And much of it works. Students who once disappeared between offices can now be identified. Patterns once hidden in spreadsheets can be detected in real time. Advisers can intervene earlier. Institutions can see where students stall, where inequities emerge, and where bureaucracies fail the very people they were designed to serve. But our enthusiasm for building has allowed us to avoid a more fundamental question: What, exactly, are we building toward?
It is an old question. On the plain of Shinar, the builders of Babel confronted uncertainty with ingenuity. They made bricks, developed a common project, and constructed something so ambitious that its top was imagined to reach the heavens. Their failure was not that they built, nor even that they built together. It was that the tower gradually became the purpose. They became consumed with what they could construct and lost sight of where they were supposed to go.
Higher education may be approaching its own plain of Shinar. Enrollment uncertainty, demographic decline, financial pressure, political polarization, declining public confidence, and rapidly changing workforce demands have made institutional anxiety understandable. And, like the builders of Babel, universities have responded to uncertainty by building: predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, customer relationship management systems, early-alert platforms, degree maps, career technologies, financial-wellness applications, and student-engagement systems.
Individually, these tools can do enormous good. Collectively, however, they are beginning to do something more consequential: They are creating a common language for what student success means. That should concern us.
For much of American higher education’s history, institutions distinguished themselves by the educational philosophies they defended. Liberal arts colleges emphasized judgment, character, and citizenship. Research universities organized themselves around discovery and the creation of knowledge. Land-grant universities joined learning to public service and practical innovation. Community colleges democratized educational opportunity and economic mobility. Historically Black Colleges and Universities made education an instrument of individual possibility and collective advancement. These institutions did not merely offer different programs. They offered different answers to a deeper question: What is education for?
That philosophical diversity gave American higher education much of its vitality. Institutions competed over ideas before they competed over metrics. Today, something curious is happening. Institutions with radically different histories and missions increasingly purchase the same technologies, employ the same predictive models, attend the same conferences, hear the same vendor presentations, monitor the same indicators, and populate governing-board dashboards with remarkably similar measures of success. Institutions that once distinguished themselves by what they believed increasingly distinguish themselves by what they buy.
The consequence is more profound than technological sameness. Every technology carries within it assumptions about the problem it was designed to solve. Predictive analytics privileges probability. Career platforms privilege employability. Artificial intelligence privileges scalability. Engagement platforms privilege measurable participation. Financial technologies privilege economic persistence. These are not necessarily bad assumptions. Each illuminates something important about the student experience. But none is a philosophy of education.
When institutions assemble these technologies without first deciding what education is ultimately supposed to accomplish, they import more than software. They import definitions of success. The inversion is subtle. Technology was supposed to serve educational philosophy. Increasingly, educational philosophy is asked to justify technologies already purchased. Questions about what students should learn and become yield to questions about implementation, interoperability, predictive accuracy, automation, and return on investment. Universities that once debated the meaning of an educated person now debate which platform will move the retention rate. Systems integrate seamlessly. Purposes often do not.
This is where the metaphor of Babel becomes more than a caution about technology. Babel was a crisis of orientation. Its builders possessed extraordinary capacity. They could organize, communicate, innovate, and construct. What they lacked was not intelligence but direction. Their technical achievement could not answer the more fundamental question of where humanity ought to go. Neither can ours.
Technology can tell us which student is unlikely to persist, but it cannot tell us what that student should persist toward. It can predict the probability of graduation, but it cannot tell us what a graduate ought to know, value, question, or become. It can measure belonging, but it cannot decide what kind of community is worthy of belonging to. It can recommend a career, but it cannot tell a student what constitutes a meaningful life. Those questions belong to education.
Yet those questions are becoming strangely peripheral to the contemporary student-success enterprise. We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at measuring retention, persistence, graduation, employment, and belonging while remaining comparatively hesitant to say what those outcomes are for. A student can persist efficiently through a curriculum that asks too little of her. A student can graduate on time without ever encountering an idea that unsettles him. A student can secure a well-paying job without developing the intellectual independence to question the systems within which that job exists. If so, our dashboards may show success while our educational mission tells a more complicated story.
Perhaps the deepest irony is that institutions devoted to producing original knowledge increasingly borrow some of their most consequential assumptions about education from companies outside the academy. We would never permit a scholar to conduct research without articulating a theoretical framework. Yet universities routinely make multimillion-dollar investments in technologies without articulating with equal precision the educational philosophy those technologies are supposed to advance. We interrogate the theory behind a faculty member’s research; we should be equally willing to interrogate the theory behind our dashboards.
The builders of Babel did not build because they loved towers. They built because they feared being scattered. Universities have their own fears: fewer students, shrinking revenues, political intervention, public skepticism, technological disruption, and questions about whether the university itself will remain relevant. Those fears are not imaginary. Institutions must survive. But survival has never been the purpose of a university. It is merely the condition that allows a university to pursue its purpose. And institutions organized primarily around preserving themselves eventually risk forgetting why they deserved to be preserved in the first place.
The answer is not to stop building. Universities should use AI. They should employ predictive analytics. They should integrate data, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, identify struggling students earlier, and use every responsible tool available to help students succeed. But purpose must precede platform. Before asking whether a technology can improve retention, we should know what we believe persistence is for. Before optimizing graduation, we should be willing to say what we believe a graduate should become. Before measuring belonging, we should articulate the kind of intellectual community to which we are inviting students to belong.
Otherwise, we may build the most sophisticated student-success infrastructure higher education has ever known and discover that we have constructed an extraordinary tower without agreeing where it is supposed to lead. That is the enduring warning of Babel. The danger was never the bricks. It was mistaking the tower for the destination.
Aashir Nasim, Ph.D. serves as Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at a leading public research university and is the author of Rethinking Equity: A Poetic Reckoning Within the Academy. His scholarship focuses on institutional design, student success, and the conditions under which higher education fulfills its public mission. Drawing on more than two decades of experience as both a faculty member and senior academic leader, he examines how institutional structures shape student outcomes, influence educational opportunity, and determine whether access to higher education ultimately translates into meaningful achievement. His work argues that improving student success requires more than expanding access; it demands institutions intentionally redesign the systems, policies, and cultures that too often reproduce the very inequities they seek to overcome.
