniquely good at? Not every institution should try to be everything to everyone. That’s not shrinking. That’s becoming clearer.

The crisis fits in a post. The answer doesn’t fit in a comment.

The answer is different at every single school. It depends on who they serve, where they sit, and what they’re uniquely good at. They’re paying attention. Promise.

Which brings me back to the World Cup. Thousands of people came to America expecting one story and found another. Not a perfect country. Far from it. But we aren’t one thing. We’re a place made up of people, the same way our colleges are, full of neighbors who welcomed them and moments no headline could have prepared them for.

That’s roughly how I feel about the colleges we’re all sending our kids to. I’ve read the think pieces. I know the sector’s problems by heart; I spent many years fundraising inside it. And I’m still handing these places my children, because I’ve stood on those campuses and met the people building what comes next, and there is more there than the headlines have room for.

Belonging isn’t believing a place, an institution, or a person has no flaws. It’s believing there’s enough worth loving that the next chapter is still worth writing.

Country roads are about to lead my sons to places that they will call home for the next handful of years, and maybe forever in their nostalgic hearts. What an abundance of riches we have here in America. Maybe we just needed other people to tell us to see it for ourselves.