Pres. Hinckley in October 1997 announced a striking new plan to start building many more smaller temples to serve people in more remote areas of the world:

"We are determined, brethren, to take the temples to the people and afford them every opportunity for the very precious blessings that come of temple worship."

The pattern has continued, with Pres. Nelson announcing 20 more temples in the last conference.

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BYU increasingly struggles to offer a meaningful educational opportunity for most members of the Church. Enrollment has been capped for decades. Huge numbers of faithful and highly qualified applicants are turned away every year. BYU-I and BYU-H provide some additional reach, but cannot possibly keep up with demand. U.S. higher education in general has been largely corrupted by direct and indirect government subsidies. Graduates increasingly emerge from these institutions with limited practical skills, a destabilizing philosophical swerve toward social justice activism, staggering debt, and unrealistic expectations about their path ahead. The money involved in college sports, especially football and basketball, is turning many schools into little more than minor league professional sports programs that occasionally pretend to be interested in education. BYU is not immune from many of these trends.

Meanwhile, rising admissions standards at BYU exacerbate the trend of relocating many of the strongest LDS young single adults to BYU, taking away some of the strongest people from local young single adult populations, and leaving them to do the best they can with whoever remains. The tendency of BYU students from widely scattered hometowns, states, and even countries, to meet at BYU and marry each other, contributes to the permanent fragmentation of extended families into geographically isolated units with very limited (and often expensive) options for serving and supporting each other.

Why do we do all this? Maybe it was a great idea in 1875 when the world was a very different place, but is it still a great idea today? Is there really no better way?

I would not be surprised at all to see a major push in the coming years that mirrors the approach the Church has taken with temples, to take the education to the people. The benefits of such an approach could be as far-reaching in some ways as the decision to build many smaller temples, with significant positive impact on many if not all of the issues mentioned above. It could mean at the very least de-emphasizing BYU as an educational destination, and perhaps de-emphasizing "higher" education in general. It could include radical changes in how and where the church invests in education. It could mean a significant repurposing of the BYU brand. It would almost certainly mean a major rethinking of the role of BYU sports. Would they completely disappear? I doubt it, but the winds of change are becoming so strong, and coming from so many different directions, that to me it is nearly impossible to imagine BYU (and BYU sports) in a decade or two being largely unchanged from what it has been for the last 50+.

I'm just an out-of-state alum watching the winds blow. Love to hear what others have to say who may have more/better insight into these trends.