Simon & Schuster
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Published in March 2025
Reading Abundance through my narrow, provincial higher ed filter is kind of brain-breaking. How to apply the ideas of Abundance to an industry defined by scarcity?
Not that you need a list of reasons not to let your babies grow up to be academics. I’ll give you one anyway:
- Demographic cliff
- Public defunding
- Cost disease
- Loss of public faith
- Professional student athletes
- Tuition-dependent institution closures
- Federal government attacks
- New graduate underemployment
- AI angst
- Adjunctification
- Student mental health crisis
- Deferred maintenance
- OPMs
To riff on Churchill’s pronouncement about democracy: A career in higher education is the worst one could choose, except for all the others.
And then along comes a book like Abundance that has you nodding at every page. Yes, we liberals should prioritize building (housing, high-speed trains, the electrical grid) even when it means loosening our grip on process and even, at times, on equity.
But when you apply the Abundance framework to higher ed, that’s where things get dicey. If anything, we seem to be too abundant in our colleges and universities. Higher education is the inverse of the housing problem, as our supply increasingly outpaces demand. In fact, higher education’s solution to our demand problem has been to increase supply. This is especially true for master’s degrees, which have grown by nearly 14,000 new programs (69 percent) since 2005.
If new master’s degrees are not the answer to the endless scarcities that constrain every aspect of higher education, where might the path to abundance lie?
Klein and Thompson leave higher education out of their Abundance story, which is a shame. Surely, an abundant society is an educated one. If they had addressed what colleges and universities might do to flip the scarcity/abundance script, they might have emphasized:
- Credentials over degrees
- Portable and stackable certificates
- Low-cost, scaled online degrees
- Competency-based credentialing
- Prior learning assessment
- Robust and open transfer pathways
- Apprenticeships and employer-embedded pathways
- Low-cost/high-quality open education resources
- Consortium (multi-institutional) credentialing and degrees
- Built-in wraparound learner support (childcare, transit, food)
All these ideas would contribute to creating an abundance agenda for learners. However, I find it challenging to understand how implementing them at existing colleges and universities would enhance their abundance. Each of these proposals would require funding for implementation and would likely have a long payback period to justify the investment.
To take the idea I know (and love) best—low-cost, scaled online degrees—we know very well how to build these programs. Quality at scale is possible. However, building a high-quality scaled degree is enormously expensive, and the costs are heavily front-loaded. Not to mention the huge investments in marketing and lead nurturing required to get to scale. Possible, but an expensive and multiyear commitment.
Abundance, like all good books, raises more questions than it answers. It would serve as an excellent foundation for campus discussions, beginning with the question of how the book’s ideas can be applied to address the ongoing scarcity in our higher education ecosystem.
What are you reading?
