This paper explores the current crisis of local universities, and demonstrates the urgency of taking corrective actions to halt the decline of the non-metropolitan areas. The decrease in the school-age population as well as the students' preference for the universities in the metropolitan area makes the ongoing crisis for local universities. In addition, a lack of decent jobs often leads undergraduates to the metropolitan area. Consequently, non-metropolitan areas, suffering from the continuous outflow of young people to the metropolitan area, are faced up with the serious possibility of extinction, and local universities, impossible to be separated from local communities, will not be exceptions. The Ministry of Education launched a new project to support universities, but it will not be as successful as is expected: it does not make a good solution for the students' preference for the universities in the metropolitan area, and it does not present a long-term plan to fund departments of high technology. The solutions for the crisis of local universities begin with the clear recognition of the interconnectivity between non-metropolitan areas and their universities. A comprehensive plan should be devised to support local universities and prompt their functional specialization in regions, and fundamental studies, which might be weakened by the restructuring of departments, should be protected by a newly established public agency. More importantly, this crisis, if understood as the effects of the natural demographic change, and thus left unattended, will end up with the catastrophic contrast between the extinction of the non-metropolitan areas and the overconcentration of metropolitan area, and thus more efforts should be exerted to alleviate and finally solve the ongoing crisis of local universities.