Recap: Random Thoughts on Seemingly Different Things
Two recent changes, one deeper diagnosis: thoughts from some unsung intellectuals.
Scrolling at lunch this week, enjoying some food while chasing a Domaine release, I stumbled on this post on LinkedIn:
Community college bachelor’s degrees aren’t a threat to traditional universities—they’re a lifeline for students who’ve been locked out for too long.
As Angela Kersenbrock writes in The EvoLLLution: A Modern Campus Illumination, these degrees are designed for the real students of today: working adults, parents, first-generation learners. They’re affordable (around $10,000 total), flexible (evenings, weekends, hybrid), and built in partnership with employers to align with real job opportunities.
This isn’t about mission creep. It’s about mission clarity. It’s about meeting learners where they are and giving them a path forward.
The resistance from some four-year institutions misses the point. These programs aren’t siphoning students—they’re serving those who wouldn’t have enrolled otherwise.
If we care about equity, affordability, and workforce readiness, we need more of this—not less. Because opportunity shouldn’t depend on your zip code, your age, or your ability to pause life for four years. It should depend on whether the system is willing to adapt.
And right now, community colleges are leading that adaptation.
It brought me back to my own college path, which I wouldn’t change for anything. I started at Kilgore College, an open-access junior college just 14 miles from my small hometown of Overton, Texas. Many of my classmates took the same route, either to Kilgore or to Tyler Junior College farther away. At Kilgore, I had strong instruction, active student life, and a real sense of community. I even served as student body president and lived on campus to soak it all in, all without borrowing a single dollar.
When it was time to finish, I transferred to the University of Texas at Tyler, another small, open-access school exclusively offering junior and senior courses, and a few master’s degrees. By then, I was working more and didn’t engage as much in campus life, but I built deep relationships with some faculty and, most importantly, graduated without debt. I was fortunate. I got a great education and left with no baggage.
Today, UT-Tyler and Kilgore College look nothing like they did in the late 1980s. UT-Tyler added freshmen, expanded undergraduate programs, launched doctorates, and now even has a medical school, becoming a regional behemoth that drives economic growth and serves as East Texas’s medical center. I remember when that expansion debate began in the early 1990s. It faced fierce opposition from rural communities, who feared it would drain local community colleges like Kilgore and TJC.
Over time, economic development arguments won out, and UT-Tyler kept growing, but the critics were right. Community college enrollments dropped as predicted. Kilgore College is now a shadow of its former self. TJC was similarly impacted, but under Texas law, it has the means to offer limited bachelor’s degrees, giving students an affordable path to finish college. Kilgore hasn’t done that; the state regulatory burden is too high, and it continues to fight for survival one student at a time.
Connecting Dots to the Past to Better Understand the Present
Clark Kerr’s 1960 Master Plan for California laid out a higher education system with clear missions and intentional selectivity. The University of California would admit the top one-eighth of high school graduates, focusing on research, graduate training, and the formation of new knowledge. The state colleges (now California State University System) would take the top one-third, emphasizing undergraduate and master’s education with a strong teaching mission. Community colleges would remain fully open access, serving all adults capable of benefiting, and focus on workforce development, vocational training, and affordable lower-division pathways.
Kerr’s “ideal type” envisioned selective universities as more than workforce pipelines. These are meant to cultivate intellectual and social development, foster civic responsibility, and push students to engage with complex ideas and broader society. He believed higher education should prepare people for good careers and for lives of thoughtful citizenship and leadership. Kerr saw workforce development as just one piece of a broader education. His vision depended on a coherent system that protected less selective colleges from mission drift and preserved clear, equitable transfer paths.
David Riesman would see UT-Tyler’s expansion and TJC’s move into bachelor’s degrees as examples of mission drift driven by the need for revenue growth. He warned that when colleges chase enrollments and market demands, they shift from shaping character and civic life to simply delivering credentials. By trying to be everything to everyone, these institutions risk losing focus and the cultures that support intellectual growth. To Riesman, this reflects broader moves toward seeing education as a private good, a transactional service rather than a formative journey.
Martin Trow would see these shifts as signs of a system losing its structure. He supported expanding access, but only if institutions held to clear, differentiated missions. Moves like UT-Tyler expanding and TJC offering bachelor’s degrees blur the boundaries Kerr intended to protect. Trow warned that as college became universal, it also became increasingly obligatory, and for many students, increasingly involuntary. In that sense, he said, colleges start to resemble high schools: more students arrive without clear purpose, and institutions struggle to maintain focus and meaning. The more roles blur, the more the system drifts toward a prestige race, not a coordinated effort to serve students with different needs in different ways.
All three, Kerr, Riesman, and Trow, saw “mission drift” as a threat that erodes what selective institutions should be: spaces for deep intellectual growth, civic formation, and the shaping of future leaders. That’s the type of education, I’m proud to say, students at the University of Georgia receive, including the strongest of preparation for successful long-term careers. Thinking about my path, I’m simply grateful that students in East Texas still have more affordable paths to bachelor’s degrees at open-access institutions like TJC, a path that changed my life trajectory for the better.
The Quiet End of Graduate PLUS Student Loans
We’ve all been thinking a lot about the Big Beautiful Bill’s quiet ending of the Graduate PLUS student loan program. It’s stuck with me, not just as a policy shift, but as something that touches a part of my own story. After graduating from UT-Tyler, I eventually left full-time employment and enrolled in a doctoral program at Texas A&M University, following the advice of mentors who saw potential I hadn’t fully seen in myself. Like most research doctorates, and professional programs like law and medicine, outside employment wasn’t allowed. Your study was your job, and that meant financing basic living expenses wasn’t optional. It was how you kept going.
As a graduate student, borrowing up to the full cost of attendance was essential. We used Stafford Unsubsidized Loans, with interest accruing from day one, to cover rent, groceries, and other living expenses. When the federal government later took over the program, Graduate PLUS loans filled that role. Because they covered total cost of attendance, students at both public universities and elite private schools could fund tuition, fees, and living expenses. With Graduate PLUS ending, policymakers seem to expect students to turn to private lenders to cover their living expenses.
For most public institutions, federal loans may still cover direct costs for graduate and professional study. But at private institutions, students will now need private loans to cover much of their tuition and fees in addition to living expenses, making graduate study at those schools out of reach for all but the wealthiest. Sallie Mae, for example, advertises unsubsidized medical school loans with interest rates from 4% to 15%; a steep cost for students unable to work while enrolled full-time.
Riesman and Trow would both see the end of Graduate PLUS as more than a budget decision; they’d see it as a cultural signal. It reflects a growing consensus that graduate education is a private luxury, not a public good. For Riesman, this marks the triumph of consumerism: when education becomes a transaction, society feels less obligation to subsidize it. For Trow, it reflects the breakdown of a system where each type of institution had a clear, essential role, and the whole worked because those roles stayed distinct. The result isn’t just fewer loans. It suggests a narrowing of who gets to climb, and what kind of higher education some believe is worth supporting.
Higher education leaders have a lot of work ahead and little time to waste.