We have seen a number of economic bubbles deflate recently;
now there is another one – higher education. A number of second tier colleges
are finding this summer that their freshman enrollment for next year is down
sharply, 20% to 30% in some cases. This of course leaves them in substantial
financial difficulty, and some will no doubt eventually close. Not
surprisingly, this is not affecting the most elite schools, probably because
those in the highest income brackets are less concerned about economic
considerations.
There are probably several reasons for this sudden drop in
enrollments, but certainly one big one is the extraordinarily high cost of
higher education these days, fueled in no small part by all the direct and
indirect government subsidies over the past decades that have allowed colleges
to go on massive building sprees, expand their administrations until in some
schools there are more administrators than teachers, and raise their fees faster
than inflation. This is yet another case of well-meaning but poorly though-out
government intervention.
Now of course there are lots of people noticing that a
college education, at $40,000 to $50,000 a year for four years, no longer guarantees
a job at the end, especially for fields outside of science and engineering.
That leaves lots of people unemployed yet saddled with huge debts. No wonder
college enrollments are down.
No doubt the advent
of free and low-cost on-line college courses will continue to drive the shift away
from the traditional expensive residential college experience. And it should. The old model of huge
Ivy-covered campuses, highly-paid tenured professors who only teach half-time
anyway, layers and layers of deans and administrators and their staffs, and unnecessary “distribution requirements” to force students to take
courses in subjects that don’t interest them (but keep the faculty paid) is
clearly outdated, and incompatible with the economics of the current world.
Posts
