2026 Higher Education Fault Lines

Author’s Note on 2026 Fault LInes Series

Each year brings its share of predictions about higher education. New tools. New threats. New promises. Most of them focus on what is arriving next.

The next several blog posts take a different approach.  Together, they are an expansion of my 2026 “Preview” noted in my “Field Notes” Newsletter.  (For links to each one, can be found at the bottom of this post).

Rather than offering predictions, I’m naming fault lines, areas where pressure has been building quietly, often beneath the surface, and where 2026 is likely to make that pressure increasingly visible. These are not sudden disruptions. They are second-order changes, emerging from forces already in motion, including demographic realities, financial strain, workforce fatigue, public skepticism, and a credential landscape that has grown more crowded and confusing by the year.
(And yes, I am enjoying the rare opportunity to apply my extensive academic training and experience in earth science, including years of teaching physical geology, to a Field Notes edition.)

Fault lines do not always announce themselves dramatically. Sometimes they produce only tremors, small movements that are easy to dismiss or rationalize away. Other times, pressure accumulates until movement becomes impossible to ignore. In a given year, that can mean anything from subtle shifts to a full-on earthquake, followed by aftershocks that continue reshaping the terrain long after the initial rupture. To be clear, I am not suggesting there will be six major earthquakes in higher education this year. Rather, these are six places where stress is concentrated, where movement is becoming more likely, and where even a single major event could produce wide-reaching effects.

I’m not calling these predictions because very little here is speculative. In most cases, the signals have been present for years. What changes in 2026 is not that these dynamics suddenly appear, but that the space to ignore them narrows. In some cases, it is not that the cracks were invisible before, but that institutions still had room to look away. That room is shrinking. Conditions that could once be managed quietly become harder to contain. Workarounds become constraints. Assumptions that once held begin to crack, and in some cases, require a change in direction rather than another adjustment at the margins.

A brief word on what’s not listed explicitly.

Artificial intelligence will almost certainly continue to dominate headlines in 2026. Its influence on teaching, learning, assessment, and institutional work is undeniable. But AI is not treated here as a standalone fault line. Instead, it functions as an accelerant, intensifying existing pressures around workload, trust, capacity, and legitimacy. In that sense, AI appears everywhere in this outlook, even when it isn’t named.

The same is true for institutional closures and mergers. They will continue. There are others who track those developments closely and do that work well. Their absence here is not a denial of their significance. It reflects a different focus. This edition is less about predicting which institutions will close and more about examining the conditions, including governance choices, workload practices, portfolio decisions, trust dynamics, and capacity constraints, that shape whether those outcomes arrive abruptly and traumatically or through more deliberate, humane processes. In many cases, closures and mergers are not sudden failures but the result of an enrollment clock that has been ticking for years. For some institutions, the runway shortened long ago. Even institutions that make sound decisions in 2026 and beyond may still find themselves facing closure or merger because time, not intent, ultimately determines what options remain. How institutions navigate that reality still matters.

What follows is not a forecast of winners and losers. It is a look at where the ground is shifting, often quietly, and what those shifts demand of institutions that want to remain credible, sustainable, and worth trusting in the years ahead. In that sense, this edition builds directly on themes that ran through Field Notes in 2025, particularly around trust, capacity, and the limits of optimism untethered from reality.

My approach here is influenced by the scenario-based work of Bryan Alexander, though this is not a futurist exercise in the strict sense. Rather than naming possible futures, I am focusing on pressures already shaping the present and asking what 2026 is likely to make harder to ignore.

What matters next will not be how loudly institutions talk about change, but how honestly they confront it.