Much anxiety surrounds the future of higher education in the United States. With escalating costs, tuition, and class sizes, and the increasing exclusion of many poor and minority students, higher education needs to become more accessible and sustainable. This paper defines five "abilities" for the sustainability of higher education--availability, dependability, capability, affordability, and marketability. The literature indicates that components of each of these abilities are lacking at many institutions. To remedy this problem, the authors developed a framework for sustainability based on these five abilities, and a case study at a public university in the United States was used to validate the framework's applicability to education.