And much of it works. Students who once disappeared between offices can now be identified. Patterns once hidden in spreadsheets can be detected in real time. Advisers can intervene earlier. Institutions can see where students stall, where inequities emerge, and where bureaucracies fail the very people they were designed to serve. But our enthusiasm for building has allowed us to avoid a more fundamental question: What, exactly, are we building toward?
It is an old question. On the plain of Shinar, the builders of Babel confronted uncertainty with ingenuity. They made bricks, developed a common project, and constructed something so ambitious that its top was imagined to reach the heavens. Their failure was not that they built, nor even that they built together. It was that the tower gradually became the purpose. They became consumed with what they could construct and lost sight of where they were supposed to go.
Higher education may be approaching its own plain of Shinar. Enrollment uncertainty, demographic decline, financial pressure, political polarization, declining public confidence, and rapidly changing workforce demands have made institutional anxiety understandable. And, like the builders of Babel, universities have responded to uncertainty by building: predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, customer relationship management systems, early-alert platforms, degree maps, career technologies, financial-wellness applications, and student-engagement systems.
Individually, these tools can do enormous good. Collectively, however, they are beginning to do something more consequential: They are creating a common language for what student success means. That should concern us.
For much of American higher education’s history, institutions distinguished themselves by the educational philosophies they defended. Liberal arts colleges emphasized judgment, character, and citizenship. Research universities organized themselves around discovery and the creation of knowledge. Land-grant universities joined learning to public service and practical innovation. Community colleges democratized educational opportunity and economic mobility. Historically Black Colleges and Universities made education an instrument of individual possibility and collective advancement. These institutions did not merely offer different programs. They offered different answers to a deeper question: What is education for?
That philosophical diversity gave American higher education much of its vitality. Institutions competed over ideas before they competed over metrics. Today, something curious is happening. Institutions with radically different histories and missions increasingly purchase the same technologies, employ the same predictive models, attend the same conferences, hear the same vendor presentations, monitor the same indicators, and populate governing-board dashboards with remarkably similar measures of success. Institutions that once distinguished themselves by what they believed increasingly distinguish themselves by what they buy.
