The Six Functions — Summary

Robert Acheson has been president of a regional university in the upper Midwest for six years. Enrollment has dropped eighteen percent. He keeps a photograph on his bookshelf of the 1987 graduating class of the college he attended as an undergraduate, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania that closed in 2024. The buildings are assisted living now.

The university is a bundle. It contains at least six functions that arrived at the same institution by historical accumulation rather than design: research, credentialing, professional training, coming-of-age, social sorting, and community. AI does not dissolve the bundle uniformly. It pulls at specific fibers while leaving others intact.

Research is being transformed but not displaced. The tools are new. The enterprise is not. What is changing is who can participate: the computational infrastructure is becoming available outside the university. Credentialing is under the most direct pressure: employers are beginning to experiment with alternative signals, portfolio assessment, skill-based hiring, micro-credentials. The four-year degree remains the default screening mechanism, but the default is being questioned. Professional training faces the distillation paradox: AI absorbs the skill scaffolding and reveals the vocational core, but the institution has no mechanism to distinguish between what is core and what is scaffolding.

Coming-of-age is largely untouched by AI, which is why it may be the function around which the surviving university reorganizes. The residential experience of navigating independence among age peers requires physical co-presence, and physical co-presence is what AI cannot provide. Social sorting is accelerated by AI matching algorithms that do a version of what the university does, connecting people with complementary skills and social positions, though the university’s advantage is that its sorting happens through sustained proximity over four years. Community is the fiber that holds when everything else frays: the experience of being in a room with people struggling with the same questions, guided by someone who has struggled with them longer.

Robert’s strategic plan says his university will become a nationally recognized leader in applied learning and workforce development. He does not believe the document. What he believes is that his institution’s actual value proposition is something closer to what his Pennsylvania college provided: a place where people are formed, not just trained. Where the struggle of learning is scaffolded by relationships with people who care whether you succeed.

The thing the university actually provides that nothing else provides is the thing no one is willing to pay for by name. The formation function. The community function. No metric captures it. The student herself may not know for twenty years.

The unbundling does not distribute evenly. The research university with its $2 billion endowment survives because it never depended on any single function. The regional university depended on the bundle. The bundle was the product. Remove any fiber and the others weaken.

Robert’s Pennsylvania college did not understand this in time. The 1987 graduating class had 278 people. He can name perhaps forty. The ones he can name are not the ones who sat next to him in classes. They are the ones he ate with, argued with, stayed up late with. The formation happened there. Not in the lecture hall. In the common room that smelled like carpet cleaner and microwave popcorn. The formation happened in the spaces between the formal functions, in the interstices the institution provided without intending to.

The school is assisted living now. He is trying to save his institution from the same trajectory. He does not have the answer. He has the question, which is further than the strategic plan got.