When I started this six-week-long series by asking whether my daughter would be attending college in 2035, the year she turns eighteen, I was pretty sure I already knew the answer. Nine years is a short amount of time, and something disastrous—or, I suppose, downright liberatory—would need to happen in the culture to make it unlikely for her to shuttle off to some campus after high school.

Still, thinking about the future of higher education has convinced me that her path to a bachelor’s degree will be very different from the one I began in 1998. I want to end the series with a set of of predictions about what will happen to higher ed in the next nine years:

As a columnist, I’m almost embarrassed by the dearth of truly hot takes in this list. This is hardly Armageddon for higher education. But the future does kind of suck, and looking over this list makes me wonder if the more appropriate framing for this series would’ve been to ask about my future grandchildren rather than my children. Will they be attending college in the twenty-fifties or the twenty-sixties, when the attrition of the next decade or two has run its course, universities have consolidated, and we’ve come to some livable peace with technology? If my hypothetical grandchild grows up like my actual daughter, in an educated household in an expensive town surrounded by educated friends with educated parents, what will pull them to a campus? For me, it was an imperative: go to college or end up homeless on the street. Or so it seemed. For my nine-year-old daughter, in 2035, I imagine it will feel more like inertia: go to college because you might as well have a degree in an uncertain and changing world, where every day some A.I. company or another announces yet another industry that will soon be taken over by the robots.

Inertia, though, is finite. If the university is no longer just the place you go to get a degree that gets you on a job, what is it? As far as I can tell after my inquiries during the past six weeks, almost no one has a particularly good answer to that question. In the coming years, as the pain starts at so many of these universities, their administrators, faculty, and those with a direct stake in the future of higher education need to figure out what a college education is for.

My suggestion: It’s easier to come up with a collective vision for an educated population than it is to keep flogging exclusivity, élite credentials, and whatever else colleges sell these days. A.I. will, at minimum, shift the access points to all sorts of information, flatten much of the differences between formerly disparate forms of education—as the robot learns more, it’ll arrive at some bland but acceptable amalgam of all it has read, and everyone who relies on the robot will take that mush as the consensus—and radically change the way students work, especially in STEM fields. Under those conditions, can colleges still sell class mobility through an exclusive education? Or will they do better to look at the existing infrastructure of affordable community and regional public colleges, hear what young people and their families are saying about the cost of tuition and student debt, and then make a broader appeal for education for the sake of the public? ♦