As a resident of Boston (America's biggest college town) and a potential academic myself, I've thought a lot about this.

The fact is that the US is living way beyond its means and produces little that the rest of the world wants and not even many of the things that its own citizens want.  When the Asian central banks refuse to keep adding to our tab, there will be a truly wrenching adjustment, in the form of something like the 1930s depression.

The difference between the 1930s and today is that today the US lacks a strong manufacturing sector or adequate energy resources.  Without a multibillion-dollar-a-day foreign subsidy stream, I don't think that the bloated service sector can avoid a sharp downsizing.

Part of that downsizing will certainly affect universities.

Think about the main sources of funding for universities:  student tuition and fees, government grants, and endowment income.  

Tuition and fee income will drop sharply in a deep recession because in real terms, median incomes will drop sharply due to layoffs and pay cuts.   Rich kids will continue to attend college, but their numbers will not increase.  

Government grants will drop sharply because revenues will drop sharply and foreign central banks will no longer be footing the bill.  Meanwhile governments will probably have to spend more on poverty relief.  

Finally, every serious economist agrees that nearly all asset classes are now overvalued.  That means a drop in the size of endowments.  A sharp recession means  a drop in the yield on those endowments as well.

This all adds up to sharply reduced income for the higher education sector.  However, the impact will differ widely from one school to the next.  

Universities like Harvard and Stanford, will see their endowments shrink, but they will still be huge.  They are also able to attract the richest students.  They will have to tighten their belts from the loss of government grants, but they will survive nearly intact.

However, most higher-ed enrollment and employment is in the run-of-the-mill, second- or third-tier public and private colleges and universities:  places like Northeastern University, University of Massachusetts, or the Cal State system.  These places will suffer enormously.  They rely heavily on government money and cannot attract wealthy students, particularly when the more prestigious schools relax their standards for students with money. These lesser schools will have massive staff layoffs, and many of them will close their doors completely.