Built for complexity, grief, and rigor. Carrying paradoxes that most people instinctively split apart.

And what Deloitte misses in its 2025 report on higher education

I was born into a family of diverse spiritual beliefs and milquetoast dysfunction. My childhood wasn’t storybook, but it wasn’t a nightmare. There wasn’t chaos, but there wasn’t alignment, either. We had the ordinary stuff of middle-class life—professional careers, public schools, piano and swimming lessons, camping trips to national parks. Yet within the stability and structure, we were lonely people. We were kind, loving, and ethical, but missing were the interpersonal skills to connect on a deeper level—to transcend our personal convictions and experiences.

These aren’t unusual circumstances. Many can relate. It’s the type of existential childhood that drives one to become an overachiever, or seek therapy, or make art, or fall in love with the Jeremy Allen Whites of the world. And despite that we often chastise our families for how they fell short, the B-side is what we gained and the strengths we honed as a result. It might look like the ability to find solid ground before others know that ground exists. It might look like valuing flexibility and pluralism, and intuitively knowing how to navigate the world of ideas from multiple perspectives at once. It might look like separating the essence of truth from stories and traditions encapsulating it, or developing a high tolerance for complexity, grief, and rigor. It might look like carrying paradoxes that most people instinctively split apart.

As a coach, I’ve come to enjoy working with people like this, too. People who can hold emotional and intellectual tension, and who are seeking a partner and collaborator in a world that seeks to flatten complexity and reward speed, metrics, and uniformity.

The Deloitte Report on Higher Education

Here’s why I’m articulating this. The other week, I read a report from the credentialed people in the higher education sector at Deloitte that outlined the challenges and opportunities facing higher education in 2025. More accurately, I opened the report, closed it, opened it, skimmed it, opened it, closed it, opened it, and then read it.

While not surprising or new, the report points out that public confidence in the value of US higher education has sharply declined in the past decade: “Concerns about the value of a degree, politicization, rising tuition costs, and perceived misalignment with workforce needs are contributing to the erosion.” Yes, it’s been crumbling for a while, though what to do about it feels more urgent now than ever. Deloitte outlined five areas that higher education leaders should address in response: adopt new financial and governance models, reconsider risk management, align academics with workforce needs, and explore ways to increase the sector’s “systemness,” which could look like greater integration or more interdependence.

It’s not earth-shattering advice, but it makes me anxious because I believe it’s skipping some fundamental steps. It’s as if Deloitte’s trying to schedule the sunrise when we haven’t finished reckoning with the dark of the night.

Strategies and clear thinking alone won’t be enough to get us out of this mess. I believe the first job to be done, to borrow a phrase from business innovation theorists, is to stop trying so hard to fix things, and instead address our feelings of heartbreak and loss about where are today. I’m convinced of this because the education sector was built by idealists—true believers who resonated with the power of education to transform souls, not just build careers. These are educators and researchers who’ve dedicated their lives to blue-sky research and public good, and this is worth honoring and mourning. This is part of change management, too.

Start at the very beginning

It starts with telling our origin stories and reconnecting to the past, first. That is one way to return to the essence—how did the university come to matter to us?

Growing up, my dad, who holds a doctorate in education, was a university professor of industrial arts, then photography, and this life was all around us. Dinner table discussions recounted campus goings-on and politics: “the dean” has been a character, quite often the bad guy, in stories my entire life. I remember my dad grading tests in the evenings. On weekends, my sister and I would tag along to his building to develop film. Sometimes we would assist in the darkroom, but mostly we’d run and slide down the dark, linoleum hallways in our socks, or scrounge up quarters and hunt the halls for vending machines. On paydays, our family would eat Chinese food at the Grand Canyon Cafe downtown, where one of my dad’s students waited tables and would bring us all the extra dishes.

There is no higher calling than to be a professor, I believed for most of my life. In fact, this was engrained so deeply that I felt sheepish, like I was selling out, taking my first professional job out of college as a reporter at a business newspaper.

I entertained becoming an academic, too. When I went back to school for an MFA in writing, I had my sights on pursuing a doctorate and making my living in a world of coffee, classrooms, and ideas, too. It was a deep, unsettling loss when I came to accept that I wasn’t cut out to be a professor, at least not one of writing or literature. But I didn’t love teaching, and I couldn’t imagine maintaining the same schedule for decades—not after I’d experienced the faster-paced, deadline-driven world of journalism. In subsequent years, I took alt-academic fundraising and marketing roles, thinking that would combine all of my interests, and it did to a degree, until the gap continued to widened between what I believed the university could be, and what it had become.

Personal evolutions are one thing, but when you feel that your profession is under attack, on the verge of collapse, or is transforming into something you no longer recognize or enjoy, that’s its own kind of crisis. Higher education isn’t the only sector that’s cracking, splintering apart. I speak with doctors, therapists, journalists, nonprofit professionals, and others who all say it’s disheartening not to be trusted, or that they’re drowning in bureaucracy and paperwork. Their profession’s structures and systems are built for an era past, or to maximize efficiency over being truly effective. Clients and friends must say to me weekly, “I didn’t sign up for this,” or “it’s not what it once was.” They aren’t complaining but processing. “Given the circumstances, what do you want?” I often say back.

Given the circumstances, we each have to consider what we can contribute, and how we can stay anchored in meaning making, and what it will cost us to stay in the fight. This is work I did with my own coach, too. Large, lumbering organizations like universities will take decades to transform, so it’s totally valid to wonder whether this is our fight, especially considering we may never see the results of our efforts.

For those seeking human experiences in the present moment, I’m here for you. This is where I’ve landed, the best way I can contribute in these times, articulating what’s happening and providing support to volunteers and professionals in the trenches.