December 16, 2025

Understanding Today’s Higher Ed Landscape with Peter Stokes

Peter Stokes has been advising influential figures in higher education for decades. In this episode, he breaks down recent upticks in college closures and gives valuable advice for families and higher ed professionals alike.

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About the episode

In this episode, Peter Stokes, who is the Managing Director of Huron Consulting Group, and spent several decades advising higher education presidents, provosts, and more, goes in-depth on the forces reshaping colleges and universities today. Stokes pulls back the curtain on the major demographic, financial, and workforce trends driving change across the sector, offering a rare industry-level perspective on why institutions are evolving, and often struggling to survive.

Stokes shares practical advice for evaluating the long-term stability of a college such as the early financial warning signs that a school’s future may be uncertain. He also touches on emerging pathways such as dual enrollment and accelerated degrees, and how colleges are adapting to meet the needs of a changing workforce.

Mentioned in this episode:

Hundreds of US Colleges Poised to Close in the Next Decade, Expert Says – Bloomberg News
Huron Consulting Group
Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students? – Hechinger Report
The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out – by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring

Host

Will Geiger

Will Geiger is the co-founder of Scholarships360 and has a decade of experience in college admissions and financial aid. He is a former Senior Assistant Director of Admissions at Kenyon College where he personally reviewed 10,000 admissions applications and essays. Will also managed the Kenyon College merit scholarship program and served on the financial aid appeals committee. He has also worked as an Associate Director of College Counseling at a high school in New Haven, Connecticut.Will earned his master’s in education from the University of Pennsylvania and received his undergraduate degree in history from Wake Forest University.

Guest

Peter Stokes

Peter is a Managing Director in Huron’s higher education Strategy & Operations (S&O) group, focusing on strategy, innovation and growth. Over a 25-year career, he has worked with presidents, provosts, chief financial officers, deans, and other senior institutional leaders at an array of public and private institutions across the U.S. as they have sought to strengthen operations, define paths to growth and sustainability, manage their program portfolios, reach new audiences, develop innovative curriculum and online delivery models, support the work readiness of their graduates, and better engage with their alumni and employer partners. He is the author of Higher Education and Employability: New Models for Integrating Study and Work (Harvard Education Press, 2015), and contributed the “Forward” to Moving Horizontally: The New Dimensions of At-Scale Learning in the Time of Covid-19 (Open Access, 2021, edited by Gazi, Baker), as well as “What Online Learning Can Teach Us about Higher Education” in Reinventing Higher Education: The Promise of Innovation (Harvard Education Press, 2011, edited by Wildavsky, Kelly, and Carey), among other publications.

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