Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
Wrong Tool. Right Problem. Fifty Years Wasted.
This is not a new argument for me. I have been making the case for years that governments, industry, and education are not separate concerns but interdependent systems, each one necessary for the others to function, each one weakened when we blur the distinctions between them.
What has always struck me is how invisible that interdependence remains in the conversations that matter most. Budget negotiations treat education as a line item rather than infrastructure. Workforce policy treats it as a pipeline rather than a foundation. And higher education, to its considerable shame, has too often solved for the wrong premise, prioritizing tradition at the cost of relevance. The cost of that invisibility is now impossible to ignore. This piece is my attempt to make the argument in a way that finally forces it into the open.
That is what education is supposed to produce. Not a credential. A person.
I have been leading at a university for almost fourteen years. I have watched enrollment grow from a few hundred students to thousands. I cut tuition in half while other institutions raised it annually. And I am telling you plainly that the crisis facing higher education is not a business problem. It is a purpose problem. And no amount of pricing strategy or enrollment marketing will fix a purpose problem.
There is a question that keeps surfacing in boardrooms, congressional hearings, think tanks, and faculty senates. It sounds like a policy debate. It presents itself as a budget argument.
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