The Antifragile Christian College

Turning Disruption Into Advantage

In recent years, American economic and social life has undergone widespread disruption and witnessed a corresponding loss of trust in institutions. In particular, three trends in the macro environment—global disruption, bureaucratic stagnation, and cultural and political alienation—threaten to upend the systems and structures upon which American higher education currently depends. This position paper reviews these trends and explains how together they are likely to produce both elevated levels of concentrated risk for universities and decreased trust in postsecondary credentialers. It concludes by exploring the implications of this foreboding reality and elucidating two divergent futures for Christian higher education: submitting to the legacy academic status hierarchy and accepting a suboptimal position, or gaining independence from these negative trends by forking away from the existing system and cultivating institutional antifragility.

To download the full report, please click here.