The difficulty with describing this as a possible future is that parts of it have already arrived. Universities are closing courses, removing posts, delaying investment and spending money on restructuring so that they can spend less money later. The argument is no longer about whether contraction begins. It is about where it stops.
That is the worse future: not collapse, but contraction without an end point. It will usually look like narrowing — a regional subject offer that disappears, a campus that loses half its purpose, a research group left to expire politely. A university becomes smaller when people leave, and the work is redistributed until some of it quietly ceases to be done.
This book spends most of its length explaining why people behaved as they did. The epilogue insists on the distinction that makes the explanation useful: understanding why a system produces an outcome tells you what to change. It does not tell you the outcome was compulsory. Nobody has to be stupid for this future to occur, which is exactly what makes it plausible.
It has a shortage of decisions made while decisions still matter.
Regulated to Fail, Epilogue
Where this goes next
This is the question the chapter opens with and the mechanism it identifies. What it concludes — and what follows from it — is in the book.
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