**Claim (2025):** Over the next 20 years, AI-driven disruption of US higher education lands unevenly — and the contraction zone is the Northeast/Rust Belt, not the South.

1. **The shrinking tier:** Old Manufacturing Arc regional publics (PA→WI) and mid-ranked New England privates decline first. Their 18-year-old cohorts fall fastest, their state fiscal space is crowded out by pension/OPEB, and their local white-collar employers are the earliest AI substituters. Path: program triage → mergers/branch closures → consolidation into multicampus systems by ~2035.
2. **The growing tier:** SEC-footprint flagships and land-grants grow on a dual tailwind — Southern demographic and industrial inflow (energy, logistics, defense, care) *plus* energy/data-center tax and royalty bases and corporate co-funding of attested credentials. They expand enrollment and research scale while undercutting coastal price points.
3. **The refinement:** It is not "the South grows, the Northeast shrinks." It is **flagship-rich regions grow, flagship-poor regions consolidate.** Southern non-flagship regionals face the same cliff as northern regionals; only top-flagship and metro-adjacent institutions capture the regional tailwind.
4. **The mechanism link:** Enrollment growth in the South substitutes for falling credential value — AI complements the labor those regions sell (trades, energy, logistics, care), so short-cycle attested credentials scale there; the residential four-year degree reprices as a consumption good that holds up in high-income coastal metros even as its labor-market premium erodes.