Editor's note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers.
The University of Illinois is unlike other large public universities, and not just because its flagship is a modest 244 acres — Indiana University Bloomington’s campus spans eight times that. It also sits neatly within a titanic city, home to 2.73 million inhabitants.
When state legislatures chartered the first public universities in the 19th century, they favored former cornfields as campuses. Today we call them Bloomington, State College, College Station, etc. Amid nowhere, land sold cheaply, with the added benefit of cloistering young scholars. And initially, UI, planted in Urbana, Illinois, was no exception. Three years after its inception, only 2,277 people, including its students, lived in city limits.
But in 1982, Illinois’ Republican governor, Jim Thompson, asked state entities to “spend less, do more” — sound familiar? Duly heeding Thompson’s call, UI’s trustees founded a campus in Chicago.
The Second City was a wellspring of in-state students. Happily for UI’s shriveled budget, being local, they came pre-housed. And Chicago’s abundant professionals meant UI could trim payroll by leaning on adjunct faculty, while corporations provided students with internships.
This economical model of academia proved so successful that, in 2020, UI at Chicago dropped the “at” in its name. Two years later, UI named Chicago its flagship campus.
Other universities noticed. In 2023, the University of Michigan Board of Regents approved a plan to move its flagship campus from Ann Arbor to Detroit by 2045. Last year, Pennsylvania State University’s trustees said they hoped to plant a Pittsburgh campus to transition to flagship status by 2060. And the University of Iowa will leave Iowa City for Des Moines in 2050.
***
If this story sounds a trifle unbelievable — well, good. It is unbelievable; indeed, it never happened. UI’s flagship remains anchored at Urbana-Champaign, with no foreseeable voyage to Chicago. No other university is charting this course, either.
But Jacob Stewart, a columnist for the Indianapolis Star, wants you to believe that IU Indianapolis should become IU’s flagship campus.
Yes, the outpour of money into IU Indianapolis since IUPUI’s breakup will boost student demand to attend. It will boost it… well, by how much, and for how long, exactly?
College enrollment on the whole is waning, falling 15% between 2010 and 2021. And universities can’t count on that rate to rebound because birth rates, too, have been trending downward since the pandemic, reaching an all-time low this year.
Perhaps IU is gambling on Indianapolis to draw more of the future’s fewer students. But the waters of the fleet system — whence the term “flagship” originates — are perilous, especially in brick-and-mortar form. The University of Wisconsin has, in the past several years, scrapped five of its smaller vessels, while Penn State will scuttle seven after spring 2027. An average of 60 colleges, public or private, are shutting their doors every year.
Public university systems, composed of regional campuses, are products of the post-war era; hence they’re questionable institutions to stake the future of education on while the nation faces a seemingly irreversible baby bust.
Universities built most of their regional campuses in the 1960s to meet soaring student demand as the eldest Baby Boomers graduated from high school. Seven branches in the University of California system emerged during this period. As did IUPUI, in 1969. And with the rise of the “college wage premium” throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, demand for such, more accessible, universities rose further.
But the college wage premium has slumped, too.
On one hand, the market has become so saturated with degree earners that nearly half, even 10 years after graduating, work jobs they’re nominally overqualified for. On the other hand, 20 states have eliminated or eased their requirements to hold bachelor’s degrees for government employment. Over the past decade, so have private sector giants: Apple, Bank of America, Delta Airlines, Google and IBM, where, last year, half of open roles lacked a bachelor’s degree requirement.
The public and private sectors’ about-turn on degrees suggests there may also be fewer non-traditional students in the future, students whom regional campuses, including IU Indianapolis, usually enroll more of than flagships. If employers devalue degrees for entry-level positions, it’s not a stretch to imagine they’ll also prefer demonstrated skill to paper credentials in determining who they’ll promote. (When employers do request continued education, will the proliferation of online resources not be more practical for the learners of the future who may be settled and have children in schools?)
Much like the other “vast and trunkless legs of stone” the American century built, which now stand “in the desert … half sunk” — ponder the fate of the nightly news, fraternal orders and WASPs — regional campuses face an existential crisis.
While IU Indianapolis is, at this point, large enough to withstand changing tides — can the same be said of IU’s other branches? — it probably won’t become the first regional campus to stage a mutiny against its flagship. And it shouldn’t, either.
As long as there are traditional students, albeit fewer, many of the highest achieving will continue to apply to the Public Ivies — last year, Forbes named Purdue University West Lafayette, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and University of Michigan Ann Arbor, among others, to this list — and the Ivies. With these, IU Bloomington is better matched to compete, partly because of its scenic campus.
Indeed, higher education’s physical presence in the future may again be smaller, a future where legacy campuses are luxuries that universities will want to market as their flagships. Increasingly, online learning could fill the former role of regional campuses.
For IU Indianapolis, such a future holds divergent paths. At one extreme, it’s crowned the “UCLA East of the Mississippi.” (Note: Berkeley is UC’s flagship.) At the other, IU Bloomington, much like Saturn, devours its child in a fit of jealous rage, largely due to Stewart’s provocative column.
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a junior studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government. For the record, Gov. Jim Thompson of Illinois was not known for austerity. Far from it — they called him “Big Jim,” for his six-foot-six stature and his spending.
