Debt Leverage Hollowed Universities

The article claims the University of Chicago borrowed more relative to assets than peers, pushing tuition and endowment liquidations toward debt service. To stay solvent, leadership is cutting doctoral training, merging departments, expanding undergrads without faculty growth, and shifting teaching to low‑paid lecturers and even ChatGPT. — If leverage drives university decisions, the sector’s quality decline is a governance-and-capital-structure problem, not just partisan politics or culture war.