Once it has outsourced its administrative functions and spun off its professional and career-prep degree programs, the post-industrial university will initially be a much smaller and more purposefully-focused enterprise than today’s typical industrial-scale public university. But the mission of the new university will be large, for the new knowledge that it produces will not directly translate itself into human progress. In capitalist economies, new knowledge is made manifest in the marketplace. The most important consumer of the university’s output in the Information Age will be society in general, as the public is made better aware of the opportunities, imperatives and constrained choices that lie ahead. By shedding their career training programs, post-industrial universities and their faculties will be able to focus on the institution’s unique core function: public enlightenment. This special issue focuses on research into the plausible metamorphosis of higher education over the next 10 to 15 years in response to its changing demographic, economic and technologic circumstances, modeled on the multiple simultaneous transformations that are already well under way in the world of business.