Steven Shulman did something nobody in higher education wanted done. He looked at the actual cash.
Not the endowment. Not the net assets. Not the carefully worded financial statements that boards present to accreditors. He looked at how much liquid money 44 private, mid-size New England colleges actually have — and how long they can keep the lights on at current burn rates.
The answer, for more than a third of them: not long.
His analysis, amplified by Michael Horn, showed that 15 schools already face serious liquidity challenges. Another six are drawing down their endowments at more than double the sustainable rate. And if enrollment drops just 10 percent — which is not a catastrophe, it’s a Tuesday in demographic terms — 21 of the 44 are in trouble.
A parallel study of 27 West Coast schools was even worse.
Here’s what caught our attention: these aren’t the tiny schools everyone expected to close. These are mid-size institutions with brand recognition, athletic programs, alumni networks, and boards full of people who run businesses. They should know how to do this. Most of them can’t.
Because the problem isn’t financial management. It’s structural. The entire model — tuition-dependent, four-year, degree-granting, residential — was built for a demographic and economic reality that no longer exists. You can’t spreadsheet your way out of a structural crisis. You have to reimagine what the institution actually is.
At Campus Transformation, we’ve been building a framework that combines three things nobody in higher education is combining:
The Hampshire College model showed decades ago that individualized learning, student-designed curricula, and competency-based assessment work. Today, AI makes that model scalable at a fraction of the cost. Imagine a campus where every student has a personalized skill map, where AI coaches handle the repetitive instruction, and where faculty focus on mentorship, research, and the things humans actually do better than machines. That’s not a fantasy. The technology exists right now.
This isn’t about replacing professors. It’s about freeing them from the assembly line so they can do what they were trained to do. And it lowers the cost of delivery dramatically — which means you can serve more learners without hiring proportionally more staff.
A college campus is the most underutilized real estate in most towns. Empty buildings, dark conference centers, idle kitchens, half-filled dorms, sports facilities used ten hours a week.
Meanwhile, the town around it is short on workforce training facilities, health clinics, child care, co-working space, and commercial kitchen access. The employers in the region can’t find trained workers. The small businesses can’t afford their own facilities.
The intersection is obvious and almost nobody is working it. Not because it’s impossible — because nobody on a college staff was hired to do it. There’s no VP of Local Economic Integration. There’s no Director of Community Revenue. Those roles don’t exist in the org chart, so the work doesn’t get done.
We do that work. We scan the region, identify the gaps, make the calls, and find the partners who’ll pay to use what the campus is heating for free.
The biggest structural mistake in higher ed is defining the customer as an 18-year-old who wants a bachelor’s degree. That’s a shrinking market. The growing markets are:
— Working adults who need certifications and authenticated skills, not four-year degrees — Employers who need training facilities and customized workforce programs — Career changers who need six months, not four years — Retirees who want to learn for the sake of learning — High school students who want dual enrollment and early college credit — Local startups and small businesses who need research partnerships, testing facilities, and talent pipelines
A campus that serves all of these audiences has six revenue streams instead of one. When enrollment dips, the other five keep the lights on.
Shulman’s analysis is the diagnosis. Campus Transformation is the treatment plan. But the treatment requires a team that doesn’t exist inside most institutions — experienced educators who understand curriculum reform, administrators who’ve run budgets, technology people who can implement AI-driven learning at scale, and business development professionals who know how to negotiate with employers, municipalities, and investors.
That’s our team. We’re not theorists. We’re people who’ve taught classes, run departments, built technology platforms, and negotiated deals. We’ve seen what works from inside the system and what’s needed from outside it.
The schools Shulman identified aren’t poor. Many have endowments, facilities, and brand equity that smaller schools would envy. What they lack is imagination and permission. Their boards are conservative. Their faculty governance moves slowly. Their accreditors reward the status quo. And their presidents are too busy managing the current crisis to design the next model.
That’s where we come in. Not to replace leadership, but to be the outside team that does the work the inside team wasn’t hired to do — and to do it before the cash runs out.
If you’re at one of these schools — or you know someone who is — the time to start is before the next board meeting, not after it.
Campus Transformation is an initiative of Transform Learning. Contact jeff@transformlearning.ai.
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