The Cockroach Problem
On institutional survival, structural change, and the things we mistake for permanence.
About two years ago, I participated in a webinar with independent college counselors who were concerned about the financial stability of colleges and universities. Understandably, they were wrestling with whether they should advise students toward institutions that might not be around long enough to see them graduate. It's a reasonable concern, particularly given the very real consequences of institutional closures for students and families who have invested their time, money, and aspirations in a college education.
I had a rather unconventional response.
I compared colleges and universities to cockroaches.
Yes. Cockroaches.
To be fair, I warned my fellow panelists during our preparation that I might actually say this out loud. And when the opportunity presented itself, I did.
My point was that institutions have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to adapt, whether through reorganizations, consolidations, program closures, new revenue strategies, or any number of compromises that allow them to remain standing. That's not to suggest that individual colleges and universities don't close, or that those closures aren't devastating for the students, employees, and communities affected. But as a sector, higher education has demonstrated a remarkable ability to persist, even when the conditions surrounding it change dramatically.
I've always found that institutional resilience fascinating. Lately, though, I've been reconsidering my own cockroach analogy, particularly as I've watched federal policy developments challenge some of the financial assumptions on which colleges and universities have long operated.
The Buttons We Didn't Know Existed
Over the past couple of years, the federal administration has proposed and enacted changes affecting higher education funding in ways that have required institutions to reconsider longstanding financial arrangements. Some proposals became law, others were blocked in court, and still others were revised or abandoned. But what has stayed with me isn't simply the magnitude of the proposed changes. It's the realization that some of the most consequential pressure points within our institutional operating models are things we may not have fully appreciated as vulnerabilities.
One particular episode captured my attention: the attempt to dramatically reduce federal reimbursement for the indirect costs of university research.
The overhead.
We're talking about facilities and administrative expenses—the infrastructure, utilities, compliance systems, and other shared resources that make research possible in the first place. These aren't necessarily the things that come to mind when most people imagine federal research funding, but they are fundamental to the operation of a research university.
I remember thinking, Who thinks of this shit?
Who looks at a university's research enterprise and identifies the financial arrangements supporting its laboratories as a point of intervention? The proposed restrictions encountered successful legal challenges, including the attempt to impose a uniform 15% cap on National Institutes of Health indirect-cost reimbursement. But the episode stayed with me because it revealed how much of our institutional operating model depends on financial arrangements that we may have come to regard as relatively stable.
And even when proposed changes don't ultimately take effect, the uncertainty surrounding them can be consequential. Institutions still have to understand their exposure, consider contingency plans, and make decisions about resources and priorities while the outcome remains unresolved.
Frankly, the repeated cycle of announcements, proposals, legal challenges, and reversals reminded me of an irritating sibling on a long car ride. You know the one who holds a finger approximately one centimeter from your face and repeatedly announces, "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you," while you slowly lose your mind.
Technically, they're right. But the experience is still maddening.
There were moments when federal policy uncertainty felt a little like that. Consider the proposed reduction to the maximum Pell Grant, which required institutions to contemplate what a substantial decrease in federal grant assistance could mean for students, affordability, and enrollment. Ultimately, the proposed reduction was rejected and the maximum award preserved. That was certainly a relief, but it didn't erase the work of understanding what such a change might have meant.
Meanwhile, other changes to federal student aid did become law, including significant changes to graduate and parent borrowing. The distinction matters because not every threatened change became reality, but neither did every threat disappear. Some of the buttons were tested and didn't work. Others did.
What fascinates me is that the experience revealed just how many different points of vulnerability exist within an institutional operating model that, from the outside, can appear remarkably durable.
Survival Isn't the Same as Stability
I suspect the next twenty years will bring changes to the underlying structures of higher education that are more consequential than many of us currently appreciate. And I don't mean simply which colleges will close, merge, or remain open. I'm thinking about the organizational bones of our institutions: the ways we recruit and enroll students, the structures through which we deliver education, the divisions of labor we've spent decades building, and the financial assumptions supporting our research, instruction, and student services.
We spend enormous amounts of energy improving the performance of existing structures, often with good reason. In enrollment management, for example, we've become increasingly sophisticated in our ability to model student behavior, manage recruitment funnels, optimize financial aid, and measure institutional performance. These capabilities matter, and I've spent much of my career helping develop them. But I wonder whether we're becoming exceptionally good at managing systems whose underlying assumptions are beginning to shift.
There's an uncomfortable possibility here: institutional resilience may actually make it harder for us to recognize when fundamental change is necessary. An organization that has survived one disruption after another can become understandably confident in its ability to survive the next one. That confidence may be justified, but it may also obscure the possibility that survival will eventually require becoming something substantially different.
I don't have a neat prediction about what the university of 2046 will look like, and I'm not convinced anyone does. Nor am I suggesting that every policy proposal represents an existential threat. Universities have navigated shifting public priorities, political pressures, and financial uncertainty for generations, and the fact that some of these recent proposals were successfully challenged is itself evidence of institutional resilience.
But I'm increasingly interested in the difference between surviving a disruption and understanding what that disruption reveals.
The attempted changes to research overhead reimbursement didn't have to take effect to make me think differently about how universities are financed. The proposed Pell reduction didn't have to become law to remind us how consequential federal policy decisions can be for students and institutions. And the changes that did become law demonstrate that some of our longstanding assumptions about higher education finance are already being rewritten.
Which brings me back to the cockroaches.
I still think higher education institutions are remarkably resilient creatures. I'm just no longer certain that the ones emerging from the next nuclear winter will look much like the ones that entered it.
And perhaps that's the conversation we should be having.
