This article is the final installment of my United States Semiquincentennial Series. This series is a celebration of the country, its history, and the American people. See the previous editions on the Space Race, National Geographic, and the World Cup.

The topic centers on the show Deadwood. If you haven’t seen it (go watch it!), you can still enjoy the article for the history, urbanism, education, travel, and more.

Deadwood was a show that ran three seasons from 2004 to 2006, along with a movie in 2019, depicting life in an 1870s mining camp. The show, while dramatized, offers a glimpse into American history and our pioneering spirit, warts and all. The first season begins 100 years after the founding of the country, right during the Centennial, and 150 years before 2026’s Semiquincentennial.

Unfortunately, Deadwood sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of other great HBO series of the era, namely The Sopranos (another all-time show that I will have an article on in the future). To me, Deadwood should be considered alongside the greats. My wife and I like it so much that we took a road trip to the real-life town of Deadwood, South Dakota, this summer.

The town leans heavily into the identity of the show. Although the reenactors I met weren’t usually the biggest fans, saying that it wasn’t accurate. Of course, HBO had to dramatize for TV. Nonetheless, comparing both the historical and contemporary aspects of urbanism and education in the town of Deadwood has a lot to say about the trajectory of the entire country.

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19th Century Urban Planning

Deadwood gives the audience a view into the traditional style of American development. When we were first building towns, a street grid was laid out by the founders, with property plots marked off. As new people came in, they bought these lots and were able to build how they saw fit. This was the same with the pioneers and miners who first arrived in Deadwood Gulch in the 1870s, building it into the town it has become today.

In the show, Al Swearengen and Tom Nuttall considered themselves the town founders, two true pioneers, in Al’s view. They were some of the first residents, chopping down trees to make way for civilization. The pair both had choice locations for their bars, with Swearengen taking a leading role as a kind of anti-hero in the series.

Deadwood illustrates the incremental approach that American towns once had. The muddy mining camp starts out with a lot of tents and non-permanent structures. Eventually, more businesses and people move in, such as Seth Bullock and Sol Star, building up the camp into a town. We see an evolution from the pilot episode to the end of the series, with everything in the town filling in, from bars, banks, schools, more bars, and even the fire brigade.

The real-life version of Deadwood experienced this same kind of growth that the show depicted. Once gold was discovered in the Black Hills, thousands of fortune seekers flocked to the area in hopes of striking it rich. Businesses and buildings popped up along Main and Broadway, classic American street names that can be found in towns and cities across the country. Craven Lee, who was not depicted in the show, was one of the key real-life founders, helping to establish the city’s grid layout. Lee survives through a street named after him, right where I stayed during my trip.

Residential areas grew when locals were pushed out by commercialization. It simply made too much financial sense to have businesses in the central part of town. One new residential area even pushed out an old cemetery, moving it further up the hill to make way for more housing. The Presidential District (aka Ingleside) became the wealthy enclave of Deadwood’s most fashionable. Some of the beautiful large Queen Anne-style homes survive.

That same cemetery now sits up a hill at the edge of the residential neighborhood. Admittedly, it is a slog to walk to, but it makes more sense than in the middle of town. Could you imagine if a city tried to move a cemetery today? The site itself has become one of Deadwood’s most popular tourist attractions. Both Wild Bill and Calamity Jane are buried next to each other there, along with Seth Bullock and his wife, Martha.

While the historic downtown and surrounding residential neighborhoods keep the charm that comes with walkable cities, autocentric development has encroached on these American traditions. The Family Dollar, which doubles as a grocery store, was obviously more recently built than the rest of Deadwood. The dead giveaway is that it’s set back far from the road, surrounded by a sea of parking. In a literal transportation progression, the site of the old livery stable is now the main parking structure. Not even a town as historic and traditional as Deadwood could stop the onslaught of post-War planning.

Perhaps the show portended sentiments of American NIMBYism to come. In season one, Al put a stipulation on selling a plot of land that limited the new owners, Bullock and Star, from establishing a rival bar with girls and gambling; they oblige. Yet, it is not quite universal zoning, as another rival, the devilish Cy Tolliver, does sneak into town anyway with the Bella Union. Al also initially detested the installation of telegraph poles and wires (he would come around to their usefulness).

In the follow-up film, the mining tycoon George Hearst returns as the villain. He was attempting to install telephone lines to the town. Charlie Utter blocking this installation is a central catalyst for the action. In this case, the bad guy is trying to bring what will eventually become a necessity while the good guy fights against it. Retrospect.

Even some of the real-life town’s founding lore says that Deadwood was staked because some miners didn’t like the rules in a nearby campsite. In the town today, for the gunfight reenactments they hold in the middle of the town on brick roads, they need to set out orange cones so some moron TikToking while driving doesn’t barrel into the crowds.

There is an American identity of being rough-and-tumble cowboys and ranch hands. This ideal is glorified in Deadwood. But the perceived rugged individualism is usually a false suburban identity. Modern America is simply an easier place to live compared to 150 years ago. Still, the spirit of Deadwood endures, even if the hardships have ceased. Our urban planners should be reminded of that.

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Educating the Frontier

Education in the show Deadwood illustrates the progression of the town itself. At first, Deadwood was just a dangerous tent camp, where adventure-seekers wouldn’t dare bring their families. As the camp got more established, women and children started moving in, albeit still a dangerous place. How to educate children became a running theme in the show. It might seem strange that husbands would move their wife and children to such an unforgiving place. But this was indeed the reality of the real Deadwood.

Horace Mann started the Common School movement in 1837 as the state’s first secretary of its Board of Education. One-room schoolhouses began dotting the landscape across the country, even on the American frontier as we made our Westward expansion. Deadwood was no exception, building several grade schools and a high school in 1881. At that time, even graduating high school was rare, at under 3.5%, as shown in the chart below. Most adults (≈15%) ended up illiterate.

Schools then brought women to the frontier that was dominated by men. In the show, the town first brings in a teacher from back East. She barely lasted an episode, leaving after witnessing the newspaper being ransacked. The short tenure of teachers then was typical, relating to so-called Marriage Bars that prohibited married women from teaching. The show does not follow this real trend, and eventually installs Seth Bullock’s wife, Martha, as the town’s teacher.

It might not be so surprising that Deadwood had K-12 schools in this era, but the Dakota territories also had higher education during this period. College attendance was lower than 2% in the 1870s, meaning that Doc Cochran may have been the only character on the show with some kind of higher learning. In real life, Black Hills State University was established in 1883 in nearby Spearfish, just a few years after the series is dated. By the time the movie is set, what was then known as Dakota Territorial Normal School would be up and running.

These “Normal” colleges were typical across the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were explicitly founded to train teachers. The name “Normal” fell out of fashion, and most of these institutions transitioned into full universities by the 1950s. Some famous institutions started as these Normal institutions, such as UCLA and Arizona State University. My alma mater, the University of Central Oklahoma, was also a former teacher training school called Territorial Normal School.

It wasn’t just teacher training institutions popping up during this era. Over in Yankton, the much-hated rival town in the show, Yankton College was established in 1881. The Christian college had a storied 100-year history, but eventually closed down in 1984. The campus has since been converted into a Federal Prison. Talk about adaptive reuse!

The educational numbers would continue to rise through the turn of the century. While high school took off in the 1910s, it would not be until the post-War boom that higher education attainment soared. If you want to see what happens in later decades in the 20th century, check out my article on Dazed and Confused.

Today, there is still no higher education institution in town, only those in neighboring towns such as the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead. This facility is one of the deepest underground laboratories in the country, with bleeding-edge research on dark matter and neutrino physics. Likewise, Deadwood still has elementary and middle schools, but the high school has long been consolidated with neighboring Lead—certainly a sign of the times.

Newspapers Foundational to American Identity

Newspapers aren’t exactly schooling, but they have been crucial in providing an education to the citizenry, a principle dating back to the Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson. In a time and place where formal schooling was rarer, such as Deadwood in the 1870s, newspapers were central.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the famed French diplomat and philosopher, toured the United States in the 1830s. His musings offer key insight into the American sociopolitical background of the US during the day. One reason Tocqueville believed the US could stay so connected as a unitary identity despite spreading across a far and wide landmass was newspapers. Newspapers offered the country national cohesion during a disconnected period.

Deadwood, set just 40 years after Tocqueville’s journey, illustrates his point on newspapers. The Deadwood Pioneer, founded by A.W. Merrick, was an important institution for the town, with critical functions such as announcing town policies (as dictated by Al), reporting news (like statehood rumors), and keeping connections with civilization. Perhaps coming short on the last one: Dan Dority, Al’s right-hand man, complains there’s no baseball reporting in the newspaper.

In real life, the paper was actually named the Black Hills Pioneer, still founded by Merrick. It played the same roles as the fictionalized version. Although, the paper did not spar with Hearst, who was famous for his litigious strong-arming of rivals. Later, though, Hearst departed the Black Hills for good; he would purchase what became the San Francisco Examiner in 1880. When he was elected Senator, he handed it over to his son, William Randolph Hearst, who went on to be one of the most well-known newspaper magnates in US history.

Print catalogues were also key commercial outlets of the day. In season one, a piano gets delivered into Al’s bar via Montgomery Ward’s. This is the same catalogue that sold Sears Kit Houses, which debuted about 30 years after the show is set. Montgomery Ward’s survived as a department store until the 90s, dying with the lost malls of America. It had survived the Old West, but could not survive Amazon.

The written word remained a powerful American institution until other forms of media, first by the radio, then eventually TV, and now the internet. The excitement of getting a telegraph wire was depicted in the show. The telegraph operator, Blazanov, worked closely with Merrick and his newspaper. Al (eventually) recognizes the power of this information flow, co-opting both into the fold of his team.

In real life, Deadwood got a telegraph line to Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1876. Deadwood Mayor. E.B. Farnam, who wasn’t as wormy as the show depicted, exchanged the first message with his counterpart there. Today, the Black Hills Pioneer survives, although it has changed hands numerous times and had various name changes.

Of course, the Hearst legacy survives in the media through Hearst Communications, which remains one of the largest media conglomerates in the country. Hearst’s wife, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, too, has left her mark on the civic cultural life with the Hearst Library and the Homestake Opera House, both in nearby Leads. I should also mention another captain of industry who left his mark from afar in Deadwood: Andrew Carnegie, whose library still stands there today. It is still beautiful.

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An Immigrant Nation Show

The American mythos is built on us being an immigrant nation. This national ideal is heavily felt in this series. The show was set in a period of a boom for immigration that would last 40 more years. Many of the main characters were immigrants from abroad: Sol Star was from Austria, Seth Bullock was from Canada, and Al was from England. Other side characters include Wu from China, Blazanov from Russia, and Jack Langrishe from Scotland. The Irish, Cornish, Swedes, and Germans all make up a good portion of the miners and pioneers, loveably called “hooples” by Al.

While these immigrant roots are often celebrated in the show and the US in general, the levels of migration we see depicted in Deadwood would not last. Growing anti-foreign sentiments swept the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 put massive caps on migration, including from European countries.

The show also depicts the lives of the early Chinese migrants to the country. It was true that the town did once have a thriving Chinatown during this period. The plight of those coming from the Far East was much starker than that of the settlers from the East Coast. While it was no easy time for any population, the Chinese were treated as second-class citizens, sometimes just above slave labor for the so-called coolies, as illustrated by Mr. Wu’s operation in the show.

This was not a pleasant time to be Chinese in the US. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed just a few years after the show’s setting. There were consistent riots across the country where Chinese would be beaten and lynched, blamed for management undercutting their wages with foreign labor. These difficulties did not subside until after World War II with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened the US back up to immigration.

But just like the spirit that drove Americans and Europeans alike to Deadwood, the Chinese held that same conviction that a better life awaited them across the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese even call the US “美国,” literally translated to “Beautiful Country.” I know this label had to be about the natural landscape, because it certainly wasn’t about how society treated the Chinese at the time. Surrounded by lush mountains, Deadwood, the Black Hills, and the entire Dakotas certainly are the Beautiful Country.

By the 1880s, there were over 200 Chinese in Deadwood’s Chinatown. At first, the Chinese migrants mostly focused on servicing the mining camp itself, such as laundromats, grocery stores, boarding houses, bakeries, and even opium dens. There was even a school to teach English to the migrants. In the film, Wu’s nephew speaks fluent English and acts as the translator. But the last of these early Chinese migrants to Deadwood moved away in 1931, with the Chinatown fading away with them. The old Chinese portion of the cemetery is all that remains of this community today.

American Tenacity

Being out in the Black Hills, you can really feel the pull of the West. Deadwood is an outpost among outposts. There isn’t much around other than the wide-open skies. The US has long had a sense of Manifest Destiny, the view that the small colonies on the East Coast would eventually spread from sea to shining sea. Of course, that was hubris then. But that hubris did indeed complete the destiny.

Deadwood was just one small example in a broad history of westward expansion. I’m sure the pioneering spirit of the day’s past made the region an even stronger draw. “The world ends when you’re dead; pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair or f*#%¡ü@ beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back,” Al says to Merrick, in a speech that oozes this tenacity.

During the time period of Deadwood, getting to the town wasn’t like a relaxing road trip through paved highways to a little resort hotel. It was a long, hard slog over rough terrain through dangerous conditions to arrive in the wilderness. The founders of Deadwood did indeed tame the wild, but the cost was staggering.

Countless lives were lost to this move, through disease, accidents, violence, and conflict. Native American civilization especially took the brunt of these forces, losing land, traditional territory, and an entire way of life. While the show Deadwood does not focus on Native American plight, the film Dances with Wolves, filmed nearby in South Dakota and parts of Wyoming, depicts the striking calamity that followed the Western movement.

Another key feature of the real town Deadwood that wasn’t depicted in the show was the constant disasters that befell the area. There were constant floods, mudslides, and fires. Deadwood, the town, was destroyed multiple times by these disasters, with all of the structures built at the beginning of the town lost in fires. The entire town is actually raised above the ground floor where these structures once stood.

Yet the people who made this journey must have believed in this pull of the West. There was riches to be made, or at least a better life found, at the end of the trail. The follow-up movie to the show begins with South Dakota’s statehood in 1889—the cast’s triumph. The real town stands as a memorial to this spirit today.

Deadwood does not survive in the exact same way as it once stood. Instead, it has been rebuilt multiple times over due to disaster and progress. Many of the historic structures that remain were built around the turn of the century, dating to the late 1800s and early 1900s. In the basement of Wild Bill Bar, patrons can see the exact site where Jack McCall killed Wild Bill Hickok, a crescendo moment for the show’s first season. The attraction sits in the basement because the town had to be raised to deal with floods. The structures from the rebuilds have been preserved, and the old downtown has been totally renovated.

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Kitschy Americana Tourist Town Today

Much of the show centered on local businesses, especially entertainment, from gambling to prostitution. This same spirit is still around in the town today. Well, not the prostitution, as far as I could tell. But there were casinos everywhere. And the mountains that once attracted settlers to the Black Hills 150 years ago now attract visitors for skiing, like Terry Peak Ski Area.

At first glance, during my trip to Deadwood, I was surprised that it had turned into a cheesy tourist attraction. Every hotel seems to have a casino, impersonators walk the street performing for the visitors, and contrived versions play on the show’s success (such as Mr. Wu, using the likeness of the actor with no real connection to Chinatown).

But what I found was fun. I like this contrived version of Mr. Wu’s! Sitting at the bar, drinking cheap whisky, hearing the whistles and dings of the slot machines all around me, while chatting with my wife, locals, and bartenders. The in-your-face cowboy bars with photos of Wild Bill, wagon wheels, and rope on the walls were actually fun. I was happy to give them my money, and they were happy to take it. It's all kitschy Americana, and I loved it.

In retrospect, I think becoming a tourist town makes sense in the trajectory of Deadwood. The show depicts a place that is obsessed with making money through gold, brothels, gambling, and bars. These are natural evolutions into the Disney version you can find there today, and it has even managed to stay a little rougher around the edges.

Deadwood is now a lovable place. Kevin Costner was actually so infatuated with the area when he was filming Dances with Wolves that he bought his own casino there. The town has leaned into the fanfare. In one casino, they had the show playing in the background. Too perfect.

This was no linear rise from the show to today. The town fell into disrepair after World War II, hollowed out by deindustrialization and the mines drying up. The Homestake Mining Company, founded by Hearst, had claims from the 1870s that technically lasted until 2001 near Lead. Deadwood was on the verge of becoming a ghost town until 1989, when South Dakota relegalized gaming there.

The population hovers around only 1,200 today, dwarfed by the incoming tourist numbers. There is affluence in being a resort town. Only 6.7% of people live below the poverty line, with the median housing value at $226,500 and $40,179 household income. The residential neighborhoods are beautifully restored, and I certainly saw my fair share of golf carts, snow skis, and giant trucks. Unlike the dangerous and chaotic times from the show, Deadwood now seems like a paradise for outdoorsmen.

The show Deadwood was just a dramatized version of the real town’s history. Both have a lot to say about American society. The town today remains a fascinating place. The history that the locals have embraced just adds to the enjoyment. I can say that going to Deadwood really took me back in time.

Note: Around the College Towns is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.

The Department of War’s War on Universities

The US Department of War released a public memo announcing a probe of 30 universities for “unauthorized technology transfer, intellectual property theft and adversarial exploitation.” The memo called for these institutions to do “immediate and comprehensive reviews of their academic, financial and research collaborations with foreign entities of concern.”

The Department of War cites an ongoing investigation into broader academia through a so-called “adversarial influences infiltrating” American universities. In particular, the “rebranded Confucius Institutes” have been flagged. The US has long been concerned about those cultural diplomacy programs connected to the Chinese government, with most of them being shuttered.

Now, I do not have a problem with military and intelligence agencies attempting to protect the country from actual threats. However, these efforts by the current Department seem just lazy and uninspired. It appears that the brass has just control-F’d Chinese or Russian institutions from the websites of various American universities. That is not intelligence.

I was also thinking that perhaps this was just retaliation against elite institutions that are seen as the enemy by the Trump administration at large. But that is not the case, as many of the Ivy League schools are missing, and places like Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, are included.

I have already written about my qualms with the administration’s “New and Improved Portal for Universities to Report Foreign Funding,” calling it “the dashboard that is a contextless mess.” That did not stop White House from touting how revolutionary and damaging to higher ed this data was. This new memo seems like much of the same, fantastical claims without much payoff.

I already included commentary about Bryant University in that previous article. The summary is that it is a low-level business and accounting program at a random Chinese university. This seems to be the case with many of these targeted institutions.

I’m not going to go through all 30 institutions and their partners (perhaps a future full post). Instead, I just looked at two from my home state of Oklahoma. The letter sent to the President of Oklahoma State was published by local media. Here is the opening:

The Department of War (DoW) is committed to fostering a collaborative academic environment while safeguarding the U.S. research enterprise from foreign exploitation. Oklahoma State University (OSU) appears to maintain an active connection with Fudan University. This entity is on the Department's most recently published list of foreign institutions engaging in problematic activities, pursuant to Section 1286 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, as amended (https://www.cto.mil/fy25-ndaa-section1286-list/).

Fudan is one of the top institutions in China. It does not surprise me that the school has some kind of connection to the military, much like our top American schools. But the institution is much more than that, with full comprehensive programs. I’ve been to Fudan a few times, once for a conference on liberal arts in Asia. Hardly anything diabolical. And that tracks with the connections to OSU.

In 2011, the universities announced a partnership to “enhance their school's student affairs division and are especially interested in OSU because of its strength in student affairs.” They had seniors attend OSU’s International Symposium on Student Affairs, and had leadership keen on learning more about “Career Services, Residential Life, the Colvin Recreation Center, and the Edmon Low library.”

For Northeastern State University (NSU), the concern was with a partnership with Guangzhou College of Technology and Business (GCTB). Frankly, both places that most people probably have never heard of. I only know NSU because I’m from the state and did a summer camp there as a kid. No offense to either institution, but these places are not at the bleeding edge of technological innovation and advanced research.

This tracks with the programs actually taught. Professors from NSU were going to GCTB to teach undergraduate business courses like Leadership and Supervision and Negotiation and Labor Issues, Technology & Society and Project Management. The president of NSU defended the programs, saying they were “limited exclusively to undergraduate teaching and degree completion” and had “no research security risk… exposure of DoW-funded, sensitive, proprietary, or export-controlled research.”

This is all wildly mundane stuff. It is easily found and listed on the institutional websites. Yet, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, wants the American people to believe he uncovered some kind of dangerous conspiracy. Perhaps one of the other 27 universities on the list does actually have some concerning partnerships. I just happened to choose the three with mundane business classes. Or perhaps there is just not a lot of there there.

This affair reminds me of the battles Senator J. William Fulbright fought in defense of his international exchange programs. He and Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced Senator who led the Red Scare, barbed over paranoid fears of anything foreign. Another Senator, Kenneth McKellar, pointedly warned that Fulbright’s “dangerous legislation” is “going to take our young boys and girls over there to expose them to those foreign ‘isms.’”

Of course, Fulbright believed in the strength of Americans and America. Luckily, his ideals won out. Now, these exchange programs are considered premier US public diplomacy efforts that advance our national interest abroad.

Like Fulbright, I, too, believe in these same strengths in our country and people. The current detractors in the Trump administration only echo the same doom and gloom that lost out 70+ years ago. I ask now: Are our institutions so weak that they cannot have partnerships with institutions from abroad? Is our intelligence so poor that we have to wildly throw darts at every possible target?

If you actually care about foreign influence and espionage targeted at American interests, then this Mickey Mouse operation by the US Department of War should be concerning. This is not intelligence; this is a brainless witch hunt. We can do much, much better than this.

The full list of institutions in the memo:

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Not to be too Trump-centric today, but a Federal court ruled that Marco Rubio’s attacks on international students for speech violations were unconstitutional. I previously wrote that these actions were un-American; glad the courts agreed. Kudos to for leading the charge here.

• Ok, back to the regularly scheduled urbanism meets higher ed promise: U of Arizona sees massive drop in freshmen, has to shutter some of its dorms. The K-shaped economy of American higher ed (I’ll have a future post on this).

• Columbia’s campus is still closed to the public. Such a bummer that my alma mater is abdicating a key part of its public good.

• The loneliness epidemic has hit college campuses. This is unconscionable to me: dorms, cafeterias, gyms, activities, festivals, events, sporting events, massive student body, clubs, colleges should be the antidote to the loneliness crisis.

• UCLA is cutting campus childcare. I always thought universities should do more for families. This is going in the opposite direction.

• St John’s College is changing its Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts to a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Literature, and the Natural Sciences. This will be an interesting space to watch, as there seems to be a growing resurgence of this kind of classic education.

• Sam Altman of OpenAI/ ChatGPT fame says college should only be 2 years. Terrible take from a guy who seems to be full of them.

• More Americans are doing their undergrad abroad. I love this. I hope more American students continue this trend.

• In more news abroad, I hadn’t realized this when it was first announced, but Saudi Arabia had planned for a university at the ridiculous NEOM megastructure. That is likely not happening with the collapse of the project.

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Urbanism-ish

• In annoying news from my current state, California, a dingy laundromat takes years to redevelop into housing in San Francisco. This is just the epitome of the problems in this state.

• In more California news, Bakersfield Mall is charging for parking spots closer to the entrance. I don’t hate it! But the town seems upset. Should I let them know about the 700+ page book The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup?

• Similarly, some countries around the world have pay-per-use elevators. Maybe this one I agree with the naysayers on. Elevators are much different than parking lots.

• There was a lot of autonomous vehicle (AV) news recently. First, Tesla revealed its new robo-bus.

• Toyota is getting into the self-driving game. Better late than never. I, for one, am hopeful about the Japanese foray into AVs. I would prefer not to have to rely on Tesla.

• Next, Uber’s president sees self-driving cars as an existential threat to jobs. But driverless trucks are already here. This will be the next intense culture war battle:

• The final piece of self-driving news: it seems that women are most against driverless taxis. I have no theory of mind on this. Is it just an artifact of the survey design? Or is there something actually to this? I would love to hear your thoughts.

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Adaptive Reuse Corner

I found a bunch of fun adaptive reuse this week. Sticking with the education theme, a middle school becomes a home in Michigan. This price is pretty steep for Michigan, but you would get your own basketball court! I can see the appeal.

If you don’t want to live in an old school, I have a couple more options for you. How about living in an old hotel, silos, cathedral, bank, or jail (pictured in order below)? These are all really fun, and some seem pretty reasonably priced!

I think my personal winner for today is this beautiful church redevelopment in Oakland. It is truly a stunner. I could certainly see myself living in these apartments:

And to close out the segment, I know this is not exactly adaptive reuse, but I had to flag this listing. Who wants to live in the Obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey? I think I’ll pass on this one.

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Closing Time… Goodbye to the Bohemians

There is always a romanticism around New York City. The classic story of a starving artist moving to the city from rural Ohio, moving into a dingy artist loft, and making it work on a shoestring budget. But that kind of true Bohemian lifestyle has mostly faded away as housing costs rose.

In more recent years, those kinds of artist lofts are more myth than reality. But there are still a few long-timers clinging to that old way of life. There is a new book chronicling this part of fading New York entitled Loft Law: The Last of New York City's Original Artist Lofts.

Joshua Charow, a documentary filmmaker and photographer, spent five years gaining access to these old lofts to interview “the mystery artists living inside,” as he calls them. With some persistence, people were happy to share their experiences. “I’ve been here for 58 years,” said one of the featured artists; some of the residents were in their 90s.

I am happy that someone is documenting some of the last remaining Bohemian spaces in New York City. As one of the artists said, “Our world as we know it now is disappearing.” And it is true; this kind of old world is just not something the younger generations can experience today. Charow's entire YouTube channel is worth a watch, taking viewers for a glimpse inside.

This all got me wondering: where do the new Bohemians go? Is there anywhere in the country with available inventory of loft space, with a critical mass of people/ galleries, living a car-free lifestyle, and all doing it cheaply? I am not so certain. Perhaps some deindustrialized Rust Belt city like Cincinnati. What do you think?

Editorial Note: This is a guest post in the “Summer School at College Towns” series.

runs the here on Substack, where he frequently writes insightful articles on cities, political movement building, messy coalitions, and even mushroom foraging. He also graciously stepped up to become moderator at r/urbanism. I appreciate that service!

Today on College Towns, he reflects on the housing situation in his alma mater college town, Santa Barbara, California. Enjoy. -Ryan

After five and a half years away, I returned to Santa Barbara, home to my alma mater, the University of California, Santa Barbara, for a wedding. While in town, I revisited the nearby college community of my youth, Isla Vista.

Everything I loved in Isla Vista remains the same. The sunshine feels like it could go on forever, and it mostly does: an average of 283 days of sunshine annually, summer highs of 77 degrees and winter lows of 65. On a random walk down the main street on a Friday night, you can see the most beautiful woman (or man, or anyone in between) of your life, over and over again. Everyone basks in a surreal natural environment, overlooking the ocean on one side, backdropped by the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other. Occasionally, studying happens.

Yet Isla Vista is both beautiful and haunting in its built stasis: A 1970s suburb, unchanging in response to current needs, slowly decaying into the ocean. Residents deserve better, students deserve better. The pathway to meeting their needs is a microcosm of the changes that will be necessary in aging college towns everywhere.

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Student Housing Situation in Santa Barbara

Isla Vista may be the most distilled version of a college town in America: More than 20,000 people, 90%+ college students, cram into approximately 0.6 square miles immediately next to the university. Its population density, above 30,000 people per square mile, rivals Brooklyn in New York City.

Yet Isla Vista’s built environment does not reflect its huge population. The median construction age of its buildings is 1975—more than twice the age of the median resident.

Students cram two, three, or four people into a room, paying $600-$1200 per person per month for the honor. Most of the area, an unincorporated corner of Santa Barbara County, allows one or two homes per lot. The very highest-density parcels allow a whopping 30 dwelling units per acre, 35 feet tall, and that’s only on a single lot in the entire area. For reference, this is about as dense as Brooklyn’s lowest-density row home districts; most NYC zoning districts allow buildings as tall as 85 feet with no residential density limits.

Of course, while the built environment remains unchanged, many of the beachfront houses are falling into the ocean.

A College Town Frozen in Amber

Isla Vista’s built environment may have changed very little over more than 50 years, but its population has changed a lot. Namely, it has grown. Between 1960 and 1970, during the heyday of housing development in Isla Vista, enrollment at UC Santa Barbara tripled from fewer than 4,000 students to more than 12,000. Since then, the student population has doubled again, to 26,000. But housing development froze in place in the 1970s.

As enrollment has gone up, so have rents. A median three-bedroom house in Isla Vista—most of the structures there!—rents for over $7,000 per month, $2,300 per bedroom or more. Trashy three-bedroom apartments will rent for over $5,000.

Coastal California, including Isla Vista, faces unique development challenges. Developers realistically should not build new projects directly on eroding cliffs that will fall into the ocean in the next 50 years.

But it’s equally hard to build more inland in Isla Vista, too: The notoriously anti-housing California Coastal Commission covers the entire community as well as the surrounding land owned by UC Santa Barbara, making zoning reforms to enable new development exceptionally difficult. In 2007, the Coastal Commission rejected a new Isla Vista Master Plan that would have allowed for more homes.

Today, six infill multi-family projects proposed under the Builder’s Remedy—a penalty imposed on Santa Barbara County for failing to follow state housing laws—face a similar hurdle. Three years after the projects were proposed, none have meaningfully moved forward.

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Common Challenges in College Towns

Isla Vista’s fundamental challenges resemble those of many college towns: Student populations rose for decades amid built environments that could not rise with them. Even as nationwide college enrollment falls, many college towns have fallen decades behind their housing needs, with longtime residents (many of whom arrived as earlier generations of college students) restricting new development at the expense of the future.

Meeting Isla Vista’s housing needs starts with the basics. Most importantly, Santa Barbara County should change its zoning to allow greater density. Low-slung suburbs of the 1970s can no longer meet the needs of America’s college towns; Isla Vista is only unique in its setting, not its need.

Outside the areas subject to immediate coastal erosion—for locals, the southwest-facing side of Del Playa—Isla Vista should allow eight-story buildings, at the very least. Students and the housing they need are not pollution; they are an essential part of building California’s future and ensuring access to its coast.

The playbook for revival in Isla Vista extends to every college town struggling with questions about its future. As many schools grapple with declining enrollment and more and more close up shop entirely, communities will have to choose whether they want to cling to a dying past or build a brighter future. Even if it doesn’t build, Isla Vista can coast on the gravity of an expanding UC system and its proximity to the actual coastline, forcing its students into ever more dilapidated and expensive homes. Other college towns don’t have the same luxury.

Isla Vista’s eroding coastline provides the most dramatic image of housing stock obsolescence, with homes falling into the ocean. But in every college town, and in many other cities, an aging housing stock fails to meet our future needs. College towns should seize the opportunity to build while they still have it. Maybe the next time I visit Isla Vista, I’ll be lucky enough to see some cranes amid the endless blue sky.

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Note: Around the College Towns is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events. Since I had back-to-back guest posts, this edition will be a bit longer. Enjoy.

Bears and Pigs and College Students, Oh My!

This week, The New York Times had a (sort of) humorous story about college students that I saw a lot of higher ed people discussing. The article’s setting is Cornell University, where the Upstate New York Ivy League school recently banned students from processing wild game in dormitory kitchens. What prompted this new policy? Well…

One Saturday last September, two Cornell University students plopped a bear carcass on a table in a communal dormitory kitchen and began to carve it up. They planned to make “black-bear pastrami,” as one of them described their plans later.

Yes, the students slaughtered a bear in the dorm kitchen. Apparently, the students were hunting enthusiasts and legally shot and killed the black bear since it was open season. I know there are likely vegans and vegetarians disturbed by the story (and the photos circulating do look gory), but the process is fairly typical in hunting circles. It just happened to happen in a shared dorm kitchen.

The students defended themselves on a hunting podcast called The MeatEater Podcast. “We were really diligent in reading all of the rules, you know, regulations. We made sure we did everything by the book,” said Aaron Chin. Their plea was basically that there was no explicit rule against slaughtering a bear in the dorms.

This story illustrates some of the ridiculous experiences that come out of college campuses. It is one reason I loved my own time in college! It reminded me of my first job after my undergrad as a Leadership Consultant for my fraternity (Acacia) in Indianapolis, Indiana. This job had me traveling to college campuses across the country (fun job for a 22-year-old), helping or starting local chapters, and also dealing with disciplinary issues with things like hazing.

One day, headquarters got alarming news from the Penn State chapter. The university’s Greek Life director told us that our boys had slaughtered a pig in their basement. If that weren’t enough, they also invited the entire chapter and even neighboring sororities to watch. We were horrified, thinking it was some kind of disturbing ritual sacrifice. The next day, they sent me and a couple of other reps to State College, PA, to investigate.

Down in Happy Valley, we met with the university officials and interviewed much of the chapter. What we pieced together was not dissimilar from the Cornell story. The chapter had some country boys from Pennsyltucky (self-described), the lingo for rural counties in the state that traces cultural roots to Appalachia. They had actually followed the rules and norms in processing ham. They just did it in the fraternity house and with an audience.

In the end, the chapter received a slap on the wrist from the university. The headquarters basically told them to never do something like this again or else lose their charter. The chapter had a pretty wild reputation, even amongst the seasoned fraternity headquarters. They were eventually suspended from operations due to hazing and other misconduct, according to Penn State.

Things like hazing are far more common and dangerous than processing pig or bear meat. These kinds of bizarre stories just capture an audience. They are just part of the totality of happenings in a college town. Young people from different cultures making dumb decisions together, as long as not too consequential, is exactly what college is for.

Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• In college housing news, Liberty turns old dumpy hotel into dorms. This kind of conversation has become quite common in higher ed. Even when I was an undergrad two decades ago, my university recently purchased a hotel as a dorm.

• In California, Fresno State is building its first on-campus housing in 50 years, while Long Beach City College is building its first on-campus dorms ever. California is bonkers: 50 years of growth and just now building housing.

• Shuttered college dorm to become affordable housing in Philadelphia. This is a perfect adaptive reuse of closed college campuses.

• Florida Tech is opening its largest dorm to ease the housing crisis. It’s just too bad the building is utterly ugly. It seriously looks like an Amazon distribution center.

  

• The fastest-rising housing markets are all basically towns with colleges. So I do not expect the housing struggles around colleges to end anytime soon.

• Stanford backs off Flock cameras after outrage. I wrote previously about how the university was getting pushback over its surveillance deal, but I am starting to soften my stance (perhaps I will write a longer response as to why).

• ASU launches school for content creators. Honestly, I do not hate it. If this is what students want to invest their time and passion in, then universities should oblige. I may have to do a deeper dive on these types of programs in the future.

• UCLA wants to add shade infrastructure across LA. I am glad someone is trying, but it is pathetic how little the city leaders actually care about this issue.

• New study abroad targets? Bored retirees. Now this is interesting. With the looming population cliff, there will be a dearth of 18-year-olds. At the same time, we are going to have an excess of seniors. More universities should try this.

• Not every person in the older generations is financially comfortable. Some Boomers are saying that they cannot retire because of student loan debt.

• There’s a new college entrance exam that promises to return to the classics. This is another sign of the divide in educational philosophies. I have a planned article to break down this issue in more detail.

Urbanism-ish

• LA’s airport people mover is nearly done but still facing delays. We already missed the World Cup. We should get it open by the Olympics, but anything is possible in this city. Pathetic.

• In more bad news from my state, California must get rid of its double-decker trains. We are letting another icon die due to overregulation and bureaucratization.

• Further, California is getting sued by Teamsters to keep self-driving big rigs off the road.

• In other parts of the country, a state rep in Pennsylvania wants to ban automated public transit (a Democrat, no less). Short-sighted! Naked rent-seeking is one reason we cannot escape our terrible transit ecosystem in the US.

• While we stumble with basic transportation here, Russia wants to build a train route to India. Russia→ Turkmenistan → Iran → Afghanistan → Pakistan → India. Well, that would certainly be an adventure!

• It’s not all good news abroad, though. In South Korea, Seoul’s nightlife is grappling with young people’s new temperance tastes. The old bar district I used to hang out in is “not what it used to be.” Many such cases for things from my youth. Bummer.

• In the adaptive reuse corner, a church-turned-nail-salon for sale as a single-family home in Wisconsin. You can also live in a train in Washington. I love adaptive reuse!

  

• An author argues the national housing crisis is a moral problem for churches. Yes! Let the churches build for their parishioners and communities.

• In other self-driving car news from around the world, China is banning blue lights to indicate self-driving mode. When the blue lights were on, other drivers would know the car is being driven by a robot. I like this concept. It gives drivers more signals. Alas, it looks like it is gone.

• Volvo removes LiDAR. The company is saying that their regular sensors are safe enough. It does make me a bit nervous, though. I will have a future article on how these impact road safety.

• The number one most feared public safety issue by Americans: traffic violence. While also true around the world, the numbers of people who fear road-related accidents in the US are much starker. It makes sense; our roads are very dangerous.

Closing Time… New Professor Show

A couple of weeks ago I posted about Amy Poehler fantasizing about being a professor. Well, it seems the thought must have been on her brain because a new show was in development where she will be an academic. Dig will star Poehler and Hugh Laurie as archaeologists taking students on an expedition.

The showrunner will be Mike Schur, who will reunite with Poehler, having formerly worked together on Parks and Rec (a great show on small-town politics). Schur has a murderers' row of heartfelt sitcoms: The Good Place (a great show that taps into academic philosophy), A Man on the Inside (which I almost wrote an article about on the season it was set at a struggling college), Brooklyn Nine-Nine (probably my least favorite, though it’s fine), The Office (an all-time TV show).

I am looking forward to seeing how Poehler, Schur, and the gang depict the academy. We already have Indiana Jones as the iconic archaeologist professor depiction. Will this show add to the cultural relevance or fade into obscurity?

Editorial Note: This is a guest post in the “Summer School at College Towns” series.

Matthew J. Camp, PhD, is the founder of Campfire Strategies in Massachusetts, helping nonprofits develop political relationships, community power, and sustained engagement to advance their missions.

He served as Vice President of Education Policy at the Commission on Independent Colleges & Universities in New York. He spent 20 years in government and community engagement at Columbia University and Princeton University. His research focuses on higher education lobbying.

Enjoy. -Ryan

On August 3, 2026, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon released a “national call to action” to universities to describe “to the American public your commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service,” continuing the Secretary’s attempt to align higher education with Trump administration goals.

In response to administration challenges like these, and the urgent need to recoup lost research and development dollars, some institutions doubled or even tripled their government relations budgets. But is writing bigger checks to lobbyists the best way to shore up higher education’s future?

The problem is, colleges tend to put time, effort, and money towards government and community relations in a reactive way, as a response to negative public policy. Indeed, my last two government relations positions at universities were created as reactions to deleterious state policies.

In addition to governmental relations, higher education should do more community engagement: a deeper, less transactional, and more service-oriented proactive relationship building. This allows a college to make strong inroads to elected officials and governmental agencies for the long run. It is valuable to not only develop crucial staff relationships, but also to connect to local officials who often move up to higher office. And it’s valuable to boost eroding student belonging, support communities and the health of our democracy, and help rebuild the lost trust in higher education.

Lobbying—the First Amendment right to petition government—is necessary and vital in a healthy democracy, but a deeper community engagement strategy is as important today because politicians from the left and the right target colleges as not doing their full public service, citing, among other factors, ideological narrowing and high tuition.

We see the Trump administration implementing gainful employment rules designed by the Obama administration. We see Republicans and Democrats at federal and local levels pushing endowment tax bills, and bills to revoke nonprofit status. We’ve seen communities advocating for payments in lieu of taxes and community benefit agreements with universities and even the newly opened Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

The federal government may be creating a tsunami of challenges for higher education right now, so not losing sight of “the local” is more important than ever. Universities must prove themselves to their local communities, elected officials, students, and families. A thoughtful community engagement strategy can do this if it is proactive, positive, and sustained.

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Add-On vs. Core Competency

Many universities are doing notable community engagement work. Hartwick College in New York places students in local nonprofit organizations and governmental agencies, with some undergraduate students even running for mayor. Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life is a national leader in the study and practice of civic engagement, with students serving k-12 schools and the medical profession. And the University of Texas at Austin’s Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life keeps the University and its students deeply rooted in Texas state government and the Austin community. The All in Campus Democracy challenge and its partner Campus Compact give schools tools to embed voting and civic action within all elements of the student experience. For example, Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania went from a below-average participation rate to an impressive 75% student voter participation rate thanks to All In.

Community engagement should be a core competency of any college student to boost civic readiness. Colleges that place students in community, government, and policy organizations offer students career pathways and a look into how our civic world works. Place students in state and local government; give them credit and give them stipends. Those students will be more likely to vote and less likely to be jaded by politics. They’ll feel connected. They might even be happier citizens—and happier alumni.

Institutions have the structural tools to make this happen. In addition to linking tenure to community engagement, colleges can leverage their federal work-study funds. Federal work-study rules require that colleges must use at least 7% of their work-study allocations to employ students in community service jobs such as reading tutoring. Spending work-study funding this way is a great way to build local rapport and student experience. It is all the more important to demonstrate impact given recent administration and Congressional calls to end work-study as a whole.

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Citizens, Not Just Workers

The debate about the purpose of higher education underlies this discussion, and nearly any major decision made by higher education leaders. Should higher education prepare students for jobs or to be well-rounded citizens? I argue it can be both, and community engagement is the perfect way to bridge the two goals.

On the one hand, one can’t blame higher education leaders for recalibrating their internal operations to rank higher in US News or Money Magazine’s list of best colleges for the money (disclosure: I did the data work on an early version of the latter). And one can’t blame leaders for adjusting their degree programs to avoid getting hit by gainful employment regulations.

On the other hand, it’s unlikely any college president would be able to sleep at night knowing that they were preparing students to just be cogs in the economy, which is changing by the minute due to AI. Colleges’ role in critical thinking and civic engagement is even more important given the rise of AI, which is better at the “whats” than the “hows” and “whys” of education. Enlightened leaders like Williams College President Maud Mandel understand the what/how difference and cultivate campuses as spaces to grapple with complex and conflictual ideas, teaching students “how to think” rather than “what to think”, and have civil, civic dialogues. Universities can be places for critical thinking, questioning, and yes, protest.

Since governmental support is no longer guaranteed, and now comes with many strings attached, colleges must support each other and show civic leaders the value of higher education. We need local leaders to go to bat for us. Show them data demonstrating that when a small private college goes under, the whole region suffers. Colleges have a tendency to split apart and compete when funding shrinks or when going gets tough. This is a counterproductive strategy; colleges should instead band together in regional, cross-sector coalitions across public and private, large and small.

Colleges can then remind elected leaders that college towns are unique places, ready-made to build community, and are rare intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and walkable places. They are local economic engines. They bring people together and are “third place” bastions against the loneliness epidemic by offering communities arts, sports, skill building, and even help with farms and home gardens. More Americans, especially our local civic leaders, need to see and feel these benefits, so open your doors and melt down your iron gates. As Walt Whitman, the poet of democracy, said, “Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”

Mutual Transformation

Community engagement is not a one-way street. It is open, reciprocal relationship-building. A university shouldn’t throw their students at a community-based organization or civic group for its own sake. Students must be given training, guidelines, and accountability to ensure that they are not a burden on the external organization. Universities can place students to build capacity at these local groups, which include elected offices and education departments stretched thin.

A deeper community engagement changes the student, the community, and the college. This work can be humbling for an institution of higher education: the community organization might not want any help, or it might desperately need the help, but on its own terms, not the university’s. Higher education officials can start by listening, doing their due diligence on community needs—not unlike what a good and responsive elected official might do. Being present and showing up is crucial. It’s no wonder, then, that President Mandel considers herself in—and of—the community.

Editorial Note: This is a guest post in the “Summer School at College Towns” series.

The guest post comes from Seth Zeren of Build the Next Right Thing. He is a recovering city planner turned neighborhood real estate developer, advocate, and educator based in Providence, RI. Seth has been a high school science teacher, an adjunct lecturer in real estate and planning, and co-founded Neighbors Welcome! RI, Rhode Island’s state-wide pro-homes advocacy organization.

Frustration with the trajectory of our cities and towns has led Seth to focus on the “education problem” — that educational institutions haven’t kept pace with changing demands from professional practice. Seth has a new podcast building on these themes called The New School for City Builders. Seth has also written on the intersection of Strong Towns, CNU, and YIMBYism here and here.

Enjoy. -Ryan

I wrote this piece a couple of years ago—a bit cri de cour and a bit Martin Luther’s 95 Theses—in an attempt to crystalize my critique of the state of “professional” education for the City Builders: the architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders who together (though rarely in collaboration) build and manage our cities and towns. It has also formed the foundation of my efforts to imagine and build new educational institutions that would approach the training of City Builders in a different way. That enterprise is best seen in my new podcast: The New School for City Builders. Thanks to Ryan for letting me republish this for his audience.

The Manual Says…

About fifteen years ago, fresh from graduate school, I got my first job as a planner in a city outside Boston. I arrived at my basement desk excited to help my new city to meet the challenges of housing affordability and climate change.

A few weeks later, a group of us planners was in our windowless conference room working on ideas to improve the economic vitality and walkability of one of our village centers. Joining the planning staff was also a young city engineer, also in his late 20’s. And then the “no’s” started.

“No, we can’t put a crosswalk there.”

“No, we can’t add a stop sign there. We don’t have the MUTCD warrants.”

“The who with the what there?” I found myself replying.

“The manual says we can’t put a crosswalk or stop sign there,” he replied as if that was the end of the conversation.

“But you get what we’re trying to do here? What would you suggest?”

“Don’t change anything,” he replied, “and by the way if you do, it all has to meet ADA and have 100% stormwater capture.”

“But it doesn’t do that now…” I said, “Let me guess:”

“The manual says…” he filled in.

We were barely able to communicate, so different was the language of our specialties. A slow realization dawned on me that we didn’t even share a coherent idea of what the city is and what we’re trying to do. No wonder we found ourselves at cross-purposes again and again.

I would go on to have many conversations like this, not just with our city engineer, but also with the fire marshal, the conservation planner, the police traffic lieutenant, the public works director.

I also worked closely with many of the architects and developers working in our city. Part of my job was to review projects for zoning compliance and identify what relief they might require. And I realized these architects also spoke a specialist jargon and designed buildings like private sculptures.

Similarly, the developers could be myopically focused on their piece of land, their project, their profit, seemingly unaware or uncaring of the long-term collaborative goal of building a good place.¹

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City-Builders in Silos

My experience inside city government (and since on the outside as a developer) is that our city-building professions–architects, planners, engineers, developers, etc.–lack shared purpose, goals, vocabulary, or even a common understanding of just what a city or town is.

And perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising:

Architects are trained in the school of arts and architecture; the engineers are over in the engineering college; the planners are at the school of public affairs and government; the developers are in the business school; and the budding activists are over in the sociology department.

Separated in silos, you can get an engineering degree without learning anything about what a city is. You can get an architecture degree knowing nothing about development and a business degree in real estate development without learning anything about construction.

A Generation After the New Urbanism

Over thirty years ago, a nascent movement calling itself the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) challenged the then ascendant way of building cities and towns. Over the generation that followed, many ideas that were incubated within the movement—mixed-use districts and form-based zoning, the missing middle and accessory dwelling units, transit-oriented and traditional neighborhood development, complete streets and tactical urbanism, highway removal and parking reform—have become mainstream ideas in the city-building professions.

But over that same time-frame, there has been little progress in reforming the academic institutions that train our city-builders. Other than a select few schools (Notre Dame, Andrews University, and the University of Miami architecture programs in particular), it’s fair to say that most schools and faculties are indifferent to or hostile to the New Urbanist movement.

This hostility, I think, comes from a clash of very different cultures and institutions. New Urbanists are practice-oriented and focused on building better places right now, with all the messiness and compromise that entails. Many new urbanists focus on architectural styles that some might deride as historicist or pastiche. Promotion in academia, in contrast, depends on specialist research output and the goodwill of your peers. Many full-time academics have never worked outside the academy and are skeptical of New Urbanists’ close ties to for-profit developers and willingness to work in suburban contexts.

As a result of this divide, the New Urbanist movement has grown, built, thought, and written largely outside the academy. New Urbanist-friendly academics are few and far between. A student is more likely to be introduced to “urbanism,” whether new or traditional, through a part-time lecturer coming from professional practice, than a full-time faculty member.

It is also apparent to me now that this is a real problem. Our city builder professionals no doubt want to build thriving places people love. And our persistent failures to do so are deeply frustrating to many of us. The way we teach our city builders is not only failing our cities and towns, it’s also failing our students. What we teach them matters. How we teach them matters.

There are some 120,000 licensed architects in the US and 28,000 students enrolled in accredited architecture schools. There are around 40,000 city planners and 6,000 students enrolled in accredited planning schools. And there are around 300,000 practicing civil engineers with 20,000 degrees in civil engineering awarded each year. There are at least 3,000 counties and 20,000 municipalities across the US.

By way of comparison, CNU has just 2,600 members. Strong Towns has a little over 5,000.

A self-selected elite cadre of professionals—the “navy seals of city-building” as some New Urbanists self-identify—may forge brilliant new ideas and build a few excellent projects. But that isn’t going to scale (on its own) to implementing reform across the other 98% of America.

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Saving the World is a Team Sport

Humans have built cities, towns, and villages for many thousands of years. They are “human habitat”—places, like the beaver’s dam, that we shape to support our safety, productivity, sociability, and flourishing. Given the centrality of cities to human life (they are where most of us live today anyway), it should be little surprise that many of the hardest and most impactful challenges we face today are also “urban.” From housing affordability to mitigating and adapting to climate change, from economic prosperity and innovation, to public health and civic cohesion, the challenges that our cities face today require responses that cross disciplines, span government, civil society, and business, and defy easy solutions.

When I work with students trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up, I like to remind them that “saving the world is a team sport.” In hockey, football, soccer, etc., people play different positions (defense, offense, special teams, causing trouble, coach, etc.) but share a common goal. When those different positions work together, you can move a ball down the field. Indeed, a team is likely to be better with a bunch of different personalities and skills.

Responding to our urban problems is also a team sport. The need for technical specialists isn’t going away, because cities are truly complex and have many specialized systems to allow them to function. But, we need many more generalists who are adept problem solvers, managers, and leaders. And both generalists and specialists will need a shared understanding of the project of city building and management—the game they are playing together—so that they can advance the ball down the field.

Toward a New Way of Educating City Builders

What would it take to make it easier to learn, practice, and teach the knowledge and skills for building lovable places? I think that reform must include at least these foundational principles:

• Integration of the city-building professions–We must re-gather the specialist disciplines around city-building as a shared enterprise. No longer can we put the education of civil engineers, architects, developers, planners, etc. in separate silos across the university.

• Shared core curricula–To create humane stewards for our cities, we must bring students into the long conversation about how and why we build, the nature of cities and their predicaments, the relationship between ourselves and society, the balance of liberties and responsibilities, and so on through a common body of texts and experiences.

• Practice orientation–To teach city-building as a craft, the curriculum must be practical, rigorous, hands-on, and mindful of its history, present needs, and future evolution. Practice experience must be valued among the faculty.

Having read this far, you may be excited by the prospect of taking this reform program to our existing academic institutions. There would be great power in repurposing their faculty, students, buildings, and prestige. So how do we do it?

We don’t.

The truth is that legacy academic institutions are too hard to change. Colleges are defined by being a collegium of academic researchers. Universities center the creation of new knowledge. Tenure protections, disciplinary turf protection, promotion based on research output, and the critical culture of academia all push against the essential reforms above. Colleges are further constrained by their bureaucratic structure, where action dies in an ever-expanding process, while keeping up with elite fads prevents long-term strategic transformation.

So instead of waging a multi-decade campaign on the hostile soil of the academy… let’s recognize that it’s time to build something new.

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A New School, a New Type of School

When I have shared the above ideas with people, I am often asked, “Why is building a new school the right idea? Why not a new series of online trainings? Or summer programs? Or weekend workshops? Or apprenticeships? Why not a loose confederacy of all those things cobbled together into something like a degree program?”

I like all those ideas. They are worth doing. And doing at least a few of them will help us get off the ground. But they cannot be a replacement for building durable, physical institutions.

City building is not a tech startup. Cities and towns are one of the oldest activities of human craft, art, and politics. We need durable institutions that can carry this lineage forward with fidelity, confidence, and adaptability. A physical school builds a community of learning and practice. Students and faculty are strengthened, tested, and supported by their cohorts. It will be a place of pride, a symbol, and a gathering place for city builders in practice across the country.

The second reason for a physical school is that we’re not going to stop licensing and certifying architects, engineers, and planners. Credentials can matter even to developers and public sector managers. Having a license or a stamp provides substantial power. And right now, nearly all these stamps are coming from graduates of schools teaching the old siloed way of city-building.

The path to licensure comes through obtaining a degree in an accredited program. To reform the city building professions, we need to build schools that can (eventually) obtain accreditation and produce young professionals on the path to licensure.

And the third reason is that the way to spur change in our legacy institutions is through competition.

Olin College of Engineering, founded in 2001, is an instructive example. The school’s founders observed that in most electrical and mechanical engineering programs, students spent three years in math and science lecture courses before getting into a lab or workshop. American engineering graduates were getting a degree in applied science. But they struggled when they went out into the workplace because they had little knowledge of product development, entrepreneurship, or the factory floor.

At Olin, they redesigned the curriculum so students are getting their hands dirty in project-based learning from the first semester. They still get all the same knowledge as a traditional program with much more experience in design, manufacturing, and entrepreneurship. Olin now exerts a competitive force on other schools to keep up with their curricular and pedagogical innovations and hosts summer programs for the faculty of other schools to learn their techniques.

Our new schools will likewise be able to innovate in curriculum and pedagogy, and then share those lessons broadly so that many institutions and their students can benefit.

How We Can Do Things Differently

• Experiential, not just classes—Education shouldn’t just consist of classroom work. Students will work on construction sites, spend a day studying a single building, or walk across a whole city. Short courses will allow intense focus on a topic and study-abroad terms in cities around the world will allow students to see and feel how other people live and bring those lessons back to their future work.

• Rigorous, practical, project-based—The curriculum and pedagogy will emphasize practical skills equally with theory. Students will work extensively on real world projects and learn from active practitioners. Expectations will be rigorous and grading hard–not everyone will make it. We want graduates to be known and know themselves to be excellent, hard-working, and resilient.

• Cross-disciplinary—We will bring together disciplines that often operate in silos to learn together so that engineers, architects, activists, planners, public administrators, and developers understand each other and can collaborate effectively.

• No tenure, teaching focus, institutional neutrality—The tenure system has laudable goals but creates perverse incentives for faculty to check boxes, rack up publications, minimize teaching, and not rock the boat. We will follow in the path of other schools, including Olin College, in awarding 5-year, renewable contracts to faculty based on student development, research, practice, and institutional service. Student learning, development, and achievement are the principal goal and metric of the institution and the faculty. Faculty and student speech and independence will be protected through rigorous principles of institutional neutrality.

• City-building as a craft—City building and management involve technical crafts with deep lineage: architecture, engineering, accounting, construction, etc. In each case, reform is needed within the specialization as well as a recovery of lost ways of doing things. Our curriculum will build on the past, rather than seeking novelty for its own sake.

• A common humanities core—a core curriculum integrating history and philosophy, literature and drawing, rhetoric and reasoning, economics and finance will prepare students to be humane stewards and not simple technicians or profiteers. Common courses taken by all students build shared understanding of our collaborative enterprise. Learning how to learn is essential to preparing students to be generalists, able to learn and manage between narrow specializations.

Together, these guiding principles help create a different institutional DNA from legacy academic programs, ensuring that as the school(s) grow and evolve, they stay true to this different way of teaching city builders.

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How We Start?

The prospect of launching a brand new college is daunting. Substantial time and resources will be required to obtain facilities, recruit faculty, and develop the curriculum before the first student comes through the doors, let alone see the first class through to graduation and obtain any needed accreditation.

Fortunately, there are ways that we can start short of building a full college from day one. We don’t need to know all the steps along the way. We just have to start.

The following ideas benefit from the fact that they require much less time and fewer resources to launch. There is an existing market of people who will pay for these programs. And no accreditation is required.

• Weekend intensives—Perhaps the easiest step. A weekend is a condensed period of time easier for working adults or full-time students. It can serve as a teaser introduction or to impart a specific idea, skill, or open a door to future programming. Examples of this are already being run by the Incremental Development Alliance (IncDev), Neighborhood Evolution, Small Scale Developer Forum, and formerly by the City Building Exchange. The new Citymakers Collective is planning a course for the fall of 2024 on cognitive architecture.

• Summer schools—Significantly more intensive (especially logistically to secure housing and classroom space). College students and recent graduates already pay for summer programs that offer unique learning experiences (no course credit necessarily required). A three, four, or five week summer program offers much more space for an extensive curriculum and lasting skill development. The Citymakers Collective is working on such a course for the summer of 2025, modeled on the Intbau summer programs. I have a summer course of my own in development, the City Summer Intensive.

• Professional certifications—Another option is to create a series of (online) courses that would lead to a professional certification. Examples include CNU-Accreditation and a new initiative by IncDev to certify consultants for working with incremental developers.

• Online courses—Online courses are attractive for their lower overhead, ability to scale enrollment, and ability to reach students anywhere. Examples run the gamut from short programs like the many commercial real estate development training programs such as Thesis Driven or Bright Build to multi-year courses like the Classic Planning Institute’s Academy.

In developing these programs, we will begin creating the curriculum materials, pedagogical tools, network of instructors, professional staff, and market knowledge we need to build lasting institutions. It’s proof of concept–for ourselves and for others (especially funders).

Looking Backward in the Future

If we can project forward to 2050 and imagine looking backward, what do we hope to see?

I imagine a rich ecosystem of educational programs–from short courses to graduate certificates and undergraduate programs. I see a network of City & Town Builder Colleges spread across the country, offering graduate and undergraduate degrees, sharing similar DNA and core curricula, and also specializing to meet the needs of their region. I imagine a constellation of satellite campuses in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, shared by the colleges in the network for international learning experiences.

All together, these institutions are training thousands of new professionals each year, as well as pulling legacy institutions along to keep up.

Ten thousand or more alumni of our various programs will spread out across the country, taking important roles building and managing cities and towns across every state. New leaders within the professions and their trade organizations will reorient their professions around the common enterprise of “building places people love.”

Instead of disposable places and people, we will build and administer cities and towns to last 1,000 years–sustainable, resilient, prosperous, adaptive, inclusive, beloved communities.

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PS–If you or someone you know is in a position to donate substantial resources to this effort, please reach out!

Note: Around the College Town is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.

Billionaires Revitalized Dead Colleges

This week it was announced that Jensen Huang, the Nvidia billionaire, and his wife, Lori, donated a $75 million gift to Vanderbilt University. The gift will not be going to the traditional campus in Nashville, Tennessee. Instead, this will go to fund Vanderbilt’s new art, architecture, and design campus in San Francisco, California.

The site where the new Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design will be located is on the former campus of California College of the Arts (CAA), which is shuttering at the end of this upcoming academic year. The 119-year-old arts college struggled with enrollment and had a $20 million deficit. Vanderbilt agreed to buy CAA for an undisclosed amount earlier this year.

Importantly, this purchase is not a merger, nor even an acquisition. The institution formerly known as CCA will cease to exist. Vanderbilt has promised to keep some of the spirit alive by creating the “CCA Institute” and by keeping the Wattis Institute gallery open.

The CAA case is a wonderful location, easily walkable and bikeable in the booming city of San Francisco. Unlike some dying colleges, a lot of the campus space seemed like it was in good shape and recently refurbished. There is no doubt in my mind that with Huang and Vanderbilt leading the revitalizing, the campus will be a thriving jewel for the city and university.

Something Old or New?

Wealthy donors bequeathing colleges large sums of money is nothing new. These kinds of philanthropic efforts go back to the origins of higher education in the country with the likes of Elihu Yale and John Harvard. Vanderbilt is no exception, as Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad and transportation robber baron, made the initial donation to get the school up and running.

But perhaps a new emerging trend is not for upstart universities founded by billionaires, but instead revitalizing dead or dying college spaces. The most recent cases are alliances between the billionaires and strong universities. The Huang-Vanderbilt case is just the most recent. There have been others.

Steve and Connie Ballmer gave the University of Oregon $425 million, which helped to create and fund the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health at a new campus in Portland. The University of Oregon-Portland sits on the site of the former Concordia University, which shut down in 2020 after over a century of operations. I visited the new Portland campus, and it is one of the finest adaptive reuses of a defunct college that I have ever seen. Oregon invested some serious funding into the space, and it shows.

In another similar case, Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of famed Apple founder Steve Jobs, funded a nonprofit that bought out the old San Francisco Art Institute. Rather than partnering with an established university, this new space will be called California Academy of Studio Arts (CASA), including saving the beloved local artist Diego Rivera's mural. It was in rough shape when I saw it last year, but I trust that Jobs will have the resources to revitalize the space.

Billionaires Can’t (or Won’t) Always Save Dying Colleges

Looking at this new trend, it brings up the question about billionaires possibly saving struggling colleges before they die. While this tactic has been tried, they do not always work. The Huang family had even formerly donated to CAA, reportedly up to $22.5 million. The gift was lauded as saving the college back when it was made in 2025. But in the end, the college still closed.

Hampshire College is perhaps one of the most famous institutions to shutter. The documentarian Ken Burns helped contribute to the fund that raised $55 million with hopes of saving his alma mater. Despite the efforts, the college announced its closure in 2026.

In a lesser-known case, Masayoshi Son, the billionaire Softbank founder, attended Holy Names College as an international ESL student before transferring to UC Berkeley. He even met his wife there! But he did not save the Bay Area college when it finally went under in 2023. He did donate to the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University, the powerhouse Chinese university.

Finally, I turn to Andrew Cherng and Peggy Cherng, the founders of Panda Express. Long before their Chinese chain restaurant empire, they were international students at tiny Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas. While the college is still open, it has struggled in recent years. I always wondered why the Cherngs wouldn’t plop down a bunch of money at their alma mater, perhaps renaming it Cherng University. But they have only donated $50,000, as far as I can tell.

Instead, the couple and their philanthropic arms have focused on giving to stronger institutions. They gave the California Institute of Technology $30 million in 2017, the University of Missouri $5 million in 2024 (which is the master’s alma mater of the couple), Cal Poly Pomona $2.5 million in 2011, and even $450,000 to the University of Pennsylvania for the Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian American Studies.

Strong Get Stronger

I think the appeal for these billionaires in reviving a dead campus is to start something new. But by going through an already-established university, it gives more cachet and increases the chances of success. After all, a lot of namesake university patrons never lived to see their creations reach great heights. Leland Stanford Junior University wouldn’t become the Stanford we know today until the tech booms in Silicon Valley.

These revitalizing efforts have largely centered on campuses in or around major metropolitan areas. While this trend may give hope to communities with dead colleges, I think that spaces in rural areas will be a much harder sell. It takes some serious deep pockets to make these revitalization efforts work. Expect more of this in so-called “Superstar Cities” like New York City, San Francisco, LA, or Miami, not in small towns without the cachet.

These trends are just part of the Age of Conquest in US higher education. The biggest get bigger, the weaker wither away. I also extended to competative nature to broader American society in an adaptive version for The Chronicle, which helps to explain why billionaires prefer to partner with the top institutions. These recent cases probably warrant a deeper investigation into the broader landscape of philanthropy in higher ed and beyond.

Video by me.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• NYU Tokyo? New York University is discussing the possibility of a new branch campus in Japan. My guess is that this does not happen, but rather a smaller study center. It will cannibalize too much of the NYC Shanghai appeal.

• In other New York news, a New York state school district is getting a robot teacher. I do not foresee these replacing us anytime soon, but it is an interesting development nonetheless, especially with the dueling forces of defunding and anti-Ed Tech sentiments.

• BU agrees to give the city of Boston over $100 million. Non-profit universities do not pay taxes, so sometimes they are seen to leach off of public service. These kinds of deals are becoming more common.

• Over in education housing news, Santa Cruz cannot retain teachers due to housing prices. It is a common problem in high-cost-of-living California. Some districts have even opted to build teacher housing. I wish we would just build more generally.

• In higher ed housing news, A two billion dollar student housing development is coming to the University of Florida.

• Columbia University buys beautiful gothic dorms. Funny enough, the building was formerly Union Theological Seminary, which is a Columbia affiliate.

• Loyola Chicago may turn a shuttered Catholic school into housing. These types of adaptive reuse cases are rising as more schools shutter.

• Even regular people are getting into the adaptive reuse in this space. Live in an old boarding school or shuttered school. Both are quite reasonably priced.

• On the other end of the spectrum, if you have 17 million sitting around, you can buy Thomas Jefferson’s childhood home. I would love to see it turned into some kind of living museum or educational center.

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Urbanism-ish

• LA might finally rid itself of the graffiti towers. It’s embarrassing that the locality has allowed it to languish this long. Poor governance.

• LA Mayor wants transit system to be free. I am already on record as anti-free buses. A more efficient and frequent system is a much higher priority. LA does not have this.

• We don’t have to accept a poorly run Los Angeles. LA is trying to build more bus stop shades to prepare for the Olympics. I’m glad we are getting these, but it’s kind of sad that it takes hosting a global event to make it happen.

• One local writer makes the case that a denser LA doesn’t have to be an ugly one. Hear, hear!

• Finally for the LA news, if you are so sick of the city, then how about hitting rural California? Gold mining is becoming hot again in the state.

• Switching gears from my current home to my former home, OKC might get a commuter rail system. The renderings look great. This would be a huge boon to the area.

• In self-driving car news, trial lawyers are against self-driving cars because they make so much money from car accidents. Disgusting.

• Likewise, Uber is trying to slow down the adoption of self-driving cars. I guess they are falling behind the race between Waymo and other industry leaders, so they are looking to slow down progress.

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Closing Time… Sweep Your Own Bike Lane

Guerrilla urbanism (or tactical urbanism) is when people take over duties from localities to fix streets, roads, and other public infrastructure. Sometimes, these acts can get people arrested. Nonetheless, the dereliction of governments leads people to become vigilantes with efforts to clean up bad urbanism.

I recently found a new company selling do-it-yourself bike lane sweepers, aptly called Bike Lane Sweeper. These can easily be hooked up to a bike and then driven over a bike lane, removing various debris from the path. The costs range from $3,100 to $5,500, including a hybrid upgrade. The company targets bike and urbanist advocacy groups who take on this guerrilla urbanism. But they also hope that municipalities will take interest, too.

The BikeLA subreddit cued me onto this new company. A local outfit called Bikerowave Coop has a Bike Lane Sweeper in its arsenal, clearing out streets on Venice, from Lincoln to Sepulveda, major bike thoroughfares. The poster even offered a review of the product in the comment section, and organized by me below.

Pros:

1. “There is no competition, there’s literally nothing else I can do… for this size and weight.”

2. “It’s actually kind of fun to use, and he gets a ton of people engaged and happy that somebody’s doing something about the problem.”

3. “It can be towed behind, literally any bike, as long as you keep it under 10 mph.”

4. “…taking up minimal space.”

Cons:

• “A new one is pretty damn expensive.”

• “You can’t pick up bigger objects like a fast food container cup, or other larger objects that can’t fit under the front of the unit.”

• “It can’t handle several inch deep debris in one pass, you’ll have to come back and do a couple passes on the deep stuff”.

• “It kicks up quite a lot of dust.”

• “It’s not good at catching every single thing on the very edge of the curb.”

So what do you think? Is the Bike Lane Sweeper the answer to much-neglected bike lanes in the country? I definitely would like to see more of these operated in my area. Universities, too, could have a few of these to clean up parts of campus.

Editorial Note: This is the second guest post in the “Summer School at College Towns” series.

This guest post comes from , is an Orange County educator whose experience has focused on combining her teaching of English as a Second Language background with other academic studies, including public policy and higher education research.

College Towns has previously posted about international students being targeted by the Trump administration. Building from these and the recent policy to limit visas to just four years, Carson explores how losing international students is detrimental to local economies. Enjoy. -Ryan

International students have quietly shored up the budgets not only for the schools they attend but also for the municipalities in which they reside. As an instructor at multiple institutions in Southern California, I wondered if the absence of international students was causing any measurable issues for local economies. I did what all academics do when faced with a research question; I began searching for data. What I found is that a quiet economic siphon is deeply impacting the neighborhoods surrounding local universities.

NAFSA’s most recent economic report from 2025 tells us that international students contributed $42.89 billion to the national economy in 2024-2025. This figure reflects the loss of $1.1 billion over the prior year. Federal laws restricting visas for international students have become increasingly stringent and show no sign of letting up under the present administration. Table 1 below shows how those numbers have changed over time.

Readers will be familiar with the litany of complaints levied against international students. Claims range from: international students take seats from Americans, international students are spies, international students steal American jobs. This framing of international students as bad actors is offered without context or proof. Such statements are designed to destabilize higher ed at a time when the system is already under attack and being forced to adapt to regulatory interference. The recent ruling from the Trump administration limiting visas to only four years has only added to these unwarranted attacks on this student population.

How Does This Economic Hit Land at the Local Level?

Anecdotally, I know from the institutions I teach for that it hurts programs, and the decrease in students has resulted in fewer classes being offered. Some might view this as a problem solely for higher ed to sort out, but research reveals that international students contribute dollars not only to tuition but also to home rentals, food, commerce, car purchases, tourist dollars, and sales tax.

To even secure an F-1 student visa, these applicants must demonstrate absolute financial solvency by providing liquid bank statements proving they can cover a minimum cost of attendance that typically ranges from $40,000 to over $75,000 per year, depending on the campus and degree program. Because they are legally barred from working off-campus, this entire sum represents a guaranteed, upfront injection of outside capital directly into the neighborhoods surrounding our universities.

Losing international students isn’t just an issue of empty seats in a classroom. Student reduction means empty apartments, fewer customers at neighborhood grocery stores, and fewer dollars flowing into local sales taxes that fund city parks and roads. The impact is much larger than is currently being portrayed.

While multiple examples exist of this local economic impact, I selected two cases from my state of California to demonstrate the order of importance this issue presents to local communities. California provides a microcosm of the entire country, as illustrated in Table 1. I selected public institutions for ease of finding verifiable information, but this does not mean that private institutions are not impacted in the same way.

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Foul Weather in San Diego

The economic liabilities of tightening immigration policies are acutely evident at San Diego State University (SDSU), a major public institution facing unexpected international enrollment contractions. While SDSU administrators initially projected an expansion of international enrollment based on strong admission activity, thousands of accepted students were ultimately unable to enroll due to severe visa appointment backlogs and a national F-1 visa refusal rate that spiked to a decade-high of 35%.

This administrative gridlock has been severely compounded by an aggressive federal vetting climate. Formal updates from the SDSU International Student Center document instances of sudden visa status terminations and active student visas being revoked mid-semester without warning.

When a major metropolitan campus like SDSU loses substantial international enrollment to systemic visa denials, the fiscal damage spills immediately into the surrounding San Diego municipality. According to NAFSA, every three international students historically support a local service job; a contraction of 400 international students at a major hub like SDSU places roughly 133 local San Diego service, hospitality, and retail jobs at immediate risk or eliminates them entirely.

The economic ripple effect of losing international enrollment can be painful. Based on the latest economic value analysis by NAFSA, international students in California contribute an average of nearly $45,000 each to the economy through a combination of tuition, housing, and local commerce. Applying this baseline to SDSU, losing a cohort of just 400 international students represents a combined loss of roughly $18 million in direct campus revenue and local San Diego business spending, which doesn’t even account for the parallel losses hitting neighboring universities.

In case you are thinking that SDSU can just replace these international students with domestic students and avoid the problem entirely, the issue is more complex. According to data compiled by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), non-resident undergraduate students pay significantly more than California residents. At California State Universities (including SDSU), non-residents pay the base tuition plus an additional supplemental tuition fee, bringing their total to roughly double what an in-state resident pays. The same is true for graduate students, except that international students make up more of the student population, especially in STEM programs.

The extra tuition from international and out-of-state students directly helps offset state revenue shortfalls and heavily subsidizes the education, financial aid, and resources available to local California residents.

If any California State University campus reduces its international student body and replaces them with in-state students, the university brings in far less revenue. This forces the campus to look for budget cuts, which can mean fewer course offerings, larger class sizes, or fewer campus jobs—all of which harm the local campus economy. This is in addition to the problems faced in the local off-campus economic community.

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(Un)Welcome to the OC

These shifting dynamics of federal visa approvals and immigration backlogs have left a clear mark on California’s public university infrastructure, with California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) serving as a primary regional indicator in Orange County. For years, CSUF operated as a major cultural and economic hub for international students, maintaining a historical baseline of well over 2,400 to 3,100 foreign-born students annually, according to historical records reported in College Factual institutional tracking data. However, as federal screening measures tightened and visa backlogs mounted, recent aggregate profiles indicate that CSUF’s unique international footprint has contracted significantly, sliding to a baseline of roughly 1,500 to 1,790 active students.

This almost 50% downturn mirrors a wider macro trend given that the California State University (CSU) system has experienced a stark contraction in its global student body, culminating in a recent drop to just 12,122 international students, as reported by CalMatters. The downturn represents the tail end of a multi-year decline accelerated by the pandemic. In 2019, the system boasted a robust international enrollment hovering between 18,000 and 20,000 students. However, a perfect storm of pandemic-era travel restrictions, prolonged visa backlogs, and fluctuating federal immigration policies ultimately drained more than 5,800 international students from the system, deeply reshaping the cultural and financial landscape of California’s state campuses.

Applying economic framework formulas established by NAFSA, a contraction of this magnitude at CSUF means that an estimated $30 million to $45 million in annual, non-tuition discretionary spending has vanished from the local Fullerton and Orange County ecosystem. Based on NAFSA’s regional employment multiplier, erasing up to 1,600 international scholars from the local economy places roughly 533 local hospitality, retail, and off-campus housing jobs at immediate risk. Furthermore, this contraction simultaneously starves the public university of approximately $24 million in annual out-of-state tuition premiums traditionally used to subsidize campus operations and domestic enrollment.

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How Long Will We Continue to Shoot Ourselves in the Foot?

The international visa crisis is not a temporary administrative headache; it is an unintended, self-inflicted economic sanction on America and our college towns. While university press releases may project a stable front, local landlords, small business owners, and service workers are quietly paying the multi-million-dollar price for federal policy gridlock. National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) data shows that 59% of America’s billion-dollar “unicorn” startups have immigrant founders, and one in four began as an international student visa holder. Blocking international student participation harms local metropolitan ecosystems.

In addition to the economic woes inflicted by the visa restrictions, there are multiple other unintended consequences of limiting the number of international students in both undergraduate and graduate programs. As an instructor, I truly value the international perspective these students bring to the classroom. Their contributions offer the domestic students an opportunity to hear perspectives other than their own and offer a chance to form friendships and learn about other cultures, even if they are not able or interested in participating in study abroad situations. It is not possible or practical for every student to leave their home campus, and for some, this is as close as they will get to an international experience.

Another issue is the loss of potential employees with the skills many employers report as difficult to find, including science and math expertise and/or multilingual employees capable of working fluently in more than one language. The Peterson Institute for International Economics recently produced a report that details the impact of international student exclusion on U.S. economic growth.

The US is not alone in this movement. England, Australia, and Canada have all also attempted to reduce the number of international students. However, they are also discovering that shutting out all international students may not be the best way forward. If you follow the money, the true economic beneficiaries of America’s hostile visa climate are America’s geopolitical competitors, including China, whose “internationalization at home” strategy successfully retains billions in domestic family capital that used to be liquidated into U.S. college towns.

Overall, research led me to more clearly link the loss of students to a reduction of both city revenues and jobs. This important issue demands additional research and consideration. The interest groups lobbying Congress for a remedy are doing so from the standpoint of the institutions themselves, but clearly there needs to be input from local, state, and federal government officials to highlight the economic imperative revealed in the research.

Note: Around the College Town is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.

Free Buses vs. Fast Buses

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has received some heat recently after a hot streak of hosting the World Cup and winning the NBA finals. One story saw him critiqued for leaving out Little Italy from a map of immigrant enclave communities around the city (to which I don’t have much to add until my future The Sopranos article). The other story was about buses, sparking a debate between free buses and faster buses.

One headline in a local paper read, “Mamdani’s push for free buses takes a back seat to faster ones.” Mamdani’s critics say he is breaking a promise to voters for free bases, a central platform during his mayoral campaign. Instead, the mayor of NYC is teaming up with the governor of NY to offer the city faster buses. The plan is to invest millions into dedicated, protected bus lanes, new bus stops, shelters and seating, Automated Camera Enforcement (ACE) to keep out illegally parked cars, and other maintenance. These services will be “modeled after the best rapid bus systems around the world,” according to the report from the mayor’s office.

I’m not mad at the mayor for chasing fast over free. I’ve already come out as being against free buses. As I wrote before, I take my cue from the East Asian countries where I used to live, South Korea and China, or have visited, Japan and Hong Kong. These places have wonderful public transit (see my video below); none of the systems are free. They are low-cost and reliable. American cities should aspire to their level of service. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

The juxtaposition between Asia and the US is even starker right when you return home from the former. I have written about doing just that here in LA, but I also experienced a version of it when I moved back from Korea to New York City for grad school.

At that time, I was working as an adjunct at a college north of the city in White Plains. I would take the Metro-North train for an easy ride up. It was nice; the biggest hassle was getting to the station. I had to get from Columbia to the Metro-North Station, going down 125th Street. That stretch was incredibly packed. The bus would often take 45 minutes or more just to creep along that mile. Illegally parked cars, normal traffic, the inefficient system for wheelchairs, the stops too close together—all things that equaled big delays. It was actually just faster to walk, so that’s what I ended up doing most of the time. This is a system failure.

To the city’s credit, they installed dedicated bus lanes and raised stations on 125th, along with a real BRT line that didn’t stop as much. My old trip takes a fraction of the time now. But some of the same problems I faced when I lived there persist in the rest of the city. “Forever. Slowest bus in America,” one local resident told Streetsblog New York City. He typically waited a half hour for his bus, then it crept along Tremont Avenue in the Bronx.

The rest of NYC deserves some reprieve as my old strip got in Harlem. The strategies used to make buses faster on 125th are exactly the right kinds of fixes buses need throughout not just the city but the country. It seems this is exactly what Mayor Mamdani is trying to do—much smarter than free buses.

And yet, people are still mad at the mayor. Probably the dimmest response that I have seen to all of this is the idea that faster, more efficient buses will lead to less overtime for union bus drivers. This is absurd. We can run more buses! Really, we should not be thinking that public transportation is some kind of job program. The top priority should be the actual service.

So I don’t care if Mamdani backtracked on his idea of free buses. Faster and more efficient is the way to go. What do you think? Where do you fall on the free bus vs. faster bus debate? I’m not sure we can ever have both (or am I wrong there?).

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• In a sign of the times of our national greying and birthrate drops, some schools that shuttered due to low enrollment are getting new life as senior housing. Some residents attended the school when they were kids!

• BYU is building more family housing for married students and those with kids. Universities really should be considering these kinds of options more, as the stereotypical 18-year-old college student is no longer the norm.

• San Jose school district is looking to buy an apartment for staff housing. It’s sad that our teachers can barely afford anything in this state.

• Even a place like Abilene, Texas, is facing a “rental crisis.” The university there is now looking to ease off-campus demand with more on-campus offerings.

• Harvard is getting into the layoff game. If even Harvard must shrink its workforce, what hope do the rest of the universities have? Tough times.

• After a University of Oregon student was killed by a driver during a bike ride, Eugene officials look to road diets. The dangerous driver was reportedly doing 50 MPH on a residential street next to campus. It’s sad that local officials need a death to happen before slowing down cars and making cities safer for bikers and pedestrians.

• In some international ed news, India’s top university is set to open a branch campus in New York. The Age of Conquest knows no bounds.

• at New China Literacy chronicles 50 years of Chinese college entrance exam essay questions. Cool idea for research connecting education with politics.

• In more China news, the country has successfully launched and landed a reusable rocket. This will just heat up the space race even further (a good thing!).

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Urbanism-ish

• Poland is planning to build a massive national rail network, including almost 1,700 miles of high-speed rail. It seems like a lot of exciting things are happening in Poland these days.

• India is also getting into the high-speed rail game, with an added seven new corridors recently announced.

• Likewise, the UAE is also getting into the high-speed rail game, along with their very own Sphere. I guess if I want to take a train to the Sphere, I’ll have to fly to the Middle East first, since the LA to Vegas one seems like it is never happening.

• Feeling the success of hosting the World Cup game, LA is confident it can make its Olympics car-free after all. I, though, remain very much not confident!

• has a post on how officials in LA are hindering the rebuilding efforts from last year's fires. Only 28 of the 5000 homes have been rebuilt so far, and the city seems more interested in catching rogue contractors than speeding up the process.

• You can now kayak through the infamous LA concrete river. Another insane and wasted space that is finally coming to some use.

• Here’s a cool real estate opportunity for any readers down in Australia. Live in the bell tower of an old monastery! Less than half a million USD.

• Ok, if you are in the US, I have you covered. Here is a church conversion up for sale in Buffalo, NY. Only $500K (admittedly, not quite as “converted” as the one from Australia).

• Tokyo to add a 3% tax on hotel stays. I was there last summer, and I certainly understand the overtourism issue, especially as the Yen continues to depreciate.

• In self-driving car news, Waymo is expanding to Tampa, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Denver. I am personally excited for the San Diego expansion, which means I am sandwiched between Waymo service in LA and SD, just waiting for it here in OC.

• Of course, humans are trying to find ways to sabotage the self-driving movement: Teens use Waymo to shoot water guns at other cars.

• In other car news, Fiat to bring tiny golf-cart-like car to the US. Not sure about the market for these, but I welcome companies making cars smaller, not bigger, for once.

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Closing Time… Celebrities Wish They Were Professors

This week, fellow faculty in the r/professor subreddit were debating a clip between Mindy Kaling and Amy Poehler. The two comedians were discussing what it would be like to be a professor. Poehler convinces Kaling that it would be a nice life:

I don’t think I want to teach at a college. -Kaling

You don’t know that! Don’t rule that out. -Poehler

Think about coming in, like a beautiful sweater, like Dartmouth, let’s say. Drive in at 10 o’clock in the morning. Have your coffee… the door creaks open and there’s like 150 kids staring at you and you start your class. Nobody gets to interrupt. You’re done in an hour. -Poehler

That does sound good. -Kaling

I’m a big fan of both The Office and Parks & Rec (along with SNL and countless other performances by Poehler). So it was fun to hear them romanticize my profession. The subreddit got a kick out of it, too. Well, some faculty were annoyed (and overly sensitive), but others thought it was a pretty funny perception of the profession by the celebs.

Poehler even answered that last question in the podcast episode, which wasn’t in the clip. She said robots and AI can just take care of the work. Again, there is a good sense of humor about this. Fellow professors, do not take it so seriously! Enjoy it.

Note: Around the College Town is my weekly-ish links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.

This week falls on the July 4th holiday weekend, so this edition will be a little light.

Yes, Professors Can Be Patriotic?

The stereotype of American professors is that we hate the country. This is certainly the view of my profession within some top conservative circles, with Vice President JD Vance leading the charge. "The professors are the enemy," the Ivy League-trained VP assails.

This line of attack is not even a new one. "Do Colleges HAVE To Hire Red Professors?" asked The American Legion Magazine back in 1951. The issue was published during the days of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) mania, so it may be wrapped up in questionable intentions. Yet, the symmetry from now to then is unmistakable.

As much as I defend US higher education here on College Towns, I must admit that some of these accusations do seem generally correct: many professors are simply not patriotic, at least not in the US. Indeed, reports that a “vast majority” of professors are left-leaning, while finds that pride in the country has collapsed among left-leaning Americans.

This means that they do not celebrate the Fourth of July, they get queasy with the American flag, and they dwell on national negativities. The sentiment can be described as doomerism, and it has become a common ideal among American professors. Today, so many professors want to be Howard Zinn.

But this form of national doomerism is not universal in the profession. There are some professors who are proud of the country, its people, and its history. Of course, I know this firsthand as the author of three installments in my United States Semiquincentennial Series. But I am not alone in the profession either.

Over the holiday weekend, other academics offered their celebrations. , Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame, proclaimed, “I’m an American nationalist, too. Not just a patriot in the sense of being proud of America, but a nationalist,” on . Likewise, , Fellow at Brown University, labeled the “America is bad” take as “a stone-cold loser” on the . Finally, former classmate of mine and Assistant Professor at Leiden University, , makes “The case for liberal nationalism” through a rich data narrative on his new Substack.

US higher education needs these kinds of pro-national sentiments because these are generally what the everyman American believes. Our sector has recently been looking for answers to why trust from the public has tanked. I won’t pretend to have the full answers to this quandary (it is quite complicated), but I do think making sure that the public knows some of our professors are patriotic can help.

None of this patriotism means there can be no criticism of the country. I provide my fair share of national critique on this very website. I lean on the famous quote from J. William Fulbright, the late Arkansas senator who championed international education. He was also a former professor, derisively called an “egghead” by rivals like Lyndon B. Johnson. Fulbright wrote:

To criticize one's country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment. It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences a belief that the country can do better than it is doing.

I understand that many are disillusioned with politics in the country right now. That’s fine, but sometimes you just have to take a break from politics, eat a hot dog, grab a Coors, watch some fireworks, and celebrate the holiday with the rest of the country. Happy 250th, America.

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If you haven’t already, check out my Semiquincentennial Series. I should have one more (or possibly two) coming out by the end of the summer. Thanks for reading.

Education

• California will vote on a $350 million bond to build more affordable student housing. My guess is that it fails, as it combines two things the voters hate most: housing and students, not to mention the state’s long tax revolt.

• On the flip side, UT San Antonio and Indiana University are adding more student housing options in their metropolitan downtowns. I am always a fan of this strategy to help juice the atmosphere of downtowns. Students bring life.

• Virginia Wesleyan becomes Batten U. This is not the worst name change that I have seen, but losing the geographic descriptor might not be ideal.

• Across the pond, Chinese companies are closing fancy private schools in the UK, annoying parents and worrying local education officials.

• In educational-adjacent news, I’m somewhat of a book collector, and I am always surprised by how much some rare books are worth. See the fair with $100M in books:

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  Urbanism-ish

• Disneyland is offering twilight rates at just 59 bucks. I might have to try this as a Southern California resident.

• But if you are planning a visit, the LAX People Mover has been delayed… again. At this point, I am wondering if we are going to make the 2028 Olympics. We already missed the World Cup!

• Fodor’s is releasing an AI modeled after the founder. It seems the travel book genre is basically dead; thrift stores cannot give them away. Perhaps AI can save these companies.

• Boise, Idaho, might be getting an intercity passenger train. Cool for the region!

• at tells us why infill housing can help save dying cities.

• Over in self-driving car news, Zoox has a new design. Looks a bit too futuristic for my taste.

  

• China’s Xiaomi self-driving car impresses in Germany. I think from EVs to AVs, Chinese car companies are going to dominate the future.

• American-built Japanese cars are worse than Japanese-built, a feature that does not help in the competition with Chinese manufacturers, as the Japanese continue to lose ground.

• Speaking of struggling industries, this over-a-century-old woodworking shop in New York City is shutting down. Sad, but these are the realities these days.

Closing Time… The World Wishes the US a Happy 250th

I loved seeing all the various Semiquincentennial celebrations across the country, but I might have enjoyed the images from throughout the world even more. Yes, other countries paid homage to the country’s 250th birthday. I found this heartening, given that our reputation and standing have taken a hit recently. Here are some of my favorites that I saw on social media (there are many more):

Emmanuel Macron, President of France:

Lin Chia-lung, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China:

The German Embassy in DC:

The Republic of Kiribati:

The Eiffel Tower in Paris:

And my absolute favorite comes from the celebration in Japan. The Japanese government gifted 250 cherry blossom trees to the US, adding to the gifts that inspired the DC festival going back to 1910. Tokyo also held a fireworks celebration as the Rainbow Bridge lit with American national colors.

Japan wished the US a happy Bicentennial back in the 1970s, too. What an image from that celebration below. Since I work at a university with roots in Japan, I am pleased to see that the two nations have strong relations. Many of my colleagues and students come from Japan. I even celebrated July 4th with a few this year. Yes, I did buy some Sapporo for the BBQ. Don’t worry, we also had hamburgers.

I have to close with the post below, which I had a good chuckle at on July 4th. Thanks to all who celebrated in the US and across the world! Here’s to 250 more.

This article is the third installment of my United States Semiquincentennial Series. This series is a celebration of the country, its history, and the American people. See the previous editions on the Space Race and National Geographic.

This summer is the 250th birthday of the United States of America, officially on July 4, 2026. This Semiquincentennial was supposed to be a monumental celebration of the country, its people, and its accomplishments. Yet, the build-up to the date has felt flat, with the national mood seemingly not feeling like partying together.

The apathy for the Semiquincentennial got me thinking about the national mood during the previous Bicentennial back in 1976. I recently visited the Nixon Presidential Library for a field trip with my students, where there was a temporary exhibition on those celebrations from 50 years ago. The planning for those festivities dated back to the 1960s, with a keen eye on replicating and surpassing the 100th birthday back in 1876.

There was excitement over America’s 200th birthday then. Towns and malls alike across the country were decked out in patriotic red, white, and blue décor. Americans flocked to Disney to see “America on Parade,” a celebration of the celebrations. These parades and parties highlighted communities throughout that summer. Incorporating every state was intentional. In 1969, President Richard Nixon said of the planning:

America is 50 states. America is big cities and small towns... we want this celebration to be national. It must go directly to the people and derive its strength from the people.

Beyond the events, Americans went out to buy a plethora of commemorative trinkets, pins, plates, books, and all manner of products in between. All of this memorabilia was adorned with the iconic Bicentennial logo. The logo even made it onto NASA’s Viking Mars Lander, which landed on Mars in 1976 (some symmetry with the recent Artemis Moon Mission).

All this is to say that Americans in 1976 were ready to celebrate their country. I juxtapose that sentiment with the recent national mood. It seems that Americans of 2026 have not been as interested in partying for our founding. The merchandise is thin, the decorations are sparing, and the planned events have been contrived.

This malaise over the Semiquincentennial held true in the early part of the summer. But things are different as we approach the official date in July. What changed? The World Cup came to town. Specifically, foreign visitors descended upon our country, spreading from sea to shining sea. They have reminded us that we have much to celebrate in the US.

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Viral Images of World Cup Visitors

The foreign visitors’ excitement over what they found in our country has ignited something inside of us Americans. We had been taking for granted the fun things about the places we call home. Even the mundane can be moving. The politics can be ignored (at least for a couple of weeks). The divides can be bridged. This is all that is happening during the World Cup.

Media outlets have already been chronicling these adventures. Owen Tucker-Smith and Chelsey Dulaney wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

Along the way, he—and other European fans who flocked to Kansas City for the World Cup—beheld the fruits of the American economy from a vantage point few foreign tourists typically see: suburban superstores, hulking plates of food, quiet streets. He marveled at the sprawling houses, a contrast from the tightly packed homes of the Netherlands.

The most emblematic fan has been Freddy, a German tourist who goes by the handle @FreddyLA7 on X. He has been documenting his entire trip across the country on the social media platform. Americans have responded by cheering him on along the way. His excitement for the things that he is experiencing has been infectious.

“The vibes are insane. Driving through the great state of Louisiana on our way to New Orleans. It’s crazy how diverse this country is, every day the scenery looks different,” he wrote, as he was trekking through the Gulf Coast. He has been compared to a modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville. The average culture and everyday life of America today necessitate visits to chain restaurants while riding in an SUV. Freddy was even reportedly offered a private jet ride at one point, but he rejected it because “we really want to drive to see a little bit more of Texas and also Oklahoma.”

I love that many of these international visitors have not just stayed in the destination cities like New York City or Los Angeles. There are examples of visitors loving so many different parts of the country, from urban to rural and even suburban. Yes, even suburban, perhaps a surprising admission for an urbanist. But there has certainly been exhilaration for our sprawling strip malls and gargantuan gas stations.

These foreign visitors just embraced being Americans during their World Cup stays. Scenes like Germans trying to square dance or English fans lauding Texan beer and BBQ went viral. Actually, it seemed like every fanbase loved Texas BBQ. “Texas is good! Everything is big!” exclaimed a Japanese fan in Dallas to a local Fox reporter. Others took on a mechanical bull while Americans helped foreign fans order at In-N-Out.

One of the American attractions that has drawn some of the most attention is Buc-ee's. The Texas-based gas and (full) service station chain has gained a mythological status in the country. Even for an American myself, I was left awed after my first trip to a Buc-ee’s. So it is no wonder that foreigners have taken to this national treasure.

The Southern breakfast diner chain Waffle House has also attracted the attention of our guests. The Waffle House franchise also has a cult following. It is not just drunken breakfast food and fist fights at two in the morning (although that is part of it). These restaurants are cultural and civic institutions. They even provide real-world indicators for natural disasters and emergencies through the so-called Waffle House Index. According to the restaurant’s website:

Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.

We have taken Waffle Houses for granted as Americans, even as they fill our bellies and help to save lives. Foreigners came along and reminded us that these places are worth celebration, not ridicule.

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Embracing National Stereotypes

I should note that the United States is not even the only host for this World Cup. It is a joint bid by North America—the US, Canada, and Mexico. Similar joys we are seeing here are spreading to our co-host neighbors with their own visitors. While the fans have embraced stereotypical North American experiences like big trucks and gas stations, they have also brought with them their own national stereotypes. Fandoms actually embrace what we Americans might think of as insensitive cultural stereotypes.

There were photos of Japanese fans dressed as the cast from Mario video games, others held Pokémon in a crowd while being tossed in the air, and brought trash bags to clean up the stadium after their match. Scottish fans were marching around town donning kilts while playing the bagpipes and belting out I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by fellow countryman 80s band the Proclaimers at Fenway Stadium in Boston. Egyptians dressed as pharaohs, Jordanians making camel jokes, and Norwegians embracing the Viking Row are just a few of the highlights from this kind of fun.

Of course, there were some missteps, like a Mexican fan making a squinting gesture at a Korean fan. But these seemed mostly isolated, and the majority of the viral interactions were cheerful. Mexican fans blasted Psy’s Gangnam Style and danced with Korean visitors who were wearing sombreros and fake mustaches. It was pure joy and jubilation for different cultures, even if sometimes perceived as insensitive stereotypes.

The confluence of the World Cup and the NBA Finals really highlighted the magic in the country right now. Brazilian fans were in town for their match at the exact same time as Knicks fans flooded the street to celebrate their first championship in 53 years. The scene was legendary, like so many others across the US, Canada, and Mexico.

I recognize that some of these posts are just pandering, especially considering the X payout system incentivizes engagement. One user proclaimed, “I just had an out of body experience,” with an accompanying photo of Golden Corral. I used to work at Golden Corral, one of my first jobs during high school. It was gross. Perhaps it’s gotten better in recent years, but I actually think this person is likely just pandering to Americans for clicks.

Pete Wells, the prickly restaurant critic for The New York Times, called out this pandering. “But some writers trawling for these stories cast a wide net, and not everything they haul in passes the smell test,” he wrote. Apparently, he found that some of the viral posts were fabrications.

No matter if every post is real, there is certainly a large group of fans here enjoying what the country has to offer. Freddy’s journey is real, all the beer Scottish fans drank was real, and the jubilation was real. Whether or not some posts were fake, this cultural mixing has made the celebration of the 250th birthday real, too.

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World Cup in College Towns, USA

One of my favorite things about this World Cup has been that some teams and fanbases got to experience the classic American college town. Jessica Blake of Inside Higher Ed has a masterful rundown of all the college connections in this World Cup. It is worth a read. Here is the list of host campuses and national teams:

• Bentley University - France

• Bryant University - Ghana

• Florida Atlantic University - Curaçao

• Gonzaga University - Egypt

• Rutgers University - Senegal

• San José State University - Paraguay

• Stockton University - Haiti

• University of California, Santa Barbara - Austria

• University of Kansas - Algeria

• University of North Carolina, Greensboro - Norway

• University of San Diego - New Zealand

• Wake Forest - Germany

• Westmont College - Qatar

Visitors of these countries got to see that good college towns are some of the best places that America has to offer. “The campus is absolutely amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a school like this. I felt like in Hogwarts, like Harry Potter. It is absolutely beautiful,” said Eugenia Károlyi of Telemundo-Spain about her time in Chattanooga, Tennessee.1

These towns have embraced the visitors, too. “Rock Chalk, Algeria!” exclaimed a local in Lawrence, decked out in the North African country’s gear, a play on the university’s call. Another local admitted that he didn’t know much about Algeria, other than where it is on a map, but he was pulling for the team because they took a chance on his beloved town. Some local young boys spoke eloquently about the meaning of the World Cup and that a team was staying in Lawrence. Algeria fans appreciated the hospitality:

The Yimbyland account summed up my feelings: “The best move we’ve made hosting the World Cup so far is sending a bunch of Europeans to the true gems of the American experience: College Towns.” Indeed, American college towns are special places. I’m glad the rest of the world got to see that during this World Cup.

Where Did the Players Go to College?

Not too many of the players on these teams would have had a chance to visit college towns. College athletics is mostly an American tradition. The rest of the world, especially in soccer, utilizes an academy system. They start playing professionally quite young, and college attendance just does not factor into these journeys through elite soccer.

But I was still curious if some players on the teams had any college-going experience. I was pleasantly surprised to have found a few, and it wasn’t just the Americans. Below is a list of players that I found with college-going experience from all of the World Cup teams, a College Towns exclusive.2

I was also intrigued that not just American players or institutions could be found. Certainly, the list is dominated by American institutions, but not all for Americans. There is considerable international student representation on various World Cup teams from Haiti, New Zealand, Canada, and Sweden. Likewise, there are local college sports traditions in Canada, South Korea, and Japan.

I have experience with the college sports culture in South Korea, having graduated from Yonsei University in Seoul with an MA. While I cannot say it is the exact same as American college life, the atmosphere of games can still be intense and high-level. Every year, Yonsei and Korea University (also represented in the World Cup data), compete in Yeongojeon (Yonei-Korean Games). No doubt that the collegiate competition tradition here traces its roots back to US influence. My alma mater, Yonsei, was founded by American missionaries.

The American universities are a fun list, too. They include some traditional college sports powerhouses like the University of Connecticut, along with some familiar Power Five schools, like the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Washington, all large R1 state flagship institutions. But there are other lesser-known universities on the list, such as Fairfield University and Saint Louis University, or even secondary state institutions like the University of Akron (MACtion represented!) and UNC Wilmington. There is even a community college, with Canada’s Moise Bombito attending Iowa Western Community College before transferring to the University of New Hampshire.

Overall, the colleges that are most represented were Syracuse University, St. John’s University (New York), University of Maryland, University of Virginia, Korea University, and Meiji University. All of these have two players representing their various countries on a World Cup team. In terms of country rank, the US had 31, South Korea had six, Japan had four, and Canada had two. Please don’t use these in some cockamamie university ranking!

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The Nixon Allegory: 1976 to 2026

A controversial president in a deeply divided society, amid raucous protests, runaway inflation, and costly adventurism abroad. This description could be about either the 2020s or the 1970s. The Nixon era is actually a good parallel to the country today. Vietnam was a disaster, Nixon was impeached, and President Gerald Ford wasn’t even elected to VP.

Despite these issues, Americans in 1976 still celebrated the country. “Rarely in the history of the world had so many people turned out so spontaneously to express the love they felt for their country... We had regained our pride,” reflected President Ford on the Bicentennial events.

The Nixon era eventually gave way to the Reagan era. Say what you want about Reagan’s policies, his aesthetics were captivating. They were patriotic, even if not an over-the-top stereotype version. But as we are seeing with this World Cup, there is something fun about over-the-top patriotism.

Some of those same sentiments may have been tried with Trump’s UFC Freedom 250 event or the Great American State Fair, yet they have been viewed as divisive or contrived. These events were truly divisive, as rival groups planned celebrations; one called Freedom 250 and the other America 250. Despite some sensational imagery from the UFC event, the negativity deflated the festivities. Likewise, the Fair has reportedly been poorly attended, and people are mostly making fun of it online, saying it looks like we ordered it from Temu.

Luckily, we do not need to rely on these contrived events for the 250th celebration. We have the World Cup. Ironically, it took the sport that the US has traditionally neglected, especially compared to pretty much every other country in the world. Yet, it was exactly this soccer event that has juiced the American celebration from big cities to rural areas, college towns, and even the suburbs.

I hope this World Cup can show that the US is an open place for foreigners, tourists, and travelers again. Our image has taken a major hit abroad in recent years. Without the World Cup, without the visiting fans, without the pageantry, without the cultural mixes, without the passion, this 250th birthday would have just come and gone with little notice. Instead, it reminded us Americans why we should be celebrating. I am grateful for those foreign World Cup visitors who made this American Semiquincentennial special.

Note: Around the College Town is my weekly-ish links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.

I’m also on a road trip this week, so this one might be a little light. Enjoy!

New York Haters Keep Losing

Just 6 years ago, an op-ed declared that New York City was “dead forever.” It was the height of COVID, with the city witnessing an unprecedented exodus. Those predictions of doom were wrong then; the city bounced back from the pandemic. With the New York Knicks winning the NBA Finals, those predictions look even more wrong today.

Last year at this time, I was celebrating my hometown basketball team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, winning the NBA Finals. It meant a lot to the city. This year, it was New York City’s turn, a turn they’ve waited 53 years to come up again.

As much as the win meant for OKC last year, those feelings were multiplied by millions more people for the biggest city in the country. I was happy for them. I lived in New York City for 6 years, and have a lot of fond memories even with the Knicks. I was in the Garden for the game where Melo set the record with 62 points!

I love NYC, my former home during graduate school. I think it’s the only world-class city in the country (I’ll have a full article for this take in the future). The density, public transport, and scale are just only comparable to places like Paris, London, or Seoul (sorry to my current home, LA). Perhaps this is why it gets so much hate. It’s the one American city that feels like a foreign city. But it’s not; it’s an American city. We should be proud that it exists.

For all of this, I always defend New York City. Sure, it has its problems, but the depiction and reputation it has from certain right-wing and suburban circles is over the top. They perceive the city as dangerous and chaotic. It’s not. It’s energetic yet safe.

The images out of the Knicks championship run just proved this again. Spontaneous watch parties, projectors on the side of buildings, people watching from fire escapes. People of all different races and ethnicities dancing together, celebrating one thing: the Knicks.

The parade and celebration day showed that energy out in full force. Apparently, two million people poured into the parade route. Yes, there were some issues, like crowds being stuck in the subway or empty busses burnt. To the credit of the city, it all got cleaned up by the next morning.

Things don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful. And the parade was just that. So too was Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s speech. He honored the team and weaved it into the city’s history. It turns out his election has not brought about the apocalypse of the city. Instead, New York City now seems to be entering another Golden Age. Add in the World Cup with the Knicks championship, and vibes are at an all-time high.

The NYC naysayers just keep losing. The city showed us all that this past week. New York City is alive forever. Congrats to them.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Community around Stanford pushes the university to build more affordable housing. Ironically, this is the same crowd who fights against normal housing.

• Walmart family announces new STEM university in Bentonville, Arkansas. I wish they would have gone a little more traditional with the design. Nonetheless, it is an interesting development to keep an eye on.

• Hilton Hotels is getting on the college town economy. The power of the top American college towns is still strong.

• California schools are facing stiff declines in student enrollment numbers. NIMBYs in the state have driven out so many young families.

• In some college town news, Berkeley plans to add a parking fee on households with multiple cars. This is going to drive some people absolutely bonkers.

• A landlord in quintessential college towns whines over competition from new purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA). Opposition to more student housing is often championed by people with a vested interest in keeping prices high.

Urbanism-ish

• Economist whines about McDonald’s installing self-service kiosks and cutting staff. He pegs it on minimum wage, but the company has followed the same trend in China for over a decade now. McDonald’s chases the bottom line regardless of minimum wage.

• Now, we cannot just cut all humans yet. Starbucks in Korea closes all stores for a day due to a boneheaded AI consultant suggestion.

• In more workforce news, Japan is turning to foreigners as bus drivers. It will be interesting to see if there is an immigration backlash like here in the US.

• New conspiracy theory: China is funding data center hate in the US. I don’t buy it. The dislike for data centers tracks with our national NIMBY attitude.

• The “hard tech” companies distributed around Southern California are impressive. The engine of the economy is not just in Silicon Valley.

• Of course, the East Coast Bizarro version of California, Florida, has its own impressive new coast name: The Space Coast.

• Switching over to self-driving news, another Waymo crash shows it is again “idiot human driver does something dumb and/ or aggressive, causing a crash with an autonomous vehicle.”

• Waymo will also be welcoming fans to the World Cup. Public transit to our stadiums does not meet international standards, so self-driving cars will be needed.

• Waymo unveils a premium service. I guess this is inevitable, and likely the precursor to the coming subscription model.

• Tesla submitted questionable safety data in Europe. I have long worried Musk’s company will sully the name of the self-driving technology.

• We do not need more bad drivers as it is, as a new report on pedestrian deaths shows the crisis isn’t getting better.

• For cyclists, has a great piece on Carbon Upfront on why bicycles should not have stop signs. This drives drivers crazy.

• Fun new Amtrak fast train is coming to the Pacific Northwest. Great name, too: Amtrak Cascades.

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Closing Time… Ethical Uber in Denver

I was in Denver this week, a lovely city by the way, when my Lyft driver tipped us to an intriguing new rideshare company. It’s called Drivers Cooperative – Colorado, and it is owned and operated by the drivers themselves. They receive a majority of the fare, with a smaller percentage going to the parent company, reversing the trends from Uber and Lyft.

We tried it a couple of times; it worked fine. Since it’s new, I think it still needs a critical mass of users and drivers to maximize its potential. But the drivers we talked to said they loved it. The Coop felt like “owning their own business,” they said. It is the ethical Uber!

Funny enough, More Perfect Union just featured the Coop in a video on the service. And our driver was featured as a spokesman. While the service is only around Colorado, they have eyes on expansion. Philadelphia is supposed to be next, according to the driver. I will be rooting for this company and its drivers, with hopes it will reach me down in California soon.

Editorial Note: This is the first guest post in the “Summer School at College Towns” series. If you are interested in writing for College Towns, feel free to reach out to me on Substack or at ryanmallen555@gmail.com.

Today’s guest post comes from Nico Hohman, who runs the Substack. He is also the Executive Director of Operations at Capitol Campus and is working on his Master’s in Urban & Regional Planning at Georgetown University. Enjoy. -Ryan

I wear two hats at Georgetown University. The first is as a staff member. My role as the Executive Director of Operations of the Capitol Campus gives me the opportunity to interact with just about every group on campus, from facilities to housing to student affairs to the provost’s office and everyone in between. My other hat is that of a graduate student. I will complete my master’s in Urban & Regional Planning in the spring of 2027.

It is through this dual-role lens that I discovered something interesting happening with graduate students: they are getting younger. What’s more, today’s graduate students aren’t just younger versions of previous cohorts. They behave differently too.

This discovery first started as a conversation with my colleagues. We were commenting that it looked like this cohort of graduate students appeared younger than previous groups. And as a current graduate student, I noticed the same thing in my classes. Though I’m far from being old (I’m only 37), it definitely felt like I was the old guy in class.

So I did what any good graduate student would do: I did some research. To the library!

Grad Students Really Are Getting Younger

As it turns out, our observations about these graduate students were correct. According to numbers from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), graduate students have been getting younger over the last 25 years. (Note: IPEDS data is a great source because institutions that receive federal funding for students are required to report data back to the federal government.)

Below is a graph showing the total enrollment of all graduate students across the United States since 2003, broken down into age-specific categories.

The topline number is obvious. Total graduate enrollment has grown by over 500,000 students in the last two decades. Lots of factors play into why graduate enrollment has increased, including more universities offering more graduate programs; more 4+1 dual enrollment programs like at the University of South Carolina, the University of Texas, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and many more; as well as economic cycles that favor graduate school enrollment when the economic outlook looks rough.

What is less obvious from the IPEDS data is how that growth is segmented by age. To better capture this growth among the youngest graduate students, I break down that growth by share. Below is a chart showing the share of graduate students over the last 25 years, categorized by three distinct age cohorts: 24-and-under, 25-to-29 year-olds, and those students over 30 years old. The oldest cohort, those 30 and older, has seen a decline in enrollment since the start of the new millennium, while the share of graduate students in the youngest cohort has grown by nearly 50%.

These three age cohorts were selected because it is assumed that the youngest cohort is moving directly from undergraduate to graduate studies. The middle cohort is assumed to have some experience in their originally selected fields and may be looking to obtain different credentials to pursue a different field of study. While this may also be true for the oldest cohort, it is more often assumed they are obtaining additional credentials to advance their current positions in the workforce.

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Introducing the Graduate Youth Index

To better highlight these trends, in the chart below I introduce the Graduate Youth Index. This index tracks the growth (or contraction) of these three specific age cohorts against their respective baseline shares in 2003. These three cohorts started with an Index score of 100, and each subsequent year their indices increased or decreased based on the enrollment of that age cohort. In the fall of 2025, the Index for graduate students 24-and-under was 138.7, the highest ever recorded. For graduate students 30-and-older that same semester, the Index was 83.8, the lowest ever recorded. Grad students in the middle cohort decreased their most recent Index score to 98.6.

The fact that universities have increased the number of graduate programs or that major economic disruptions have increased the desire to obtain additional credentials should be relevant to all age cohorts, and not just the youngest ones. So why are we only seeing growth in the youngest age cohorts? I have four theories.

First, the COVID-19 pandemic was not only an economic disruption but also a disruption to everyday life. For any student who graduated from high school in 2016 or later, they had some sort of high school or college experience impacted by the pandemic. A return to graduate school may be a way for them to experience a “normal” school life when so many other areas of their lives were overrun by COVID.

Another theory is that the market for hiring recent college undergraduates has shrunk. According to data in the chart below from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the pace at which firms are hiring undergraduates for entry-level roles has slowed. Reasons for this are varied, but for our purposes we can assume that a tighter hiring climate for younger workers specifically gives them reasons to pursue additional degrees to remain competitive in the marketplace.

A third theory is what Jean Twenge referred to as delayed adulthood or slow-life theory. The premise here is that today’s graduate students (yesterday’s high school seniors) are passing through certain developmental life stages (like drinking alcohol, dating, or obtaining a driver’s license) later in life than their grandparents, parents, or even their older siblings. For example, in 1979, over 90% of high school seniors had tried alcohol. In 2016, only 67% of seniors had tried alcohol. In 1984, only 13% of seniors had never been on a date. By 2016, 36% of seniors had never been on a date. In 1989, 86% of high school seniors had their driver’s license, while only 73% of high school seniors in 2016 had their driver’s license.

Previous generations looked at high school as a way to grow up while undergraduate school was their way to learn a specific career skill. Perhaps today’s graduate students are looking at their undergraduate careers as a way to learn how to become an adult while graduate school now becomes the place they learn a specific trade skill.

The last theory about why graduate students are getting younger is simply because undergraduate students are getting younger too. This trend is not nearly as pronounced at the undergraduate level as it is at the graduate level, but undergraduates are also becoming younger. This is primarily due to high school seniors taking dual enrollment courses while still in high school. As a high school student, obtaining more college credits prior to enrolling in undergraduate studies allows them to graduate faster.

Below is the data from the National Student Clearinghouse regarding the age cohorts of undergraduate students. While the change in the share of younger undergraduates has dramatically increased, the overall proportion of younger undergraduate students still remains small.

The Changes to Campus Life

We know that graduate students are getting younger. We also have some reasons to explain this trend. Next is the most important question: so what? Why should universities care that their graduate students are getting younger?

For private universities where tuition dollars are the primary drivers of revenue, it is often the graduate tuition dollars that make up the majority of this revenue stream. Therefore, if universities view themselves as in the business of providing education to their customers (i.e., their graduate students), then they would be wise to adapt to the changing demographics and needs of their customers. Today’s graduate students aren’t just younger versions of previous cohorts. They are a new type of consumer: the undergraduate-plus student.

The traditional graduate student was not a heavy user of campus facilities. Typically, they were students in their late-twenties or early-thirties. They lived off campus and had their own transportation. They may have had a spouse and might even have had children. They often had full-time careers and were coming to campus once or twice a week, usually in the evenings, to take three-hour lecture or seminar courses. They came to campus, took their class, and then they left. With these more traditional graduate students, the town-gown dynamics were easier to manage. The “studentification” impacts in the immediate neighborhood around campuses were less strenuous. There needed to be fewer purpose-built student housing complexes, fewer concerns over disruptive student behavior, and generally better property upkeep. In essence, the traditional graduate student was both a part of the town and the gown, and therefore wanted to maximize their positive impacts in both arenas.

Today’s undergraduate-plus students are much heavier utilizers of campus. Many of them treat graduate school as their full-time job. And without them having as much full-time or real-world experiences, many of today’s graduate students are coming straight from undergraduate school, where they are used to their undergraduate routines. These often include on-campus housing, on-campus dining, on-campus health and wellness services, and active learning classrooms.

Today’s younger graduate students want the convenience of on-campus amenities without the association of undergraduate life. They want housing, but prefer apartment-style suites instead of communal dorms. They want grab-and-go food services instead of traditional dining halls and meal plans. And they want their classrooms to be flexible and tech-capable with natural light and moveable furniture.

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Demographics are Destiny

For decades, institutions have planned around broad categories like undergraduate or graduate students. Those categories were useful because they generally reflected meaningful differences in how students lived, learned, and interacted with campus. Today, those distinctions are blurred as graduate students spend more time on campus, seek stronger connections to university life, and expect a wider range of services and amenities than previous generations of graduate students.

Demographic change arrives gradually enough to go unnoticed until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore. Universities that continue to plan around the graduate student of 25 years ago risk operating academic programs, student services, and building facilities for a population that no longer exists. Worse, universities that do not adapt to their changing student populations risk closing entirely. While fewer students enrolled overall at an institution can certainly lead to its death spiral, having the wrong products and services for the right population (or vice versa) will also lead to a university’s demise.

Graduate students are changing. The question is whether the campus will change with them.

Note: Around the College Town is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.

Waiting in Line Was Better Than Ticketmasterification

There are two big-time sporting events happening right now: the NBA Finals and the World Cup. While what happens on the court or pitch can be electric, tickets to get into the arena or stadium have proved elusive for many fans. The tickets are just unaffordable.

The cheapest ticket to get into Madison Square Garden for Game 3 between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs was over $10,000 (though it dropped to half by tipoff). And those prices are for the nosebleed, last rows. I sat in those seats years ago for 50 bucks, and I sort of felt like they weren’t worth it. This is not even to mention the astronomical prices for the lower sections, adorned with celebs and mega-wealthy.

The same ticket price issue is proving true with the World Cup here in the US, which is co-hosted along with Canada and Mexico, perhaps related to pure greed from a corrupt FIFA. Nonetheless, the ticket price explosion in the US has touched events beyond the biggest. All tickets seem to be way overinflated from even just a few years ago.

Gone are actual physical tickets (although kudos to the Knicks for making an exception this NBA Finals). Instead, everything is online through third-party vendors like Ticketmaster. The promise of moving to digital and away from physical tickets was that it was easier and cheaper to run. It is true that ordering tickets has become relatively easy through these apps, but the ticket prices are just higher, including additional “convenience” fees.

Of course, part of this is just supply and demand. More people want to go to these events, so the vendors can just keep raising prices. Yet, there is more to it than just that. Hence, why prices dropped right before Game 3 of the NBA Finals and the World Cup has not sold out yet. Scalpers and third-party vendors try to take advantage of our open system.

This all got me thinking that the digitization of tickets is worse than the old system of waiting in line. Up until 15 years or so ago, if you wanted to attend some coveted event, you walked up to the venue and staked out your place in line. Some people would sleep outside all night just to be early in line to get guaranteed seats. You had to really want it.

The other option was to just show up on game day, scoping for scalpers. Yes, these deals could also be shady, but it was just par for the course of doing business in a previous age. Often, you could get good deals by waiting right before the game to start before purchasing. Scalpers do not want to be stuck holding the bag. I know some venues or sports still have this tradition; yet it is becoming less common these days.

Actually being in a place raised the stakes to buying tickets. People had to invest time and forgo commitments in order to wait in long lines. We all thought this was annoying back in the day, but it now seems preferable to the Ticketmasterification of the sector. Having to wait in line physically meant there was a natural barrier for some potential attendees. But it also meant that if you really wanted to attend an event, you knew exactly what you needed to do. Wake up at the crack of dawn, drive down to the stadium, plop down a lawn chair, and wait to be one of the first buyers.

In this Ticketmasterification economy, bots or automatic buyers can scoop up a ton of tickets with the explicit purpose of resale, jacking up prices way over the listed face value. They are mostly just middlemen, taking advantage of the ease with which the phone has given us. Some performers are going to extreme lengths to prove ticket buyers are humans, like scanning eyeballs.

In the end, it turns out lining up physically like we did before the 2010s was the optimal way to distribute tickets…

Despite the negativity around ticket prices, these events are bringing out the best of humans as only sports can do. The scenes around MSG look like a circus in the best possible way, highlighting all the eccentricities in the world’s greatest city. “My Mayor is Muslim, my bagel is Jewish, my Christian’s Dior… Knicks in 4!” Times like these make me wish I still lived there.

Likewise, travelers from across the world have descended on North America, exploring all of our local delicacies. Germans gorging themselves on Waffle House for the first time or Koreans getting silly in the Mexican party scene is exactly what the World Cup is all about. Sports diplomacy! I also love that the Europeans are trying to grapple with the American summer. Yes, it’s hot, but you will find the hotel AC extra frigid.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Locals are “fearful” of a student housing proposal in Columbia, Missouri, home to the University of Missouri. They are worried the housing will be unsafe and will ruin the “scenic roadway.” The “scenic roadway:”

• Despite the warnings of the “Enrollment Cliff,” college enrollment has actually increased recently.

• In population news from across the world, Korean birthrates rose for the first time in years.

• Some small US colleges have been turning to seniors as the population of young people thins. Going from seniors to seniors!

• New College in Florida is absorbing another university. This kind of acquisition is more often associated with private institutions, but the Age of Conquest knows no bounds.

• MIT shuts down some of its libraries. Bummer. If MIT cannot even maintain its services, what hope is there for other institutions?

• College football coaches' salaries are massive… and these are just the assistants

• UNESCO has a digital exhibit on the history of education.

• Children of immigrants dominate billion-dollar companies in the US.

• Austin public schools are struggling with enrollment via at .

Urbanism-ish

• Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) drives across the entire country of Canada without human intervention. I have been skeptical of Tesla, but this is a welcome development.

• But a new report has also brought up questions around Tesla’s safety data and the company’s autopilot killed a man by driving into pond (though I should note this feature was not supposed to be full self-driving).

• Despite these issues, some believe that LiDAR is on its way out of self-driving cars, meaning Tesla was ahead of the game. I’m still dubious.

• It’s not just the US, a Chinese company launches a self-driving cargo and delivery vehicle line. The Chinese self-driving market is the space to watch right now.

• But in another example of how humans are going to ruin self-driving cars:

• In other car news, the new Ferrari designed by Apple legend has been getting mocked on the internet.

  

• Turning to cities, the stray dog problem is so bad in Houston they are airlifting them out ahead of the World Cup

• Hero goes around putting nets on basketball hoops so they are better for kids to play on.

• Cities are bringing back those statues we took down in the early 2020s.

• Brightline is offering extra service to the World Cup matches in Florida.

• But despite success, Brightline is about to declare bankruptcy. This seems to be mostly about the debt needed to build the infrastructure; their ridership numbers are good.

• In more train news, California is actually making progress in the high-speed rail line. Welcome if surprising news.

• In more California train news, a NIMBY town cost California taxpayers millions of dollars and delays in train electrification.

• For another idiosyncrasy of the state, 17-year-olds in California can drive their own car but cannot legally sit in a Waymo by themselves. Wild.

• In the other American metropolis, Mamdani kills the Queens subway line. First bad move of his tenure?

• But it’s not all bad news in the rail world: Omaha, Nebraska, may revive its once-glorious streetcar, even if not to the great heights that it was.

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Closing Time… Paris Syndrome in Japan

An author recently made the case that Japan is just not as cool as movies or anime. A city not living up to the imagined expectations of visitors is called Paris Syndrome, which funny enough originated from a Japanese traveler. The opening thesis of the argument in The Spectator:

Japanese cities can disappoint. Visitors stroll around hoping to be awe-struck by the dreamy spectacle of clip-clopping Geisha in their wooden geita, or barreling sumo wrestlers, or high-stockinged ninja girls (à la Kill Bill), and all against a Blade Runner backdrop, only to be confronted with mostly unremitting blandness. The constants are these: concrete, plastic, more concrete, more plastic, endless construction (one crappy shopping complex or mansion block replacing another), confusion, and noise. It can all seem dizzyingly homogenous.

The author is Philip Patrick, a writer and lecturer at the Sophia University in Japan, so he does live in Japan. His main target of ire was towards Japanese convenience stores or “konbini.” He goes after the familiar names like 7-11, Lawson, and Family Mart, saying that he hates these “soulless, ‘non-places’.”

For this take, he has been getting dragged online. People love Japanese convenience stores, and they have taken on somewhat of a cult following. So I am not surprised by the hate he is getting, especially since he is a foreigner in Japan. Some backlash responses (some that I could share on this page at least):

For my own take, I visited Japan last summer (see accompanying photos by me). I have gone on record that it lived up to every one of my expectations, no Japan Paris Syndrome for me. Given the tourism numbers, I think most travelers seem to agree with me, especially Americans. Americans are so gorged with banal suburban sprawl that we go nuts when we see a random convenience store or alleyway in Japan. We don’t see them as soulless, but rather as culture.

So I will have to disagree with Patrick in The Spectator. What do you think? Did Japan live up to your expectations? Have you ever had Paris Syndrome?

These in the 16% are the drivers who you see darting in and out of traffic, weaving at dangerous speeds on the highway. They are also the drivers who are constantly fiddling with and checking their phones. Every stoplight is a chance for them to get a hit on their addiction—perhaps not as dangerous, but certainly annoying delays.

This 16% concept encompasses drivers who are old, young, addicted, angry, and generally incompetent. In this article, I walk through the numbers and consider ways to grapple with this dilemma.

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Normal Distribution of Human Capabilities

This 16% number I landed on has been derived from the concept of the normal distribution. Plot any type of skill or trait and you will find a bunched-up portion of humans in the middle, with a spread of variation emanating out from the average, on both extremes. This is the normal distribution.

The normal distribution is the spread of scores or measures within a population. There will naturally be a majority of scores in the middle at the average, spreading out with fewer responses the further towards the extremes. Of course, there can be subset population variations.

With the normal distribution, half of the observations will be below the mean and the other half above the mean. One standard deviation from the mean in either direction is 34.13% of the observations. Within two standard deviations is 13.59%. From three, it’s just 2.14%, fourth is .13%, and anything beyond these extremes is miniscule. I get 16% from the percentages beyond one standard deviation: 13.6%+2.1%+0.1% = 15.8%. I round this up to 16% just for ease of the moniker.

The normal distribution pops up throughout everyday life. The most well-known application of the normal distribution likely comes from IQ or other forms of testing, which I recognize is controversial (where most people relate these principles to a Bell Curve). Nonetheless, these tests are meant to be normally distributed. But even throwing this one out, there are other examples to illustrate normality of human capabilities.

The normal distribution works for basic demographic traits such as height or weight. But also works for skills, such as basketball or other sports. Only about 3.4% of high school basketball players make it to play in college at the NCAA level, all according to data from the NCAA. Of those who made it to college, only about 1.2% make it to a top pro league like the NBA. College basketball players are in the 95th percentile, while NBA players are in the 99th percentile on the normal distribution of basketball skills.

These same breakdowns work with driving. Drivers for NASCAR are the same extreme end of the distribution for driving as their NBA counterparts in basketball. Like any skill, most people will sit near the average of the driving distribution. Yet, there will inevitably be a group at the end extreme end, opposite of NASCAR, that make up the 16% of dangerous drivers.

The driving test gives us one proxy for this concept. Data shows that 78.8% of American drivers pass the skills version of the test (the driving portion), only a few shades less than the 16% mark in terms of failure rates. Chalk some of that up to test nerves. Some may take multiple times to pass, too.

While we do not have great data on driving tests from the US, the UK provides national passing rates. In the UK, roughly 49% of drivers pass the practical driving test on the first try, aligning perfectly with the normal distribution. Drivers who pass the test in the second or third time account for almost 37%, which again aligns closely with the normal distribution between the mean and 1 standard deviation. Finally, a little over 14% needed four, five, six, or more attempts to pass. In fact, some drivers need 30 or 40 attempts to pass. Those in the extreme end are all the 16%.

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85% Rule

Another support for my 16% conception comes from the field of traffic engineering. When deciding what speed limit a street should have, traffic engineers do a study to see how fast drivers typically drive in the area. The engineers then average out all of the scores and set the limit at the 85th percentile of all driving speeds.

This means that speed limits in the US are explicitly tied to drivers at around basically one standard deviation from the norm. The practice tracks with the 16% conception. Traffic engineers quite literally believe in this range of human capabilities to successfully navigate roadways.

In recent years, the profession of traffic engineering has been heavily criticized for too much adherence to car-centric environments. Strong Towns, in particular, has taken aim at these tactics. The organization’s founder, , says that the 85th percentile rule can be useful for high-speed streets, but it is not a one-size-fits-all solution:

A road is different than a street, which is a platform for building wealth within a community. On streets, where there is vastly more complexity, the 85th percentile speed is almost always misapplied. Especially where a forgiving design approach is used for street design, drivers will not perceive the complexity of the environment. When engineers widen lanes, create recovery areas, make curves more gentle, and use other design features developed for highways, they give the driver the incorrect signal that the environment is simple, that they can relax and not be hyper-vigilant. Speeds go up and tragedy is the inevitable result.

Despite the critique, it shows that there is a logic to the 85th percent rule; it is just taken to the extreme in most of our built environments. This is not a test of driving ability, as I am suggesting with the 16% concept, but rather just of speed. It does, though, give us a practical proxy that is used in the real world. I’m sure traffic engineers would love to have some real driving test for their speed studies.

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Follow the Insurance Money

Insurance companies know all about the 16% already. They price in the fact that not every driver is the same as the other. It is industry standard to charge different rates for various driver types. Very young drivers get charged the most, then the rest of us pay some kind of standard, and there are a range of ways to reduce that with good driving record.

Insurance companies do this kind of pricing because they are not in the business of losing money. On the contrary, they are quite profitable, and part of that business success is recognizing the 16% of bad drivers. In general, they track with age as a proxy, with young drivers paying the most by far. There is a curvilinear relationship to age, though, as it goes up, insurance rates go down. This is true until about 60, then rates start ticking back up.

It is a crude measure of the normal distribution, yet still illustrates the concept tied to real-world money. Follow the money! There is a reason why young men in particular pay the most: they are more aggressive, irresponsible, and stupid behind the wheel. The insurance industry accounts for this disparity in driving skill.

According to Matt Timmons, author of State of Auto Insurance in 2025, insurers will offer sharp discounts to perceived good drivers. “This includes a 10-15% discount for drivers who take a defensive driving course, a 10% discount for safe drivers who’ve been accident-free for over 5 years and a 20% discount for drivers with low mileage use,” he said.

The insurance industry is very lucrative. They are not into losing money. Even they can see the 16% Dangerous Drivers Dilemma.

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Drivers, Young and Old

The 16% label is not a Scarlet Letter. Instead, we age in and out of being in the 16%. Most very young drivers are terrible drivers by dint of experience. There is simply a learning curve for learning to drive. But there is also an immaturity factor. Teenagers think they can live forever and nothing can hurt them, with tragic consequences.

Confession time: I was in the 16% when I was a teenage driver. So were most of my friends. We were all idiots. And my own high school experiences saw multiple vehicular deaths that still weigh on me to this day. After a few years, young drivers age more into the middle part of the distribution to safer and reasonable driving.

Luckily, young drivers usually age out of this irresponsible stage, which is what happened to me. However, on the other end, drivers can age back into the 16%. As we get older, we lose our faculties. Our eyesight gets worse, our reaction time slows, and our mobility diminishes. Driving skills regress. Data from AAA show that young drivers are the most dangerous, but senior drivers are more unsafe than middle ages.

This degradation of physical abilities is why a lot of senior drivers drive very slowly. Driving slowly is certainly safer than the maniac teenage driver, but mixing slow with fast speeds into traffic causes its own problems. Again, it goes back to the 85th rule. Likewise, even at slower speeds, vehicles can be deadly if the driver loses control of the 5,000 pound SUV.

But there are even more issues with seniors losing their ability to drive, yet continuing to drive out of necessity. There has been a slew of tragic deaths recently due to senior drivers losing control of their vehicles and plowing into innocent bystanders. This is becoming a growing issue as the Boomers enter these age ranges.

Super Speeders

Many cities have noticed that there is a small group of people who have an enormous amount of traffic violations. In fact, much of crime operates in the same way. Remove a small number of extreme end criminals, and a greater total percentage of crime will decrease, argued in the aptly titled paper “1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions.”

These are called “super speeders.” They make up a good portion of the 16%, and likely the least sympathetic. Often, this is not about physical ability, like rookie drivers or aging seniors, but just a total disregard for anyone else outside of their own car. States have been grappling with these super speeders across the country.

For instance, in New York, those labeled as “super speeders” average roughly 179 speeding-in-a-school-zone tickets, which equals a traffic violation every other day of the year. Georgia and Maryland recently passed "Stop Super Speeders" bills. Virginia and D.C. did something similar, too. The extreme end of the normal distribution for driving causes so much traffic violence and damage that states must make special efforts to grapple with this subset.

These laws usually target installing Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) or “governors” that throttle a car’s speed. Yet, advocates argue that the penalty of a short license suspension is not enough of a deterrent. '

Automatic ticketing cameras are another tactic against super speeders. A pilot program in Oakland installed 35 speed cameras at 18 locations. The results showed that 64.4% of drivers who received a warning did not get another ticket. But 30% of drivers received two to five tickets, 3.7% six to 10, and 11 or more at around 1%.

These types of cameras do work to a degree. “San Francisco’s speed cameras slashed excessive speeding from 25% of traffic to just 2% to 6% within a year,” according to the LA Times. But in New York City, the automatic ticketing has a lower fine than if written by a cop, hindering some of the sting to super speeders.

Not dealing with these super speeders has serious consequences. Speed is the biggest factor in fatal vehicle crashes. According to a study in the Journal of Safety Research by Walton and Hendy (2024):

Ticket accumulation need not be considered the best predictor of crash likelihood, but around 1 in every 8 persons (12. 66%) who accumulate more than four tickets within an observed two-year period are later involved in a CAS-recorded crash, where they are the driver at fault. This represents a large concentration of risk compared to the overall base estimate of 1.22% incidence over three years. This risk is clearly identifiable in a particular portion of the driving population because records are kept for every ticket.

While speed is the most important factor, these 16% go beyond just one measure. There is a general flippant demeanor to dangerously driving a 5,000-pound vehicle. In Maryland, one driver had over 900 unpaid parking tickets.

We could lop off some serious dangers if we just took these people off the road. Our laws are usually are forgiving to license suspension, even when they have some kind of horrible incident. And I don’t use accident here. Whenever someone like this kills or maims another person, it is not accidental; it follows a pattern of risky behaviors.

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The 16% Dilemma is Getting Worse

There are some aspects of the 16% dilemma that have been exacerbated in contemporary America. Our stroads do not help anyone, whether in the 16% or not. One of the key problems is the phones (I know, the root of so many modern ills).

I didn’t drive for almost 10 years, from roughly 2009 to 2019. This is the exact time period of the proliferation of the smartphone. The differences in driving then to now are stark. Everyone is on their phone. I am dumbfounded by just how often I see a fellow driver looking down at their phone. Given how dangerous it is, there should be more shame in it.

But people do not care, they simply look down at their lap, then snap back up like awoken from a delirium. In a traffic line, these phone drivers cause delays by limiting how many people can make it through a light. When they do snap up, they try to jam on the gas to catch back. This just creates more unsafe situations, all for a screen addiction that we have normalized.

On the extreme end, there are a lot of 16%ers who are simply driving around on their phones. It is stunningly dangerous. Yet, you will see multiple people doing on any commute. Next time you are driving, try to count how many you see on their phones. It should be about 1/16 drivers or so with their head looking down.

Another problem is that American cars have ballooned to ridiculous sizes. Bigger cars are simply more dangerous to everyone not inside of them. There are just realities of driving that relate to physical space. A person of smaller stature will have a more limited view in certain larger types of vehicles. They will be a danger to other people on the road because they have lower vision. There is no way to get around that other than simply driving a smaller car.

Height limits on certain types of cars would make sense. But there would be some kind of civil rights appeal. This is a very American problem, perceived personal freedom is a higher value than consideration to broader community, even if the behavior is risky or detrimental. See one example from Florida recently:

The Delirium of Dangerous Driver

As a society, Americans have been resistant to removing the 16% from out roads. Our overinflated, auto-centric design has limited our choices to everyone having to drive. Walking, biking, or taking public transportation is deemed too cruel and unusual for Americans. at recently published an article detailing just why it is so difficult to stop super speeders. In short: we aren’t allowed to.

Exasperated Infrastructures

This Is Why We Can't Ever Stop Superspeeders

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3 months ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · sam sklar

There are various laws that limit punitive measures. If someone doesn’t even hurt someone, just got caught driving in a dangerous manner, there is even more leeway. In one egregious case from Pennsylvania, an off-duty cop hit a family in a crosswalk because he was texting. He faced no real consequences, not even a suspended license, according to local news coverage. Stories like this can be found across the county.

There are arguments that speed governors are dangerous or too inconvenient. The problem with these arguments is that most of us cannot understand speed. “Quite simply, the faster you are going already, the less time you save by going 10mph faster still,” says Rory Sutherland for The Spectator. “Accelerate from 20-30 mph, and you save ten minutes on a ten-mile journey. Accelerate from 70-80 mph, and you save just over a minute.”

The 16% just make things worse with a lack of object permanence, jamming on the gas only to have to slam on the brakes because of cars in front of them. This creates more traffic because they end up bunching up with other cars when weaving in and out of traffic. We are too lenient on this subset of driver. They make everything worse. Yet even when states try to crack down, there are limitations. New York’s news Super Speeder Bill has been hailed as admirable, but it only installs governors for those with 16 tickets in a year. 16! That’s over one per month.

of has been critical of the unwillingness to punish these super speeders. He tweeted recently of the new New York law: “Don’t ever forget this story. Leading up to the crash, the killer had:”

• “21 speeding tickets in 2 years”

• “6 red light camera violations in 6 months”

• “70+ other violations in 2 years”

He closed, “She was still free to drive at a murderous speed.” I agree. We must no longer accept the scourge of the 16% on the rest of us. Do we really believe we can stop maniac driving like this by asking nicely? Of course not.

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To Stop the 16%, Design Better Streets

Despite the obvious problem, there is not much political will in the country to grapple with super speeders, reckless drivers, or the 16% in general. Democrats tend to lean away from more law enforcement due to equity concerns, while Republicans have become distrustful of more government control, even if traffic enforcement. Changing laws and adding more enforcement is just not always feasible electorally.

This is where the Strong Towns approach can come in to address the problem. In this conception, street design should dictate the comfort of driving. If we want drivers to slow down, we need to make lanes narrower, add bollards or barriers (real ones, not plastic flexipoles), cover with overhanging trees, and other general traffic-calming measures. I have advocated for these things myself (see my video essay on the topic),

What the Strong Towns approach does is take safety out of the hands of waffling politicians. In a properly designed street, a 16% driver will constantly show themselves by damaging their own vehicle. We want them to hit bollards and scrape concrete walls. This outcome is certainly better than flesh and blood of innocent pedestrians.

My guess is that anyone who gets mad at this 16% concept is in fact in the 16%. They likely cannot stay off their phone, have heated road rage, or just simply struggle with the basics of driving. No matter, getting bad drivers off the road should not elicit hate. It should elicit cheers. And since we cannot always do that, we can help protect the rest of us from the 16% of dangerous drivers through smarter street design.

Write for Summer School at College Towns

Graduation is in the rearview mirror, Memorial Day weekend is now behind us, and it’s getting hot outside; it is the official start of the summer. School’s out. Rejoice, teachers and students alike (sorry to those not in education).

It was a strong academic year for College Towns. I have continued my publishing schedule, and the site has gotten some media attention beyond just the Substack community. A recent Inside Higher Ed article, “Second Acts for Closed Campuses,” quoted me and my work here on shuttering college campuses. They also used some of my photos from my work, which I love sharing.

Ryan Allen, a professor of comparative and international education and leadership and author of the College Towns newsletter, has crisscrossed the country in recent years to visit closed campuses, traveling thousands of miles for a book he’s writing on the subject.

I want to keep this momentum up over the summer. One way to do that is to open up College Towns as a platform for other authors. I’m dubbing this call for articles the “Summer School at College Towns” series. Last year, I had some amazing guest posts from all walks of life and perspectives. We have had guest posts from former bus drivers on college town transit systems, professors and researchers on issues in higher ed and housing, and other writers on reviving dead malls.

I am broadly interested in issues at the intersections of education and urbanism, the theme of College Towns. So if you are interested in publishing something a little bit different that might not have a home elsewhere, my DMs and email are open (ryanmallen555 at gmail.com). I can work with you to craft an article or idea. Here are some things I would be interested in covering:

• Local issues in urbanism.

• Commutes to school.

• Colleges building housing.

• Movies/ TV through urbanism and education.

• Stories from studying/ living abroad.

Reach out if you want to be a part of Summer School at College Towns. And since it’s the start of summer, I remind you to rewatch the greatest end-of-school-year movie of all time, Dazed and Confused. Then check out my article on the education and urbanism of the film. It is an all-time classic.

Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Alabama has a program to fully cover housing and childcare for student moms in university. This is the kind of policy we need to grapple with the birthrate issues.

• Michigan buys a dying college campus. The Age of Conquest marches on!

• Student housing portfolio sells for almost a billion dollars. That’s 12 properties with 7,578 beds across 12 universities.

• Texas State U is constructing a $280 million high-rise dorm project. The university has aggressive growth targets, hoping to go from 44K to 50K by 2030.

• And if you think student housing is lucrative, another firm has recently expanded senior housing to the tune of $5.4 billion.

• This gives me an idea: new way for colleges to survive? Become a senior home.

• Tulane backs away from student housing proposal that would have knocked down a dumpy post-war sprawl development. The university would have preserved the vintage sign and allowed the diner to operate on the first floor.

  

• UC Berkeley law school enacts a big ban on AI. Are these restrictions too strict?

• Wharton professor sounds the alarm bells that so many high school students reach out to him to do research. This kind of thing is a farce, agreed. It is mostly about padding college application stats, not real research.

• Christian colleges think Trump’s new policy is an existential threat. These changes to higher ed are not just hurting the Harvards and Columbias.

• Sam’s Club in Shanghai is selling Harvard-branded backpacks. The strongest American brand in the world is a university.

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Urbanism-ish

• LA and Orange County, where I live, have the lowest rates of young homebuyers in the country. Previous generations pulled the ladder up from behind them.

• Former IBM offices in LA are being retrofitted into housing. Good, more of this.

• I used to be skeptical that golf cars could be usefulness for good urbanism. But runs through the advantages that they bring. I have changed my mind and see their utility.

• Singapore is going through its own kind of social and cultural transition of the urban form via at Singapore Samizat. I was taken by how similar these yearnings for nostalgia are to what is happening in the US.

• Pew reports that a larger portion of websites are no longer available. Sad. At least there is a new digital graveyard for lost websites and apps. Fun to explore.

• On the flip side, I saw this interesting story on how print magazines can work if they are hyperlocal from . Maybe it’s not print that is dead, but the Internet.

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Closing Time… Did Phones Kill the Hostel Common Room?

I saw this question posed on r/solotravel on Reddit. The user was lamenting the lack of social interactions happening at the hostel where they were staying. “Socializing in hostel common room is slowly dying?” they asked.

My last night here at the hostel and I thought "oh why not stay a while in the common room and have a chit-chat with other fellow travelers. Lo and behold! Everyone is on their phones like literally every single soul in the common room! After half an hour of" dead silence", I decided to just give up, finished my tea and went back to my room.

A lot of users agreed with the thread. “I’m new to solo travel and this is the only experience I had in hostels. It’s good to know I’m not alone,” agreed another user with the most upvotes in the thread. Others, however, suggested that travelers should “sometimes you need to make the first step.” Some tips on the thread to help lubricate socializations are, no surprise, through alcohol:

I will say that I used to love staying at hostels when I was younger, especially when I was traveling solo. However, with age, I do not frequent them as much anymore, as my wife and I have raised our standards since our grad school days. I will say that we stayed in a hostel in Seattle’s Chinatown last summer. It was fun! And we hung out late one night in the common room, socializing with guests from around the world. Bringing some beers certainly helped, confirming the tips in the subreddit thread.

So is this something that you have noticed during your travels? Have phones killed the hostel common room? Or are we all just collectively getting older and doing this kind of thing less with age? Tell me what you think in the comments.

Graduating Into and With AI

It’s graduation season! Congrats to all those recent grads ready for a new adventure. This week, a lot of talk has happened around this graduating class having to grapple with AI. The job world for recent grads is indeed in massive flux due to the wide adoption of the technology.

Given the concerns over AI, it should not be surprising that students recently booed commencement speeches by speakers lauding AI. This happened at the University of Central Florida (thanks to for flagging this one) and the University of Arizona. Not even former Google guru Eric Schmidt could convince the students of the tech’s merits.

At the same time, there were a few high-profile op-eds from students on their cohort’s adoption of AI. Basically, most of them cheated, according to these writers.

“We are the first college class of the A.I. era — ChatGPT arrived on campus about two months after we did,” wrote Stanford graduate Theo Baker in a New York Times op-ed. “When we graduate next month, this technology will have altered our lives in very different ways.”

Indeed, these students were guinea pigs in the lab of AI higher education experimentation. The experiment has gone awry, and the test subjects know it. The ease and temptation to use AI to cheat have simply been too great. Baker wrote:

Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college, yet the school was at first slow to realize how widespread this would become.

Given this one was in the New York Times, it received a lot of attention. But another newspaper with a lower profile echoed these same claims. The piece chronicles cheating at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada. One anonymous student admitted:

In certain situations people just want to do well, students, and I fall into this category, that knows cheating is not right, you just go along with it because the robot is going to be better at wording of a professional essay.

Both stories are especially concerning. Stanford is supposed to be a place for our best and brightest, an engine of innovation. The author does bring up the dubious ethics by past alumni, with several high-profile alumni in jail, such as Elizabeth Holmes. Further, the story from Western was regarding a health class. Look, I’m all for using AI to improve diagnoses, but I’d like my medical practitioners to have some competencies without the tech.

Over at the r/professor Subreddit, my fellow colleagues were lambasting these students and their cohort. Cheating with AI has been the bane of this group since the rollout of ChatGPT four years ago. It changed the profession forever, even if some professors refuse to believe it. Some harsh responses:

The message I got from this article is that while some students resort to booing commencement speakers at the mere mention of AI, they are quite happy to use AI during their education, even at hallowed institutions like Stanford.

Bingo-- they don't like the "we might have no jobs when we graduate" part… they sure love the "let me just use AI to do these assignments so that I don't have to learn anything" part. It's kind of a double-edged sword but both edges cut in a way that renders them unemployed.

Grim, maybe, but not much we haven't been chewing over in here for years. I think the hardest part for me is accepting that it's a whole culture of lying and thievery these days and that I can't trust even my best students. That if I get excited about anyone's work at all, there's a 50/50 chance I'm being played for a fool. At best, it's a waste of energy to care any more.

Tough quotes. But they represent very real frustrations from the faculty. Some have suggested we go back to older models of assessment: Blue Books, oral exams, and in-person proctoring, etc. Yet, there is pushback to these efforts.

At Stanford, professors are banned to “proctor in-person exams.” Baker wrote that some considered this practice to be a “nuclear option.” At Western, one professor said handwritten exams were not feasible. “A written exam by hand tests, first and foremost, a student’s handwriting skills which, in this generation, (are) almost absent,” he told The London Free Press. “It also means deciphering handwritten answers.”

Despite these barriers, universities (and professors) are realizing that the same ways of doing things can no longer remain. , a fellow educational Substacker who has been on this AI-higher ed beat for a long time, outlines some possible rules for institutions on Anecdotal Value. Universities need to get real and help these students help themselves.

The graduating class is right to be concerned with AI threatening their careers, even if many of them were using the tech to cheat. Universities should realize these temptations are too great, even for the best students. Our sector must adapt, or the boos at graduation will only continue.

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Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Comedian Nate Bargatze is giving a student athlete a role in the next film to sign with Vanderbilt U. College football really is in the Wild West era right now. Anything seems possible.

• Oklahoma City U’s golf team won their division’s national championship, despite the school announcing the closure of the program. All too common in higher ed these days. Good quality and importance don’t always translate to survivability.

• In more closure news, Oakland City U, not to be confused with similar-sounding named institutions in the Bay Area and Michigan, but in Indiana, flip-flops on its closure. The school will remain open… for now. From my experience, reversing these kinds of closing messages cannot easily be put back in the bottle.

• Princeton gets around the endowment tax by giving students more money. Seems like the ideal way to incentivize.

• Would you want to live in an old school? Maybe this one in Seattle! But it does cost a million dollars, with another $2K per month for HoA. Ouch. Still cool adaptive reuse.

• California may loosen regulations on public university student housing. It seems absurd that private universities already have these privileges when the UCs, Cal-States, and CCs do not.

• In more housing news, Gainesville mourns dumpy abandoned gas station to be turned into student housing. Reading through the Facebook comments, I see so many locals harbor contempt for the University of Florida and its students. Sad.

  

• Is it time to end peer review? Some fellow researchers believe AI has rendered the old academic journal publishing system unsustainable. It is a convincing argument.

• Over in the UK, King’s College London and Cranfield University announced a merger. The vision for the merger is to create a “global university” brand. The Age of Conquest goes global.

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Urbanism

• Brookline, Mass., has an amazing high school that sits over a light rail line station. I love this kind of integrated design. Too few schools these days have good urbanism.

  

• New data on childhood immobilities in the US. Kids can’t do anything by themselves.

• Ebike company locks out customers from their bikes. Another example of all this “smart” tech making things worse.

• Giant novelty statues have been a fading tradition, despite their importance in Americana. But this lost art is making a comeback.

• ABC News has removed the entire archive of the election prediction site FiveThirtyEight. This kind of thing is becoming more and more common. Good reminder that we must protect the Internet Archive at all costs.

• Likewise, AI training means destroying old books. What a bummer to find out.

• In some California news, LA residents are angry at a proposed public restroom in a popular park. They think installing restrooms will attract more visitors so they would rather have none at all. Insane logic.

• But it’s not all annoyance here. LA’s new D-line subway is a game-changer for the city. Heading in the right direction!

• Brightline West, the high-speed rail line connecting LA to Las Vegas, is facing opposition from… Texas? Apparently, it is a lobbying group of angry farmers who hate trains (seriously).

  

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Closing Time… No One Can Escape My Research. Not Even Me.

This past week, Middlebury College released a plan to sell the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) at Monterey to the Soka University of America. Hey, wait, that’s my university where I work!

I have been researching closing colleges for three years now, along with a decade of research on higher education broadly. I guess you cannot work in US higher ed these days without going through either some kind of institutional closure or expansion. I even covered the closure of MIIS here on College Towns when it was announced in August last year.

As someone who researches college closures, I am happy to hear MIIS will survive. It is an interesting and unique institution. In my own field, they have long done great work in international education (although they ended the MA in International Education Management in 2025). So I am glad that the institution will remain open.

As a faculty member here, it is also interesting that I am now within an institution grappling with closure/ merger. There are certainly questions that I have that are both professional and research-related, like How is this going to work? Since the announcement was just for these preliminary stages, there is still a lot to work out. The deal will not even be completed until the end of the 2026-2027 academic year.

For now, I am excited to learn that a great institution has been saved, even if not every program will make it. I am also excited to meet my new colleagues, even if I still have questions around the merger. C'est la vie in this Age of Conquest of US higher ed.

The July 1976 issue of National Geographic was a celebration of America. It was the time of the US Bicentennial, which captivated the country in the mid-1970s. While much of the issue looks backwards with exposés on George Washington or the country’s changing physical landscape, one article looks forward to the future.

Titled Five Notable Thinkers Explore the Future, the article outlines a meeting between intellectuals and writers of the day, as they prognosticated on what life has in store for Americans in the future. We are now 50 years out from the US Bicentennial and these predictions. With the upcoming Semiquincentennial, it is a good time to see how they did. Thinkers included in the piece:

• Gerard Piel - publisher of Scientific American.

• Richard F. Babcock - Lawyer and housing advocate.

• Isaac Asimov - Famed sci-fi and non-fiction writer.

• Buckminster Fuller - Architect, author, designer, and inventor.

• Edmund N. Bacon - City planner and urbanist.

So how did these illustrious thinkers do? Let’s dive in.

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Wait, It’s All Zoning? Always Has Been

One thing that immediately jumped out to me was how much focus there was on the urban form, cities, and our inhabitation. They dissected the ills of zoning, in particular, along with the criticisms of post-war urbanism. I was not expecting there to be so much to be about land use!

But the urbanism focus makes sense in retrospect. The 1970s were a time of the "urban crisis." Cities were struggling, hollowed out by suburban sprawl, and, in some cases, literally burning (see the Bronx). When this issue was released, the country was still a quarter-century out from the eventual urban Renaissance defined by the Millennial-Hipster-Bespoke Revolution of the 2000s.

Surprisingly, the thinkers were actually predicting these leaps in urbanism. “We’re going to see the American people resettle in the city,” said Piel. Bacon echoes the point: “It means that the center, which we think of at the moment as decaying and being abandoned, will have a resurgence and will again become the focal point.” Even in the midst of a chaotic era, they could still see the power and potential of cities and, likewise, the drawbacks of suburban development, including racial segregation.

By the year 2076, unless we achieve a racially integrated society, you are going to see our big cities substantially all white. In the next 20 years at the longest, the suburbs, where the jobs are already moving, will be open to blue-collar blacks. -Babcock.

Babcock, who is sometimes labeled “The Dean of American Planning Law,” published The Zoning Game way back in 1966. In it, he argued that American zoning laws were political endeavors rather than scientific or rational, especially that of the growing suburbanization trend. The conceptions of land use in the article almost sound like ’s Arbitrary Line (2022), published a half-century later.

On the question of land use, I think it is perfectly clear that we’re going to see the end of suburbia. The suburban dwelling is the most wasteful of resources and of energy. All of the public investment in highways, sewers, and all the rest that makes this system possible is accomplished for the more fortunate at the expense of the less fortunate. -Piel

The great illusion of the suburban experience was that man can experience nature by owning pieces of it. And that is fundamentally incorrect. Nature eludes ownership. Becoming more urban and less suburban will also reverse the rhythm of life, to our great benefit. -Bacon

In critiquing the “Low density of the suburbs,” Bacon foresaw the helicopter parenting that defines American childhood today. “They should not have to depend upon their mothers being chauffeurs in order to make contact with friends,” he wrote. Indeed, since the 1970s, children have been walking less and being chauffeured more, leading to the dreaded school car pickup lines.

Babcock even correctly identified state YIMBY movements. “I believe that by the year 2000 the states will have a significant voice in land-use policy,” he said. “The states will take back significant parts of the power they granted to municipalities.” While it took another two decades, the 2020s are certainly defined by states giving property rights back to owners, which were clipped away by obstructionists.

Although not everyone foresaw the battle lines that zoning had drawn. “New perceptions of land are going to make for a situation where private property versus control doesn’t become the main conflict,” exclaimed Bacon. If you’ve ever gone to a community meeting on a proposed apartment complex, you know these battles rage fiercely.

The urbanists were also shortsighted on the suburban experiment. There was a sense that it would eventually fail, with the rest of the country realizing the folly that they had already diagnosed in land use. “Are the suburbs dead?” posed the magazine. Yes, some have certainly failed, which is a central thesis to ’s suburban Ponzi scheme concept from Strong Towns. Yet, the country has not abandoned the overwhelming suburban form, to the chagrin of urbanists today.

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Peak Everything

This period of American history seemed to elicit thoughts on peaks and excesses. In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich published the devastating book The Population Bomb. The central thesis was that the world’s growing population could not be supported by the food supply. His calamities never came to be. But his theory was influential. To the credit of the thinkers in this National Geographic piece, they went the other direction from Ehrlich’s alarmism.

Despite the imperfections of our society, however, we see in our vital statistics, and in those of every other industrial nation, the impact of industrial abundance. All the industrial nations are approaching zero population growth. First their death rates came down. Then, with surviving offspring assured, they reduced their birthrates. We have every reason to believe the same will happen in the developing countries, as they achieve economic expansion. -Piel

Piel was mostly discussing this population slowdown in terms of expected economic growth, or that we should not expect to see infinite growth in the future. His prediction is exactly the issue many countries are grappling with today, too few babies, not too many, as Ehrlich errantly predicted.

They were, though, concerned about aspects of energy use. The memories of the OPEC oil crisis and fallout were clearly fresh in their minds. Likewise, the notions of Peak Oil or running out of resources were starting to take shape during the era.

We are assisted considerably in facing up to the problems of urban settlement by the fact that the petroleum of the world is rapidly becoming exhausted. We are going to have to move from a petroleum-base mobility to an electric-base mobility. We’ve got to quit using petroleum for our basic way of getting around. -Bacon

His colleague Piel added, “It’s quite apparent we will be living in the post-petroleum age.” Obviously, the autocentric approach that inundated post-war America was seen as unsustainable. Bacon asserted, “The only reason for a vehicle will be to bring a baby home from the hospital or to take a casket out.” While we are certainly not anywhere close to car-free America, we are certainly on a rapid collision course with change through electric cars, self-driving improvements, better battery technology, and other renewables.

Even though the world was facing energy competition, Fuller foresaw a future of global cooperation in this area. He believed that somehow the world’s powers (US, China, USSR) would join forces for a global “intercontinental” power grid. He was obsessed with the wasted energy in the technology of the day. “I know it is highly feasible to take care of all humanity at higher standards than anyone has known,” he encouraged. Alas, we have not yet reached this peaceful Star Trek-like world unification.

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Isaac Asimov is Out of This World

While much of the guesses in the piece were rooted in some practical policy and societal questions. This is actually one aspect that I was slightly disappointed with the thinkers; there were so few fantastical sci-fi predictions. Of course, Isaac Asimov was the one exception.

“I have written about the world or global village, tied together electronically, with every citizen able to communicate instantly with every other,” said Asimov, who predicted the modern world of the internet and smartphone by then through his fantastical sci-fi stories. By 1976, he was already blending science fiction with science fact.

We will have to have a steady-state society, in which all innovations will be looked closely for possible evil side effects, because the big slogan of the 21st century will be: No More 20th Centuries! -Asimov

His concern that Americans will be apprehensive of new technologies was apt. The country has a kind of distrust for new innovations. We saw this with the rise of credit card transactions, the internet, smartphones, and now AI. The current rising opposition to data centers mirrors Asimov’s prediction.

At the same time, Asimov also made some bold predictions that never really came to fruition, not yet at least. In one, he posited that the human race would stop building up via skyscrapers, and instead drill down to subterranean cities.

We can live all year round in an equable temperature at all latitudes: We can have transportation not affected at all by inclement weather. We can establish our night and day the world over to suit ourselves and thus remove a great deal of what separates us. -Asimov

Challenging this subterranean point, he ended up arguing with himself, adding that the human race may much rather prefer going up. Not in high-rises, though, but to outer space. Of course, just standing pat terrestrially was not a listed option.

Going up, however, is perhaps the more attractive direction and the one that mankind is more likely to take. Our concept of land use now may include not only the land on the surface of the earth. We can colonize the moon or build space colonies. -Asimov

National Geographic seemed so intrigued by what the sci-fi writer was predicting that they gave him his own article in the same issue. Entitled “The Next Frontier?,” Asimov described what space life would be like for future Americans. I must say that it includes otherworldly illustrations by Pierre Mion. I love the optimism in post-war retrofuturism.

Colonies, whether they are on the moon or in near space, would fulfill functions that are now fulfilled by the cities on the surface of earth Properly handled, the earth may become a rather parklike world, a rather low-density world, with most of humanity living in space communities. And then, someday; there will undoubtedly be a panel talking about the future of space use. -Asimov

In the end, we did not reach these heights, even with the renewed interest in space exploration. He did make some astute predictions, such as the rise of the internet, but he would be disappointed at the advancements we haven’t really made in interplanetary exploration. We still seem very far from a Moon colony.

My Blurb for America in 2076

This has been fun to go back and see what the smartest people predicted for life today. They got some right, and a lot wrong. There were not even that many wild predictions (save Asimov). I guess it shows how serious these guys were, but it lacks imagination, even if proven correct.

Their guesses made me think of our own current expectations for the future. I see some parallels to the Peak stuff from the 1970s with the trendy term “late-stage capitalism,” basically peak capitalism, before everything comes crashing down. The futurists of today might make this kind of prediction, as did some of the thinkers then. But they could be wrong, and the system endures, despite its warts.

Some of the current discourse reminds me of the failed Population Bomb prediction of Ehrlich. Given these population concerns of yesteryear, I do wonder if our consternation over the nose-diving birthrate numbers across the world will somehow be worked out. Perhaps, like with farming, the technology will bring ease and efficiency to laborious situations, which was seemingly the innovation path that the thinkers in the piece leaned on for their predictions.

I guess the lesson from these futurists is that a lot of predictions are going to miss, while some will hit. The most pressing problems of the day may just fade into an afterthought. On the other hand, things that are salient right now may only become more so. Like Asimov with the internet, I can see similar shades of this with the rise of AI. No matter the Bicentennial of 1976, the Semiquincentennial of 2026, or the Tricentennial of 2076, the future always remains to some degree unpredictable, even by the smartest people in the room.

ALPR Cameras as a Campus Free Speech Issue

Are surveillance cameras on campus an academic freedom issue? Two Stanford University professors believe that they are. They pair wrote in The Stanford Daily:

It is crucial to understand that threats to privacy, academic freedom and freedom of speech and assembly are taking place in the context of extraordinarily weakened and severely compromised governmental institutions

The professors invoked the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an association that organizes university faculty and academics, often against injustices of academic freedom. The pair echo a piece that came out early in the academic year by a post-doc calling for a cancellation of contracts with “dystopian” Flock Safety, an Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) company. He wrote:

ALPRs are tools of mass surveillance, indiscriminately capturing images of every vehicle that drives past them and storing the data for up to a month or more. It is equivalent to placing a GPS tracking device on each driver’s vehicle, providing time-stamped location data that can be used in warrantless searches to reconstruct your movements as you go about your lives.

I was ready to lambast this take when I first encountered it. I had mistakenly thought these cameras were the automatic ticketing variety. In my view, this kind of usage of traffic cameras is not a free speech issue, but rather a safety issue. However, the cameras at Stanford, and at many other universities, do not issue citations; instead, these Flock cameras are mostly about keeping tabs on who is coming and going to campus.

For me, these kinds of cameras are mostly a waste of resources if not used to actually enforce traffic rules. Despite what we hear from the media or from our paranoid neighbors on Nextdoor, students are more in danger of someone TikToking while behind the wheel than some random criminal predator or even an overstepping ICE agent.

Apparently, Flock cameras can be used in some cases to issue tickets, but the case seems more like a rare man-bites-dog type of article. It is not standard. I do agree there should be caution in over-surveillance. This is part of a broader safetyism in American culture, certainly a strong sentiment on college campuses.

While conservatives have long criticized safetyism in US higher education, Trump has certainly used these same fears to drive national policy. The Stanford professors explicitly cite the recent ICE raids as prime examples of overstepping. In general, there is a lot of distrust towards this company, not just at Stanford. There is fear that the technology will be used in corrupt ways. There’s even a Reddit group dedicated to tracking the company’s contracts, celebrating damaged units, and sharing tips on how to spot them.

What annoys me about this kind of Stranger-Danger safetyism is that there are real hazards that college towns just ignore. The area around campus can be quite dangerous due to the crowds of pedestrians or bikes mixing with off-campus car traffic.

There have been a range of deaths on and around Stanford recently. A woman was struck and killed in a crosswalk near campus in February of this year. Last year, a Stanford student died after getting hit by a car while riding a bike on campus. That same year, a popular coach was killed by a garbage truck a few miles from campus, and a 90-year-old woman hit and killed a cyclist. In 2024, a visiting student researcher was killed in the very same way near campus.

I could keep going. Palo Alto Online, a local newspaper, is full of stories like these I’ve already listed. The Stanford Daily even chronicled “bike accidents” on campus from 2014 to 2018, finding over 300 such incidents. Over a third, the highest percent, were related to incidents with other vehicles. The authors even highlight one part of campus called the “Circle of Death,” which is apparently notoriously unsafe. Other intersections, especially where the campus interfaced with roadways, proved similarly dangerous for bikers.

Further, the two professors argue that there is only a “dubious benefit these cameras add” and that “we have yet to receive any evidence that they actually make us safer.” I do agree with this concern when these are simply tracking people rather than trying to curb driver behavior. We have a use case right in the Bay Area. The city of San Francisco has released data on their speed camera intervention: they are a resounding success.

…data collected from San Francisco’s 33 camera locations and other traffic-sensing equipment, excessive speeding — defined as drivers going more than 10 mph above the speed limit — dropped nearly 80%. The number of repeat offenders dropped, too.

Localities in the state turned to speed cameras after an alarming increase in fatalities related to cars and drivers. Speed, reckless or inactive driving, and vehicle size are key factors for the increase. The claim that there is “dubious benefit” is true if not utilized in this way, as traffic cameras do seem to alter some offending driver behaviors.

Where I align with the anti-Flock cameras sentiment is that I would much rather turn to street redesign rather than enforcement—the Strong Town way. This would mean narrowing lanes, adding more barriers, and removing cars from places altogether. But localities have proven over and over again that all of this is too much to ask. Traffic engineering dictates that speed and ease of access for cars outweigh the safety and comfort of everyone outside of a car. See one example from College Towns:

To Stanford’s credit, the university has installed a range of roundabouts in recent years. However, students still report unease when walking. “I feel like sometimes I just have to be confident and pray I don’t get hit because otherwise I’ll be waiting forever to walk through when it’s busy,” said one student in a 2023 article in The Stanford Daily on the roundabouts.

In the end, I can see the fears of over-surveillance of an overreaching nanny state. At the same time, we cannot abdicate responsibility because there is an abuse of power in another arena. There is a real public safety issue; it’s just not the one the cameras purport to inhibit, nor the one the professors believe is an external threat.

Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Princeton NIMBYs are once again up in arms over a proposed development on the site of former dorms of a struggling college. It’s only a 4-story building, too! Just shows how difficult it can be to repurpose college space.

• To help with the student housing crisis, one UT-Austin student came up with an innovative app. Instead of Rate My Professor, he created Rate My Rental. Cool initiative!

• Columbia sold a housing unit in the Bronx that was deemed too disconnected from the main campus. My alma mater apparently lost money on it! Imagine losing money on New York City real estate

• The financialization of youth sports is ruining a childhood pastime. The travel sports culture is also another aspect that connects to helicopter parenting.

• Northeastern completes merger with Manhattan-based struggling college. The Age of Conquest is still forging ahead in US higher ed.

• UC Davis gets a massive donation to expand vet school. No, not veterans, veterinarians. This field often seems forgotten in terms of funding and STEM initiatives, which is strange considering pets are only becoming more important in American culture.

• Harvard is making its students take an AI series. If the wealthiest and most well-resourced university is paying this much attention, other schools cannot continue to ignore (or simply ban) AI.

• More AI Wrangler job updates: OpenAI reported that its latest model was given a “Nerdy personality.” This resulted in an abnormal amount of mentions of “Goblins.”

Urbanism-ish

• I’ve covered dead colleges and malls here, but those aren’t the only disappearing institutions. What happens to a vineyard once it closes? Turns out, it’s also complicated.

• “Transit is only as good as its weakest link, at that weakest link is almost always the weekends,” writes in Car Free America. This is exactly my complaint here in Southern California (amongst many others).

• in writes on the rise of factory-built homes in Florida. I have long been curious about this housing innovation, but remain skeptical they can solve our problems.

• New library in Omaha, Nebraska, is emblematic of how ugly our car-centric design is. What an abominable aesthetic.

• at has a piece on practical steps Charlotte, NC, made to urge homeowners to support better housing policy. Always great to see a positive and practical writing in this space that is often doom and gloom.

• For some California news, it seems there is more trouble brewing in Hollywood? The film company site where they filmed The Office is shuttering. It seems the industry here is disintegrating.

• But it’s not all bad news in Southern California; LA college students are embracing the metro system. Ridership for young people is up considerably this year.

• In some news from China, the Chinese government thinks that hostile foreign powers are trying to make their young people lazy. Funny that we have heard something similar about American youth usage of TikTok.

• of covered the backlash for the new The Devil Wears Prada 2 film in China. Apparently, there is a Chinese character who is a frumpy, nerdy assistant. The controversy highlights the different perceptions of aesthetics in the US vs. China. Chinese netizens complained this was an offensive stereotype, and would prefer someone with more traditional beauty standards. US media often takes the opposite view.

Closing Time… PSA: Used Bookstores, Please Stop Doing This

I do not mean to denigrate used bookstores on Independent Bookstore Day. But I must highlight a complaint from Matt K. Parker, who highlighted an annoying habit: terrible stickers. He pleaded on X, “Why, God, why do used book stores use cover-destroying price stickers?” The photo shows a nice-looking Penguin Classics version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ripped to the spine.

Some book aficionados suggested that he try using a hair dryer on high heat next time (a trick I have also heard works). Others nodded approvingly, sharing their own examples from their collections. The most egregious example was from Joshua Penduck, who lamented, “This book survived for 250 years before a used-bookshop put its price sticker on it.” Indeed, what a sad accident of carelessness.

Since I collect old books and magazines, I am constantly annoyed by sticker habits. The worst offenders are the thrift stores such as Goodwill. I have found many books over the years maimed by an errant price. It’s frustrating. Here’s an example from my collection: The Organ-Cases and Organs of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 1883. It potentially sells for $1600. Granted, I love the price I got it at Goodwill, I just wish they had a little bit better practices.

We all agree that the adhesive on most stickers is too damaging to used books, especially quite old ones. The best practice for pricing seems to be to use a light pencil on the front-end sheet. I have noticed the best (and longest-running) used bookstores often use this method. I wish more would follow suit to help preserve our old books.

The Job of the Future is Here Today

Last year, I wrote the first edition of my Future Jobs series on what I called “AI Wranglers.” I described this type of job as “part IT guy, part psychiatrist, and part detective.” You can read the full article below. While it drew a lot of interest, it also had detractors skeptical of AI. There is considerable anti-AI sentiment in the US, especially in education circles. However, I recently found out that this future job is not really the future… because it already exists in the present.

There are now real AI Wranglers at top companies. Google has hired Henry Shevlin, a faculty member at the University of Cambridge, in the role of Philosopher at DeepMind. His role will center on exploring “machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and AGI readiness.” He’s not alone. Amanda Askell is another philosopher working at a high-level company, Anthropic. She is tasked with shaping Claude’s personality and trying to understand how the AI works.

Askell described her job in a recent interview:

I’m mostly focused on the character of Claude, how Claude behaves, and I guess some of them were kind of like nuanced questions about how AI models like should behave, but also even just things like, how should they feel about their own position in the world?

So trying to both teach models how to be, like, good in the way that by sometimes think about it is like, how would the ideal person behave in Claude’s situation. but then also these, I think these interesting questions that are coming up more now around how they should think about their own circumstances and their own values and things like that.

Commenting on the interview, tech writer Ole Lehmann wrote, “[It] feels weird to tell an AI it's doing well, but it measurably shifts the next 10 responses.” He continued, “tone, trust, permission to take a position, the absence of threats… Claude picks up on all of it.” This kind of humanistic approach to AI is exactly what I described with the AI Wrangler. The job is already here.

My preferred AI Wrangler term, though, did not catch on. Instead, these kinds of skills are likely better known as something like “prompt engineering.” I still think AI Wrangler is a more apt label, given that these skill sets include not just STEM but also humanistic approaches. “Prompt engineering” sounds too technical. There is art to AI wrangling.

The full interview is worth a watch:

The Skeptics

I should add that there are skeptics who do not believe these kinds of skills are relevant or even real. “It just shows how disconnected we are from the small group of people making decisions that will impact our future heavily,” wrote the popular software developer and streamer ThePrimeagen. “These people have so much AI psychosis.”

Even (or perhaps I should say especially) my fellow professors are skeptical of these new developments. On the r/Professors subreddit, anti-AI sentiments are strong. Just offering a little bit of sympathy with AI brings the hammer of downvotes. A popular post recently complained, “‘Prompt Engineering’ is just a corporate rebrand of ‘Question Asking.’” Many applauded the rant:

The central point of my post is that there is nothing new to learn or teach. We’ve been formally teaching students how to question since the Hellenistic Era.

This is essentially Google on steroids. We didn’t have to teach students to use Google, students were usually better at it than their professors.

prompt engineering is far more insidious than question asking, imo

To be fair, there were professors in the group who defended the concept, pushing back on the assertion that the innovation is overblown. But the voices on the thread and in the broader academia usually coalesce around dislike for AI. A group of scholars even recently published an article that argues qualitative researchers should not use AI on ethical grounds.

Professors Cannot Bury Their Heads in the Sand

I do understand the disdain for AI from teachers. Students are 100% using it to cheat. It makes our job much more difficult. An example comes from the r/PromptEngineering subreddit, where one student admitted, “My professor told me my essay ‘finally sounded like me.’ I had just run it through an AI humanizer.” Of course, the group wanted to know which exact app he used.

I do also understand that there are broader environmental concerns. However, given that every company has shoehorned an AI feature into all apps, websites, or digital services, it is starting to become impossible to avoid interacting with them. The only way to avoid AI these days is to go totally analog, off the internet completely. Short of that, it is just making a showy complaint.

Just because we don’t like something doesn’t mean we can ignore or ban it. One colleague who agrees is , Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and owner of Substack, who has been publishing a series entitled Academics Need to Wake Up on AI. He drew ire from the professorate with the first post in the series when he later revealed it was written by Claude. His interview on the situation in The Chronicle of Higher Ed is worth a read:

There is a big divide. You have senior folks, or folks who are not on social media, who have not heard anything about agentic AI. They just know ChatGPT as this thing that students use to cheat. They’re like, Let’s ban AI everywhere. Meanwhile, their junior colleagues run all their data through Codex. The closest analogy would be to imagine if half of your colleagues didn’t know the internet existed. This is not a stable equilibrium.

I am not saying that every class needs to have full AI integration, just that every teacher needs to understand the capabilities to some degree and how students may use the technology. Even if classrooms have not found much use for AI, the same cannot be said of the workplace. The Financial Times reported this week that the highest earners and most experienced are using AI at much higher rates than other workers:

Lawyers, accountants and software developers are using these tools at similar rates whether junior or senior but are using them much more than people in lower-paid occupations in the same industries.

The strong relationship between pay, education and AI use suggests the technology may increase earnings inequality by boosting the productivity of workers at the top but not at the bottom.

An example of the business sector’s embrace of AI comes from ChatGPT announcing an Excel add-on. I already use AI to remind me of macros. I think this is a good use case for AI. Any class that relies on Excel must consider the tool since Microsoft is putting it front and center. This obviously does not mean every class needs AI, just like not every class needs computers or other software.

While my concept of an AI Wrangler is still something we mostly see only at the very highest levels of the tech sector, I believe things will trickle down to the rest of the industry. There is already mass adoption of the tech, with high-paying industries expecting their workforce to use and understand AI capabilities. Educators must pay attention to this job of the present, whether we like it or not.

Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• In more closure news, Anna Maria College is shutting down. The second Massachusetts institution to shutter this month, joining Hampshire College.

• A community college in Washington is closing a branch campus. This is exactly the trend I have been seeing in my own research.

• There have been some new data sites popping up that explore closed or closing colleges. One comes from ’ personal website. The other from James Long, Chair of the Division of Business at Friends University, with a pretty cool interactive map. I may do a full article on these closure metrics, as AI has really supercharged analysis and data here.

• It’s not just the US making cuts to higher education; Shenzhen University in China is taking a buzzsaw to its major offerings. Bummer.

• On the flip side of budget cuts, Yale is considering expanding with a campus in San Francisco. The biggest continue getting bigger in the Higher Ed Age of Conquest.

• There is no end in sight for donations to big football programs. I have heard growing concerns that there will be donor fatigue due to players washing out or renegging on deals. This does not appear to be happening yet, at least not at the very top.

• In student housing news, an open house for a $4.6K per month rental in a California college town has a line out the door with eager applicants. Build more housing…

• Student housing in Belfast, Northern Ireland, may have reached a saturation point. I will be interested in seeing how rents are impacted.

• Community college student in Seattle protests the exorbitant housing prices by setting up a tent right in front of the campus.

• Tulane University is building new student housing. Locals are concerned it will bulldoze a historic restaurant. I understand nostalgia, but this is basically a dumpy strip mall with a cool sign (which the university is keeping up).

  

• My lone K-12 news today comes from , a writer and mother lamenting having to move to the US because it means she will have to give up on her kid’s independence, This is the sad reality that many parents find themselves in due to our terrible built environments.

Urbanism-ish

• Where did all the public benches go in American cities? One urbanist explores this lost amenity.

• Over here in California, Hollywood, the town, is in rough shape. High rents coupled with street degradation undercut the glitz of the supposed tourist destination. Some locals have a plan to fix it.

• In more California news, LAX gets a fancy new terminal upgrade. I’m not impressed. Call me when the People Mover starts moving people.

  

• In some global urbanism news, China is helping Brazil build its train infrastructure. The US has no answer to this other than to complain.

• China has selected two Pakistani astronauts to train on board the Chinese Space Station (CSS). The New Space Race continues!

• Dubai is planning a massive metro line as part of securing confidence after the disastrous Iran conflict.

• Going across the pond, Britain’s “UNESCO model village” shows the best of town-building. Saltaire in West Yorkshire, built in 1851, is really just the traditional model. Retvrn.

Closing Time… Rats Love Driving Cars

Rats love driving cars, even if not rewarded with a treat. Ok, this is an old video and story, but I just recently stumbled on it again and thought it was pretty fun. But rat urbanists worry this newfound love of driving will lead to rat urban renewal and the end of walkable rat cities.