Will the day soon come when Shanghai University buys Princeton, an online Bill Gates University (B.G.U.) boasts six Rhodes Scholars, and Harvard and Yale, in an effort to stem dwindling enrollment and shrinking endowments, merge?
On a Web site of the Manhattan Institute called Minding the Campus, Jane S. Shaw has written an essay imagining just such a turn of events. Ms. Shaw, the president of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, which has a litany of complaints about the current quality of American universities, also foresees the actress Jodie Foster in the White House and the now-grown daughter of Amy Chua, of “Tiger Mother” fame, as president of the new Harvard-Yale.
The essay opens on May 28, 2020, but lest it be dismissed as science fiction, consider that some of the higher-education trends Ms. Shaw highlights — including the pressures on institutions to spend-down dwindling endowments, as well to offer three-year degrees — are hardly far-fetched.
You can read the full article, complete with a fictional timeline, here.
And if you’d like to start a discussion on The Choice about its prophecies and broader message, you can use this box to post a comment. (I note that the very real work of my colleague Ron Lieber, The Times’s Your Money columnist, makes a cameo in the essay as well.)
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