Christian Higher Education Doesn't Need to Abandon Its Mission to Survive. It Needs to Prove Its Value.
The institutions that thrive in the next era of education will be those that can preserve what makes them distinctive while becoming dramatically better at understanding students, demonstrating outcomes, and responding to change.
I’ve spent more than 35 years working with leaders and mission-driven organizations.
I’ve worked across all 50 states and 73 countries. I spent ten years at Life.Church as Pastor of Partnerships. I’ve worked alongside some of the largest ministries in America and helped navigate more than 70 church mergers and strategic transitions.
When you spend that much time around organizations going through change, you begin to recognize certain patterns.
One of the most important is this:
Organizations rarely fail the day everyone realizes they’re in trouble.
The decline usually begins much earlier.
Attendance changes. Engagement changes. Revenue changes. The organization begins losing people it once retained. Leaders compensate. Budgets tighten. Positions aren’t replaced. Investment slows. Quality begins to suffer.
That creates another round of decline.
Eventually, the numbers become impossible to ignore. But by then, the organization has far fewer options than it did three or five years earlier.
I’ve watched versions of that story unfold in churches, ministries, businesses, and other organizations.
Today, I believe Christian higher education needs to pay very close attention to it.
Because many Christian colleges and universities are facing pressures that are not temporary. And the question isn’t simply whether they can survive another enrollment cycle.
The larger question is:
Can Christian higher education demonstrate that what it uniquely offers is valuable enough to thrive in a world where students have more educational alternatives than ever before?
At Artifact Digital, we’ve been thinking about the intersection of learning, human behavior, digital experience, data, and emerging technology since 2019. Today, that work is leading us into what we believe could become an important new layer of infrastructure for higher education: a Predictive Learning Platform, or PLP.
But before talking about technology, we need to understand the problem.
The Closure Announcement Is the End of the Story
When a college announces that it is closing, the announcement feels sudden.
It rarely is.
Research examining Christian colleges that have closed shows how severe the deterioration can become before the doors finally shut.
Enrollment can decline dramatically. Tuition revenue falls. Deficits grow. Discounting increases. Programs get cut. Faculty leave. The institution becomes progressively less capable of investing in the very things that might make it competitive again.
By the time closure is announced, the story may have been unfolding for years.
That should change the question leaders ask.
Instead of: “Are we in trouble?”
We should be asking: “What signals would tell us where we’re headed before the financial statements make it obvious?”
That’s a fundamentally different way of thinking. And it’s at the heart of predictive learning.
The Enrollment Cliff Isn’t the Only Problem
There is a lot of conversation about the demographic enrollment cliff, and rightly so.
The United States is projected to have significantly fewer traditional college-age students in the years ahead. Christian colleges will compete not only with each other, but with public universities, community colleges, online education, employer-based training, certificates, alternative credentials, and educational experiences increasingly powered by artificial intelligence.
But demographics are only part of the challenge.
Families are asking harder questions.
What does this education cost? Will my son or daughter graduate? What will they actually learn? Will they be prepared for a career? Why should we pay a premium for this institution? What does the Christian part of Christian higher education actually change about the educational experience?
Those are fair questions.
Simply saying, “We provide a Christian education” may no longer be enough. The institutions that thrive will have to demonstrate what that means.
Four Words I Believe Matter: Predict. Personalize. Preserve. Prove.
As we’ve been exploring the future of learning at Artifact, four ideas have become particularly important to me.
Predict. Personalize. Preserve. Prove.
Those four words describe much of what I believe Christian higher education needs from the next generation of technology.
Predict
Universities need to recognize where students, courses, programs, and ultimately the institution itself may be headed before outcomes are already determined.
If a student fails a class, we know something happened. But when did the struggle actually begin? Week two? Week four? After a particular concept? After engagement started changing?
What if the right person could have seen that earlier?
Prediction isn’t valuable because a computer can say, “This student is going to fail.” I don’t want technology making declarations about someone’s future.
Prediction is valuable because it can say: “Something appears to be changing. This may deserve human attention.”
That creates an opportunity. A professor can intervene. An advisor can call. A mentor can ask a question. Someone can show up.
That’s the point.
Personalize
We also have to acknowledge something obvious about education.
Students are different. They arrive with different levels of preparation. Different strengths. Different weaknesses. Different life experiences. Different motivations. Different responsibilities outside the classroom. Different ways of understanding difficult ideas.
Yet we still largely organize education around delivering the same experience to everyone at approximately the same pace.
AI creates an opportunity to rethink that.
Imagine an educational experience that becomes more responsive to the learner while remaining grounded in the professor’s curriculum and the institution’s mission.
The professor doesn’t disappear. The professor becomes more influential.
Technology handles more of the adaptation while the human being focuses increasingly on the things humans do best: mentoring, challenging, encouraging, discussing, forming, leading.
That brings me to something I believe is especially important for Christian higher education.
Preserve
Some of the greatest assets at a Christian university don’t appear anywhere on its balance sheet.
They are sitting in classrooms.
A professor who has taught theology for 35 years has developed ways of explaining difficult concepts that no textbook contains. A business professor has stories that connect faith, ethics, leadership, and decision-making. A psychology professor knows which questions cause students to reconsider assumptions they’ve carried their entire lives. A science professor has spent decades developing a thoughtful way of discussing faith and scientific inquiry without reducing either one.
Think about everything contained inside a great professor.
Explanations. Stories. Questions. Analogies. Sequences. Examples. Corrections. Experiences. Wisdom.
And, in Christian higher education, something particularly valuable: the way that professor integrates faith into the discipline itself.
Then the professor retires.
What happens?
Most of that disappears. We preserve the syllabus. Maybe we preserve some recorded lectures. But we don’t truly preserve the teaching.
I believe that’s one of the largest overlooked opportunities in higher education.
The next generation of learning technology should help institutions preserve the intellectual and spiritual wisdom of their greatest faculty and allow that expertise to continue shaping students.
Not by turning professors into generic AI avatars. Not by removing future faculty. But by ensuring that decades of accumulated institutional wisdom don’t simply walk out the door.
Prove
Finally, Christian higher education has to become much better at proving outcomes.
For a long time, the credential itself carried much of the value. You earned the degree. You had the GPA. You graduated from the institution.
Increasingly, students, parents, employers, accreditors, and boards want to know something more:
What can this graduate actually do?
What did they master? How did they grow? Where did they improve? What competencies did they develop? Are they prepared for the work they’re entering?
And for Christian institutions, I think there’s another question: How did this education actually form the person?
Christian universities make claims that go beyond career preparation. We talk about calling. Character. Wisdom. Service. Ethics. Faith. Vocation. Christian worldview.
Those things are incredibly important. But if they’re central to the value proposition, we should be willing to wrestle with how we demonstrate them.
Christian distinctiveness should be more than a statement on the admissions website. It should be visible in the educational experience.
The Greatest Intellectual Property May Be Walking Around Campus
From a business development perspective, I spend a lot of time thinking about assets.
What does an organization have that is difficult for someone else to reproduce? What creates genuine differentiation?
For Christian universities, I think one answer is obvious.
Your people. Specifically, your best faculty.
AI can generate information. The internet contains nearly unlimited content. A student can ask an AI system to explain economics, biology, philosophy, mathematics, history, or Scripture right now.
That means information itself is becoming increasingly commoditized.
But your institution’s accumulated wisdom isn’t.
The professor who has spent 30 years integrating Christian ethics with business leadership has something distinctive. The professor who can connect Scripture, psychology, human behavior, and decades of counseling experience has something distinctive. The professor whose students still quote him 20 years after graduation has something distinctive.
That is institutional intellectual property.
And we need to start treating it that way.
If AI Can Teach Anything, Why Pay $50,000?
Christian higher education also needs to confront an uncomfortable question.
If a student can ask an AI system to explain almost anything, why should a family spend tens of thousands of dollars each year on college?
I don’t think the answer is banning AI. And I don’t think the answer is pretending the question doesn’t exist.
The answer is to become clearer about what a university provides that information alone cannot.
Formation. Community. Accountability. Mentorship. Relationships. Discernment. Application. Challenge. Credentialing. Shared experience. Vocation. A Christian understanding of what knowledge is actually for.
AI doesn’t eliminate the need for those things. In many ways, it makes them more important.
But it does challenge universities to stop competing primarily on access to information.
The value has to move from delivering content toward creating transformation.
Student Retention Is Both Mission and Stewardship
There’s another issue we can’t separate from this conversation.
Every student who leaves represents a human story. Maybe they weren’t prepared. Maybe life intervened. Maybe the institution failed them. Maybe they simply chose another path.
But every student who leaves also affects the financial health of the institution. Tuition disappears. Recruitment investment is lost. Graduation rates are affected. Future alumni relationships disappear. The fixed costs of operating the university remain.
Retention isn’t simply a financial metric. But it would be irresponsible to pretend it isn’t financial.
This is where mission and stewardship can align.
If better technology helps more students succeed, the institution becomes financially stronger because it fulfilled its mission more effectively.
That’s a much healthier model than simply trying to cut another percentage point from operating expenses.
We Need Earlier Warning Systems for Students — and Institutions
What interests me most about predictive learning is that the same basic principle can operate at multiple levels.
A student can begin drifting before failing. A course can begin showing unusual patterns before final grades. A program can weaken before enrollment collapses. And an institution can enter decline years before closure.
In every case, the principle is the same:
Earlier understanding creates more options.
That’s why I think of the PLP as more than a student success tool.
Over time, the opportunity is to help create a university that can learn from itself. A living feedback loop.
See. Learn. Respond. Adapt. Then repeat.
The University Is a Living Network of Relationships
I’ve spent most of my career building relationships. That influences how I see this problem.
A university isn’t a collection of departments. It’s a network of people.
Students. Professors. TAs. Administrators. Advisors. Families. Alumni. Donors. Employers. Community partners.
Every one of those relationships generates information. Every interaction tells us something.
The problem is that we tend to separate those experiences into different organizational systems. Admissions has one view. Academics has another. Student services has another. Advancement has another.
But the student experiences one university. The parent experiences one university. The alumnus remembers one university.
That’s why our thinking around predictive learning is ultimately about connection.
Not simply connecting databases. Connecting understanding.
Artifact Has Been Thinking About This Since 2019
Artifact didn’t arrive at these questions because generative AI became popular.
Our team has been thinking about the intersection of digital experiences, human behavior, learning, data, and intelligent systems since 2019.
The technology available today is dramatically more capable than it was then. But the fundamental questions haven’t changed.
How do we understand people better? How do we identify friction earlier? How do we create experiences that respond to individual needs? How do we turn information into action? How do we preserve what is uniquely valuable inside an organization? How do we know whether what we’re doing is actually working?
Our Predictive Learning Platform grows out of those questions.
There are elements of how we’re approaching the technology that we’re deliberately not sharing publicly yet. We’re building. We’re listening. We’re learning. We’re having conversations with people who understand Christian higher education from different perspectives.
Because I don’t believe the future of Christian education should be designed by technologists alone.
We Need Presidents, Professors, Students and Boards at the Table
This is where my role at Artifact becomes especially important to me.
My job isn’t to sit in a room and tell universities what technology they need. My job is to bring the right people into the conversation.
Presidents. Provosts. CFOs. Academic leaders. Professors. Student success teams. Technology leaders. Students. Parents. Alumni. Boards. Employers. People who understand accreditation. People who understand formation. People who understand institutional economics. People who understand what Christian higher education is supposed to preserve.
We need those voices.
Because the goal isn’t simply to make universities more efficient.
The goal is to help them become more effective without losing what makes them worth preserving.
Technology Cannot Save a University That Has No Reason to Exist
I want to be careful not to oversell technology.
A Predictive Learning Platform cannot fix everything. It cannot eliminate excessive institutional debt. It cannot repair dysfunctional governance. It cannot make aging facilities disappear. It cannot replace good leadership. It cannot solve weak fundraising. And it cannot create a compelling institutional identity where none exists.
Technology isn’t salvation.
But it can potentially help institutions become significantly better at retention, learning outcomes, faculty leverage, personalization, differentiation, resource allocation, and demonstrating value.
And for institutions under pressure, improvement in those areas can provide something extraordinarily valuable:
Time.
Time to adapt. Time to strengthen programs. Time to rebuild. Time to invest. Time to clarify the mission. Time to find a viable path forward.
The Survival Equation Is Bigger Than Enrollment
When I talk with leaders about the future of Christian higher education, I increasingly think about six interconnected variables:
Enrollment × Retention × Learning Outcomes × Career Outcomes × Efficiency × Distinctiveness
We tend to discuss these separately. I don’t think we can anymore.
Enrollment without retention isn’t sustainable. Retention without learning isn’t success. Learning without demonstrable outcomes becomes difficult to defend economically. Efficiency without distinctiveness creates a cheaper commodity. Distinctiveness without outcomes becomes a marketing claim. And career outcomes without formation would abandon part of what makes Christian higher education Christian.
The institutions that thrive will have to work across all six.
That’s why I believe predictive learning infrastructure is potentially so important.
It isn’t simply asking: How can we teach better?
It’s asking a much larger question: How can Christian higher education become demonstrably more effective, more personal, more scalable, more valuable, and more distinctly Christian in an era when every one of those things will be tested?
What Are We Trying to Preserve?
Ultimately, this is the question I keep coming back to.
I’ve spent much of my life around Christian leaders and organizations. I’ve seen institutions adapt brilliantly. I’ve also watched organizations protect the way they’ve always done something until they eventually lost the ability to protect the mission they were trying to serve.
Methods and mission are not the same thing.
Christian higher education shouldn’t preserve outdated methods simply because they’re familiar. But it should fight fiercely to preserve what matters.
Wisdom. Formation. Truth. Mentorship. Community. Calling. Relationships between generations. Professors who don’t simply transfer information but shape lives. An understanding that education isn’t only about what kind of job someone can get, but about what kind of person they are becoming.
Those things are worth preserving.
And ironically, I believe artificial intelligence — one of the technologies many people fear could make education less human — may give us an opportunity to make the distinctly human parts of Christian education even more valuable.
If we use it wisely.
That is the opportunity I see ahead.
Predict problems while there is still time to respond.
Personalize education around the person rather than forcing every person through exactly the same experience.
Preserve the wisdom and Christian worldview of extraordinary faculty instead of allowing decades of institutional knowledge to disappear when they leave.
Prove that students actually learned, grew, developed competencies, became prepared for their vocations, and received something worth the investment their families made.
None of that replaces the professor. None of it replaces leadership. None of it replaces community. None of it replaces faith.
It should strengthen them.
I’ve spent more than 35 years watching what can happen when the right people, the right information, and the right opportunity come together at the right moment.
I believe Christian higher education is approaching one of those moments now.
There are real challenges ahead. Some institutions will not survive them. But I don’t believe decline is inevitable.
The question is whether we can recognize what’s changing early enough, preserve what is uniquely valuable, prove what actually works, and have the courage to adapt before circumstances make the decision for us.
The closure spiral begins long before the closure announcement.
The opportunity is to see it sooner.
And then do something about it.