Strategizing to “Save” Higher Education: An Analysis of Expert Recommendations for Financial Sustainability, 1990–2020

Background: For decades, higher education experts have offered practical guidance in the face of financial pressures. To illuminate experts’ role in interpreting and shaping their social context, we cast expertise as encompassing both epistemic claims about higher education and practical guidance for action within this field. We analyze recommendations in this context to elucidate how experts have understood higher education’s financial problems over time. Research Questions: 1. What have higher education experts recommended U.S. colleges and universities do in response to financial uncertainty? 2. How have their recommendations changed over time? Research Design: We used systematic content analysis to study experts’ recommendations published in Change magazine from 1990 to 2020, including only feature articles focused on financial or related problems. Conclusions: Our analysis identifies experts’ evolving understanding of the field—how they rethink taken-for-granted assumptions about how to respond to financial uncertainty. Amid the intense volatility in higher education in the 21st century, experts’ ability to (re)interpret field-level problems and (re)imagine possibilities is a spring of critical hope for the future.