Alena Selezneva
A university president, when asked about his job, described it to an interested person who then responded, “Oh, you’re an edge species! You go back and forth between the forest and the meadow, and you interact with the species in both.”
I’m sure every president will want to use that metaphor and possibly retire the old saw (“I’m like the mayor of a small town” or major city, depending on the institution), especially if they’re like me and grasping for useful metaphors without the benefit of deep disciplinary understanding.
But there’s another definition, courtesy of my obnoxious search engine AI friend: “EDGE species, or Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered species, are those that are both highly unique in their evolutionary history and are facing a high risk of extinction. These species are identified by their high EDGE scores, which combine measures of their evolutionary distinctiveness (how much unique evolutionary history they represent) and their global endangerment status (how close they are to extinction).”
Some high-EDGE-scoring institutions, like pandas and elephants, will be kept safe by their crimson flag–waving alumni and their bulldog investment strategies. Others, even more specialized are, depending on their niche, rich in applicants or are going the way of the passenger pigeon.
These days, it’s the herds of bison-like institutions that for ages grazed happily without natural predators (before the ravaging white men came West), the regional publics whose appeal is dwindling and the small privates that specialize in nothing (and which have been reliant on the feds to provide their needier students), that are in the most danger.
Higher ed has never worked as a system. At best, it is an ecosystem. We have vastly different populations of institutions—your Ivies, your flagships, your regional universities, your community colleges, your large and small privates—each occupying its own niche. They don’t play well together and compete for the same limited resource: students. In fact, the internecine ways higher ed vies for students makes the redness in tooth and claw of nature seem kinda benign.
The real problem we’re facing, as I see it, after the explosion of access to higher ed following WWII that made the U.S. the envy of every nation with aspirations to an educated citizenry, is what happens when competition intensifies as resources become scarce.
This is the thing no one wants to talk about. Not presidents, not faculty, not alumni, not boards. Bear with me while I think this through with only the most rudimentary grasp of ecology: We’ve exceeded the carrying capacity.
In 1910, naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton estimated the number of bison roaming the plains to be about 60 million when Columbus began his ravaging of this New World. We wiped out 60 million buffalo! is a pretty good rallying cry.
We now know it was more like 30 million, which is still a lot of dead critters. But the reason we know it was half the original estimate is because once you look closely, it’s clear there was not space and sustenance enough for that many individuals to thrive. Carrying capacity is the maximum number of individuals of any particular species that can be accommodated by a habitat on a sustainable basis. The plains didn’t have enough goodies to accommodate 60 million bison.
Why does that matter for higher ed? When resources (students, money) become limited, competition increases. And increased competition creates that old Darwinian selection pressure: Environmental factors determine which populations thrive and which face extinction. In higher ed, what we’re seeing is that institutions with the most challenges competing for students and funding are experiencing the squeeze. The result: They must either evolve rapidly or perish.
Exceeding carrying capacity is called an “overshoot,” which can lead to a “die-off.” That is about as delightful as it sounds. So, forgive my grasping for metaphor as I pose a question: Do we have too many institutions for the carrying capacity of higher ed’s current landscape?
At this point, most of us can recite the litany of causes creating the problems that results in the simple fact that there aren’t enough (willing) students to pay tuition to fill the echoing classrooms on most campuses. We’re already seeing the selection pressure play out in the closures of small private colleges, the shuttering of branch campuses of state systems and the shrinkage of programs and majors in ways that faculty and others find unacceptable. You can’t be a real university without a physics/philosophy/piano major!
But here’s where the ecological analogy gets interesting: The most rapid evolutionary change happens in populations facing the greatest competitive pressure. The institutions struggling most for students and funding are exactly where we should expect to see either dramatic innovation or institutional death.
The colleges and universities most likely to survive may be those where faculty and administrators can avoid the circular firing squad of the blame game and work together to adapt—not to the world they wish existed, but to the one that’s actually sending them signals. That means paying attention to what prospective students are actually choosing, what employers are actually hiring for and what communities are actually willing to support.
The EDGE species that survive know how to read their environment. The question is whether higher ed’s struggling institutions can learn to do the same before selection pressure makes the choice for them.
