**Claim (filed 2025):** AI disruption of US higher education over the next ~20 years will be *regionally asymmetric*, not uniform. Expect flat-to-growing enrollment and balance sheets in SEC/Sun Belt flagships and large land-grant universities (growing 18-year-old cohorts and in-migration, athletics revenue moats, commodity/state funding, and AI-mediated instruction that lets them scale seats without proportional faculty), versus structural contraction — mergers, closures, shrinking footprints — across the Northeast and Rust Belt long tail (tuition-dependent small privates and regional publics with declining demographics, thin endowments, and collapsing pricing power as AI erodes the credential premium of the general-purpose degree). Net effect: the center of gravity of US higher education migrates south and west over the next two decades, tracking population and state-funding flows. Disruption is real everywhere, but growth and decline are geographically sorted.