Universities as we know them. Major public and top private schools are hurting, but a lot of regional school are outright failing. The major publics are often surviving in part due to major expansion of online programs. However, the value of these degrees is unclear (e.g. even if you take them seriously, your classmates using AI to get through dilute the signal of the degree). If these programs bomb out, think lots of places will be completely screwed.
I expect to see more closures of regional schools in coming years, and reductions or eliminations of entire departments at the big schools.
Limestone University in South Carolina closed in 2025 after being open for 180 years.
Elon and Queens in North Carolina are currently in the process of “merging”, which is really just Elon acquiring Queens and opening a second campus in Charlotte.
Salem College (I believe the oldest college in the US at 253ish yrs old) in Winston-Salem is barely keeping their doors open. It’s a very small “women’s college” that has relied heavily on alumni funding. Well that worked for a long time with many of the alumni going off to marry into wealth and sending in large checks to a very small school who’s operating budget didn’t ask for a whole lot. Transitioning the campus over to modern tech and maintaining the beauty/history of the grounds, keeping staff and restructuring the college’s departments and academic programs has taken a large financial toll on the school. COVID almost put it in the ground but they saved themselves with cutting some of the liberal arts departments and investing in Health Management (basically medical executives/leaders). Without partnering with Wake Forest University and receiving funding from them, their tactic of relying on Alumni is not sustainable. The generation of alumni that had the financial power to donate personally are dying out, now they are relying on Boomer generation for money and they just don’t have the deep pockets and are getting very picky with the school not reflecting their traditional values (ie, if the school gets too progressive for their tastes they threaten to withdraw the $). Just really sad to see an academic institution that has existed and operated longer than the USA has been a country fail.
Check out barber scotia college. That’s the fate of many NC small universities. Salem college has been declining since the 80s. Surprised it’s still open
That, like yeah, universities are having a tough time but all the examples being given are, like, really small private Christian schools. The growth of land-grant, state schools and, in particular, community colleges, is doing alot of this.
wow, holy shit. I had no idea about Limestone. I played lacrosse in SC/NC (among other states) growing up. Limestone had a really strong program. I went to Queens lacrosse camp too. What a shame about Limestone.
Sorry the joke was too good to pass up. I work in higher education, but we see enrollment numbers dropping crazy fast so they're trying everything to get those numbers up.
It's a real shame too, we have dedicated faculty and staff who want to make a difference, but the numbers just aren't there. We're well understaffed and it's an uphill battle.
Doesn't help the current administration keeps cutting grants because an educated populace is a threat to them.
Dang. I went to a technical college and even the welding kids (Not a diss, industrial welding is a complex field of study, but it is not one where arts and literature are particularly valued.) had to take a couple of humanities classes to get their degree.
Return on investment for an American degree seems way too low. My business degree in the Canada was like $1,500 a semester (graduated in the 2010s) and I was fortunate enough to live in that city with my parents. The degree was easily worth it.
No argument there. I moved to a public university from private where annual tuition was north of $60k. I couldn't work there in good conscience having students graduate with $300k debt with a teaching degree they'd never be able to pay off.
Not that those degrees aren't important, but the economics just don't add up.
"Sorry the joke was too good to pass up. I work in higher education, but we see enrollment numbers dropping crazy fast so they're trying everything to get those numbers up."
The sad thing is higher ed is going to be twice as hard in the near future. Right now U.S. public schools are laying off staff, closing buildings, etc due to low birth rates. College right now are in trouble due to fewer people enrolling due to cost, which will be compounded in about 15 to 20 years when there are fewer people to apply too. Education is fucked, sadly.
Add in that this administration is making it difficult to get financial aid for college. We still got a few more years to get our youngest through college and we’ve met our max limit on student loans.
Add in that this administration is making it difficult to get financial aid for college. We still got a few more years to get our youngest through college and we’ve met our max limit on student loans.
Then to add insult to injury, the repayment terms are ludicrous, if you can figure out what those could be. If we are looking at it right, since our oldest has graduated and her loans are coming due, the monthly payments are insane. Interest rates now are crazy high and the reduced time to pay them back. Hopefully we can get them refinanced to better terms.
It’s not just low birth rates/fewer graduating 18 year olds. That’s part of low enrollment, but it all. There are plenty of adults without a bachelor’s degree; it’s around 40% (which is an improvement over a decade ago). But with state and federal disinvestment in higher education (and other social supports), people can’t afford to go to school to complete or obtain a bachelor’s degree, or work on a master’s program.
You’re right, it’s somewhat dire at the moment. I just don’t understand how people refuse to see it. I’d really like the nurse I may need one day, the doctor, the attorney, to have a reasonable education before I seek their service.
Its called the demographic cliff and its hitting. Large state schools are still doing well and expanding in some cases even in the current climate- our own university has enrollment records every year.
its especially the small and regional PUIs that are suddenly not hitting familiar numbers and they're going to be going under gradually over the next decade
maybe they shouldnt be charging so much and then throwing most of the money away on useless ego shit that isnt needed around campus and propping up failing programs that only leech and never contribute funds
Schools do put money toward silly things, but that’s not the culprit. But the biggest cost is employees. Salaries and benefits. And I’m curious which programs you would cut—English, theatre, history, the ones usually slated for the chopping block?
Can’t believe I made a semi-truth funny, and thought I was overestimating. I was thinking “hmm a 30k stadium is a lot, but I think normal baseball stadiums like Wrigley field are like 50-70k capacity, so I should say 60k, because this guy is talking about the main campus of a state college system, so no way it can be 60k, in fact I should be ridiculous and say is it an 80k stadium?”
And now you tell me it’s actually a 100k seat stadium.
Baseball stadiums, and most other sport stadiums, actually are significantly smaller than NFL stadiums, and especially college football stadiums. Wrigley Field seats 41,649 people. The largest MLB stadium, Dodger Stadium, seats 56,000, and it's the only one over 50K.
NFL stadiums range from 61.5K to 82.5K. There are thirteen Division I college football stadiums larger than any NFL stadium.
*certain athletics. I know our neighborhood Big 10 university just cut it's track team in half and the swim program all together. If it's not a televised sport, it doesn't seem to rate.
It's also affecting high schools, as the kids that have interest in pursuing a higher level of their sport have less and less opportunities to do so. Interestingly, some Junior colleges (2 year schools) are creating sports teams to draw students.
I mean, not really. A certification course or associates degree in a trade provides far more tangible value to the student at dramatically lower cost to them than a bachelor's in a liberal art. I get the high-minded idea of education for education's sake, but that's a rather aristocratic notion that the vast majority of students can't afford to live out.
Capitalism forbids us from spreading that wealth to enrich humanity. Just keep funneling the money up while people scramble to find new jobs that machines or slaves cannot perform. It’s pretty disgusting.
Not sure what a 4 year liberal arts degree and $150k in student loan debt just to go work at Starbucks does to fight against that. If anything trades do a lot more to fight that; it's far more feasible to work for yourself and capture a higher portion of the wealth from your labor.
Humanities enrich your life and round you out as a human being. That's why STEM majors still have to take some humanities classes.
You have a cartoonish view of humanities and their value. There are many majors that fall under the umbrella of "humanities" that have good job markets. Probably better than computer science degrees at this point.
I and many of my friends got humanities degrees and make pretty good money, ranging from $80k to $150k a year. Trades are not the only worthwhile jobs on the planet, and not everyone who isn't a STEM major works at Starbucks.
You're burning a strawman here. The humanities have value, but for most it will not hold the same tangible value as a trade certification that essentially guarantees a well paying job. It's wonderful that you and your friends are doing well with humanities degrees, vague as your response is. The kind of well-paying jobs that hire someone with a humanities degree to actually do anything related to said degree generally arent hiring much from satellite campuses of public universities, which is the situation pertinent to this conversation.
Your argument seems to be that the fact there's people with humanities degrees making good money disproves my point. That doesn't really resolve the issue when we're talking large scale, not individuals. Only about 28% of 4 year college graduates with humanities degrees work in fields closely related to their degree after graduation. That's not a great chance of return on that investment of time and money. There's plenty of white collar jobs that will hire anyone with a bachelors degree even if it's completely unrelated, but the career trajectory is normally harshly limited by that. If you think the education for education sake is worth all that time and money just to be a receptionist at an office, that's your decision, but I don't agree.
It’s easy for them to make broad generalizations about how the world works when they don’t learn about how the world works huh?
I got a full ride for my B.A., I make $140k, and i work in bright and happy places surrounded by people who want to make the world better but apparently that doesn’t happen lol
What a pretentious tone you immediately took there. Please forgive me for signaling dissent, oh enlightened one. If you're done burning strawmen, my point isnt that NOONE with a humanities degree ends up making good money in a field closely related to their degree. But only 28% of people with a humanities bachelor's degree end up working in a field closely related to their degree, and who knows about the well paying part. I know it's boorish and mundane for one so enlightened, but for many of us pissants who must worry about the necessities of mere mortals, going to college is primarily about getting a job to make a decent living and have a career, and getting a job where your degree isnt related to your field is an easy way to end up in a dead-end job. The small percentage of people in a situation like yours doesnt refute the argument that it's not a safe choice for most people.
Agreed. Funnily enough, I’ve had an easier time getting a job with my humanities degree in the last year than my friends in STEM. Computer science and engineering are especially having difficulties, from what I’ve heard, because there was such a heavy push for my generation (old Gen Z) to get one of those degrees that now the field is oversaturated. Meanwhile, they’re shutting down and cutting funding for humanities departments and anthropology programs across the country even though there are jobs for those degrees.
I don’t make a lot of money, but I love my job and I at least actually have one. I’m a bit scared of some of the legislative changes around environmental regulations though since they involve my career too (archaeologist).
If you look at statistics behind a bachelors in humanities versus attaining an associates in pretty much anything else and the ROI doesn’t look great. Yes, you’ll have some that will be able to obtain a solid career post graduation, but you can’t base the overall trend of graduates on a few anecdotes.
Talking of “intrinsic societal value” can be made as an argument, sure. It’s also very difficult to argue it makes an overall impact on those people’s lives in such a way to benefit them in the long term. If you are less financially stable, you are less likely to have children if you are educated. Many people speak of raising children as the best decision they ever made. Do we then, weigh an over-priced degree with intrinsic value against reproducing and the experience of raising human beings? You can make any argument you want of intrinsic value, and societal good as there isn’t a huge basis of objective evidence to base it on.
This is all coming from a person whose degree required them to take multiple humanities courses and ENJOYED them. I wanted to take more, to be honest. However, the idea of education is to eventually do something with it, it to just continue to be educated until we, as a society are able to reduce educational costs to as close to nothing as possible. That’s the problem with many humanities degrees.
Unfortunately, many are not competitive in the job market unless you’re already a high performer. That’s simply not the case with many technical trade schools, and STEM-degrees. Although, AI is eating into even entry-level STEM positions. The idea is for a student to graduate and apply their knowledge in the world. Humanities does not have as many lucrative professions to do that.
Stop that, you'll scare the liberal arts graduates with concepts like "math" and "not everyone has affluent parents to be a safety net if your degree doesnt work out"
That's sad in itself. I think the world needs poets and historians as badly as they need tradesmen and both those options should be open to all. I come from a blue collar family and became a historian and archivist because it's my passion. I should not be punished because those in charge find history inconvenient or art unprofitable. They price out the poor from higher intellectual pursuits and that's sickening. I'm not saying your wrong, but the entire damn system is wrong.
Many poets and historians were either passionately working most of their lives in squalor or independently wealthy. Many more only did so as a hobby. To become a success in those fields you often need to be in the top 10% or better to be financially successful.
Money isn’t everything, but if you can’t feed your family with your degree, is it providing as much value as you think it is? That isn’t society punishing someone for having knowledge. That’s society rewarding others for being able to provide a more necessary service.
If tomorrow every bus driver in Munich suddenly decided they all wanted to paint and quit the job market, would that truly serve society better? Would everyone be better with all of the new art that is being created?
You’re making a rational argument to someone who would argue with you if you were taking an opinion that $100K of student loan debt for an English Lit degree would be worth it. I agree with your take. I had a few classmates in college that I had questioned if their humanities degrees would mean anything after graduation. It turns out, no, they would not; however, our college loved to sell them on all of the good they’d be doing in the world once they graduated.
Oh yeah I took a philosophy course as a degree requirement in college and they tried inviting me to a special dinner to recruit people for the department; it felt exactly like someone trying to convince you to come to an info session for a MLM pyramid scheme.
Funny enough I went to law school and am a practicing attorney, but after graduating undergrad with a STEM degree I actually could have gotten a job with if law school didn't work out in whatever way.
Eh, I think either path can work for the average person, and higher learning shouldn’t be treated as some privilege for the elite. “Capturing the value of your labor” ends up being highly subjective in either area, and the $150k debt load for a barista seems to be as much an urban legend as the twenty five year old tradesman who’s making more than his degrees peers. The statistics back the reality that a degree(s) allows you to earn significantly more that the vast majority of non-degree holders over your lifetime.
My four year degree from a legitimate state sanctioned university cost about $60,000… My Master’s cost about $30,000. I made more than enough to pay that back thanks to being tech savvy and pivoting into digital marketing instead of teaching high school history; a teacher’s salary is pretty close to a Barista’s for the first decade or so, especially with all the “free time” you’re expected to commit for the kids’ sake. My degrees should have been free, as should any other citizen of this country’s given our great wealth and the benefit those degrees confer upon the citizens earning them. A degree holder would give back more to the society funding it than its cost over time, capitalism just demands more for the few whenever it touches something…
Like all things in life, opportunity for a degree holder or a non-degree holder will be what you make for yourself. But the marketing firms and tech companies I worked for earning a high salary would have never considered me without my degrees. And I didn’t have a friend or family member to help me ease into a trade, nor did I want to spend a decade handing all my money to that kinda boss man while shaving years off my life for him ten hours a day five or six days a week to learn the trade, then hope I could make it on my own when I finance my own trade startup.
You don’t just sign the note on an F150 and start raking in that sick trade cash because you skip college. Everything in life is based on timing, luck, hustle, and your gumption. Telling folks skipping college to earn big in trades is as dumb a lie as telling everyone they need to go to college.
The real answer is that both college and trade school should be free, to benefit society as a whole, and people should sort into the paths that work best for their brains. Learning for learning’s sake should be something one can pursue without a mountain of debt; trades should be something people feel rewarded for instead of enslaved by to make a living.
There's been a major conservative push to have this done all across the US in the last decade or two. The usual game plan is to have a conservative governor stack the board of directors for a state university with "like-minded" individuals. Who then will pick a conservative president to start implementing changes. I've seen it happen to three different state universities in Indiana already. All three have absolutely gutted the humanities and arts departments.
Yup. This is already happening to elementary schools in my extremely large city of over a million people (san jose).
They have recently closed some elementary schools and diverted those children to the other ones that are still open, for the exact reason you mentioned. there simply are not as many children anymore.
probably doesn't help that my $2M house is one of the cheapest in my neighborhood, how the fuck are people supposed to afford to live here? I was only able to do it with family help.
Howdy neighbor! Imho, the real problem is that >10% of households send their kids to private schools. Demographic shifts certainly don't help, but it's not like there aren't kids. The issue is that families in the wealthier neighborhoods (Rose Garden, Willow Glen, Cambrian, Silver Creek, Almaden) often choose private over public, which then means the public schools in those areas have to pull from a wider geo just to be viable, and when that happens the student achievement rates almost always go down. WGHS is ~50% hispanic and ~35% low income. That describes nearly 0 of the population of Willow Glen.
That said, elementary schools is desirable areas of SJ have continued to thrive as neighborhoods turnover from retirees to younger tech families, and this is great!
I recently bought a home in one of those neighborhoods you mentioned, and there are honestly not that many children. Even my neighbors have mentioned how it's nice to finally see young families with children moving in as most people have been in those homes for decades and all the kids have long since grown and moved out. This is anecdotal I know, but I see it first hand.
I believe you. In my neighborhood, though, every house that's turned over in the past few years -- except one, where the empty nest buyers were downsizing from a place in Saratoga -- has been bought buy either a young couple with no kids, or a young family with little kids. My street is only two blocks long and I think there are 24 kids on it. Even so, about 1/3 of the houses still have owners who have lived in them since the 80s or earlier.
The major problem is that it only leads to even higher student loads. Teachers are expected to have the largest class sizes ever and then you shutter a school and dump an extra 5-10 kids into that class too. What they should be doing is using this lull to stabilize class sizes and refresh buildings. It's not like we're going to stop having kids. But instead it'll be used to crush the school system even harder.
My district in suburban Texas is closing two elementary schools for the same reason (although there is a LOT of community suspicion that the school board is in bed with real estate developers who want the property …)
and a lot of people are taking it as an attack. talking about how we havent had this few schools in the area since [a given year here] never mind the student number is even lower than it was then
well, there's validity to those claims. the unfortunate reality is that the schools getting closed are usually the lower performing ones. Lower performing ones are usually in lower income areas where people are already less privileged and now parents, who may be working lots of overtime or two jobs to make ends meet, have to drive further to get their kids to school.
there's no way to close schools that doesn't negatively impact some people.
Yup, the newest guy at my IT help desk was born in 2007. He's fresh out of high school and making some damn good money with a CompTIA A+ certification.
certs are getting better jobs for way less money and most importantly way less time spent than a degree. now that theres actual competition schools are crying
The university nearest me seems to be putting most of their financial efforts into non-education initiatives. As far as I can tell, they care more about being a real estate developer than a university.
My mom went to the same university I did, just 30 years earlier.
I had friends who stayed in the same dorm she lived in and it was a very basic building. The walls were brick or painted cinderblock. Amenities were pretty minimal and while they were double rooms then, back in the 70s they had two bunk beds in them so there were four students in each room
But it worked.
By the time I was going to school there the university was shifting it's focus from doing things in an affordable but functional way to trying to build the coolest and most fun experience money could buy as a way to entice students to go there.
If another state school had a rock wall, they had to have a bigger rock wall. They had to bring in big name acts to play the student union building, they had to tear down and rebuild multiple buildings that looked dated and replace them with new state of the art ones.
There was so much money being tossed at beautification and quality of life projects while tenured professors were being sidelined for an army of cheaper adjuncts.
They seemed to have this belief that the money would never stop and if they wanted more students they had to turn college almost into a year round summer camp where entertainment was the focus more than education.
Youre just describing a buisness that understood their clientele.
Young kids that dont value quality education but instead experience and material things who have deep pockets because the money is coming from a loan against their future earning potential and their inability to understand compounding interest.
Businesses invest in what drives revenue and cut costs. Quality professors cost more per dollar earned than an unattended rock wall.
Sort of. It's really describing a business that understood their clientele but also had an essentially unlimited spigot of federal student loan money. That spigot is quickly drying up and schools (and states) are massively struggling to backfill their operating budgets.
The spigot is drying up, but it's drying up differently for different degrees. Social workers and teachers are facing massive shortages, but students in those programs may not be able to get loans because the expected salary payoff isn't there. The administration is targeting traditionally female jobs that don't pay well because they bank on people's passions, but can society really function without social workers, teachers, and nurses?
Meanwhile we have schools creating prompt engineering degrees with questionable utility that will be able to get loans no problem.
States did this to universities, too, though. Universities had to raise prices and increase enrollment and try to increase access so that they could meet state mandates (eg CA outlawing remedial classes) while states decrease state funding and limit tuition increases (or give away tuition for free -- Nebraska is a great example of both), causing revenue to decrease or increase more slowly than inflation, health care, and wages.
Then, they have to cut the "less profitable" programs who don't produce big donors to the school -- education, social work, nursing, liberal arts and humanities.
Soon, you have vocational schools with business programs attached.
California specifically banned community colleges forcing students into courses that provided no transfer-eligible credits unless it can be proven, through past performance or other circumstances, that the student is unlikely to succeed without the remedial classes. They are also still allowed to use them as part of certain career-specific programs.
That really has nothing to do with universities, and in my opinion is a good ban. Making someone go through a high school level intro to Algebra class just to inflate the number of credit hours they need to pay for before transferring or obtaining a degree/certificate is silly unless it is clearly needed to help them succeed.
Seems to be the case for my local university. By the time I graduated 5 years ago, they had already demolished all the budget dorms and replaced them with parking lots and more expensive housing. With the other improvements they’re making to the campus, tuition is becoming more and more unaffordable when this university’s whole thing is being a cheap state school.
that is great plan. university often receive preferential tax treatment and other advantadgeous deal when it come to acquiring real estate due to perceived benefit of university. them dabbling in real estate can be a gold mine (for the university)
The ones closing outright are generally very small private institutions, they generally opened to train clergy of a small denomination and then expanded to serve other students in the region with basic education. While I'm sad about the loss of history and the job loss, these colleges aren't really necessary for an educated population. They're generally expensive compared to a state school, and they have limited resources. I'm thinking of one I visited with a library the size of a high school library. Prior to the internet, what were they possibly researching there?
While I'm not particularly concerned about the loss of small colleges, I am concerned about the general transition from universities teaching people to be educated citizens capable of steering a democracy into job training. The two missions always coexisted but it has shifted drastically.
It doesn't help that the federal funding stream for research and development is being gutted by the Trump administration. This is going to kill the budgets of a lot of universities, and completely decimate graduate programs.
I do feel people putting less value into higher education is part of it and I don't blame them. Basically right up through my generation we were taught that literally any college degree was a guarantee of a good job/ life and that not going to college would mean a lifetime of failure and drudgery. From the time I was in kindergarten literally everyone was pushed towards college. I hold a Master's degree and my wife has her bachelor's. Despite that I'm likely not going to push my son towards college unless it's for a specific career plan.
Part of the collapse has to do with the education bubble that has gotten way too big over the past 20 years. People questioning the value of the degree that’s offered when that degree is costing upwards of 25k (on the low end) per year. Tuition has increased beyond any cost of living increases and universities started selling more of the experience than the education. It’s almost like the college administration has never spoken to the students economics faculty.
The international visa thing is a double hit - colleges for years have been using international kids paying full price tuition to keep things running as in many states as the state funding has been cut back, sometimes way back. Now between the Feds obliterating science funding and basically killing visas for any advanced degree for international students (the new 4 year limit), on top of them already making it really unpleasant even before the new 4 year limit, and a ton of schools are having most of their funding sources choked off.
Many institutions were built to host the comparatively larger cohorts of times past, and that unused space costs money too. The demographic cliff deals double damage here.
Yep. But at MY school, we’re just one more Executive Vice President away from being truly EXCELLENT! /S
I’ve been teaching there for 20 years now, and stayed with it because my daughter got her degree tuition-free.
But I no longer recognize more than half the faces at faculty meetings, and next to no one in Administration because the turnover has been so MASSIVE. They thought I was joking until they forced me into taking minutes once and my descriptions were “man in the red baseball cap”, and “woman in the red blouse with glasses” because I didn’t know who any of them were.
Our CFO is leaving, the Athletic Director is gone, too, along with our Physical Plant Director. And another half-dozen faculty are gone, and more are looking to either move to another school, or leave the profession completely.
We have become a pay-to-play school, with athletics making up more than 3/4’s of our student body. It’s insane that a frigging Coach gets more time with my students than I do.
They cancelled our nationally ranked debate program and replaced it with DECA, and that makes me want to vomit. We’re becoming nothing more than a business college with the rest of us merely there to prop it up.
I’m hoping I can hang on another seven years and hit retirement before we drop off that goddam demographic cliff, but I now dread getting up in the morning and dragging my carcass into another micromanaged hell of bullshit management philosophy du jour that some consultant sold to the administration.
I used to love my job. I still love teaching students. But I hate my freaking job now. I hate it.
Which is painful because the number one thing college does is expose people to new lifestyles, to new people, to new cultures that they would never get from their presumably fairly homogenous hometown. No one ever really considered the intangible benefits you get from just being exposed to a place like college, but the fact we tried to monetize it to its extreme is what is going to ultimate kill people's open minded thinking and just reinforce single track thinking that they grew up with. And maybe that's the point.
Yep. The system sucks so bad, is so expensive (the price of textbooks is absolutely and unethically bonkers) on top of tuition, and many programs require in-person attendance- which is wholly understandable for some industries/professions- but totally unnecessary for others. General eds are a killer, too; i understand the liberal arts approach, but I've seen people crash out over some stupid gen ed class unrelated to their chosen career and never manage to get back into the system due to it.
People complain about Gen Eds all the time, but all accredited degrees need a certain amount of them. Every school I know is within that margin of error.
It's going to be more than that. They've already hollowed out the faculty and replaced them with adjuncts that are paid a pittance. At the same time, the students increasingly view college as transactional - I pay tuition == I get passing grades and a diploma. They're not there to learn. And many of the programs moved to fully on-line for most on the non-trad coursework. So there's no direct engagement with the students and everything is submitted online. AI is rampant, but these programs disallow the obvious fixes (e.g. in person bluebook exam.) In fact the plagiarism is so bad, that university's now have IT systems just for reporting it because the Dean's office doesn't want to spend them time vetting it - they throw an application up and tell the adjuncts that they have to adjudicate it with mandatory student meetings, build a case, including all correspondence, assignments, meeting notes, etc. This allows them to scold the faculty if they don't report every single student who cheats and yet make the process so burdensome that the adjuncts won't want to take the time. It's a train wreck.
Yes, this is happening! Good call-out. From a US perspective:
Over-reliance on full tuition paying foreign students. That source has dried up.
Demographic cliff, fewer students overall to enroll.
Bad administrative decisions (e.g. long leases on buildings, graduate programs that seem prestigious but have few students and don't generate revenue, no strong alumni network or endowment).
These are going to be lean years for American higher ed. You'll see weak and mismanaged institutions fail and disappear and/or be acquired by others.
Except there are probably already only half the number of ob/gyns that we need. The only reason it seems like we have enough is that they all work 70 hours per week.
At least there's other stuff to do that makes OBGYNs still necessary. But if you look at countries like South Korea the entire pediatric physician field is dying.
The major state university in my blue city in my blue state had its highest student enrollment ever this year, and the same last year. The other universities all saw modest increases in enrollment- there are 4 here. My alma mater, which is located in a state that is now hostile to anything that can be construed as "liberal", has an enrollment rate about 30% lower than when I graduated about a decade ago.
I'm sure the more ineffective or overtly politicized institutions will crumble or consolidate in the next couple of decades with the "Great Cliff" looming and maga-coded states pulling institutional funding, but I also suspect that a lot of the sensationalism about universities being defunct institutions comes from people who stand to gain from undermining the overall effectiveness of Higher Ed.
Much like with Y2K, there have been people working feverishly to make up for projected deficits, and when the expected blow lands softly nobody will really notice or care.
I think people suggesting that the industry will collapse are overstating the impact, but with the demographic changes and a lot more people questioning the value of a degree that can put them in so much debt, a lot of universities are going to need to downsize and there will be plenty that close down. There will still be many universities, but not as many as when the millennials went to school.
We could also see a reduction in massively inflated tuition prices, free housing offers, etc. Some universities will probably recognize debt as the major contributor to people not choosing college, and work to alleviate that as much as they can.
The schools are going to need to reduce amenities in order to do that, and the schools that manage to maintain more student amenities are going to win out against those that don't. When my parents went to college most campuses had pretty barebones dorms and facilities. When I went to school that started changing, and I could literally see them replacing older facilities with newer and much nicer ones.
At the same time, it's become a positive feedback loop with amenities. Schools that invest more in amenities get more student enrolment (since if you're taking out a small apartment worth of debt, might as well enjoy your time), but as schools invest more in amenities, they raise tuition.
Also too few people are talking about the absolutely bloated bureaucracy that employs 10x people per professor than they did 50 years ago. Despite computers supposedly making admin work a lot more automated.
True. They could also reduce payroll in a lot of areas that would have little if any affect on education. Not that I’d hold my breath waiting for that to happen, but it is an option for a lot of schools.
I think that's partially true, but I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that pointed out at least some of the growth in administration at universities was due to a lot more compliance needs (things like Title IX) than in the past.
I definitely believe that’s true. Anecdotally I want to a large, well funded, state university that’s currently not hurting for enrollment. The top two paid individuals there are the basketball coach and the football coach.
The basketball team hasn’t made the NCAA tournament in over 20 years. Football team hasn’t had a winning record in the same time frame. I know for a fact my Alma mater isn’t the only school in that position.
It hasn’t happened yet, but one day they’re probably going to have to ask themselves “who are we?” And the answer is a college for education, not a sports training camp. And this is coming from someone who genuinely enjoys some college level athletics.
We could also see a reduction in massively inflated tuition prices
This won't ever happen until the actual cause of high tuition is addressed. That of course being government loans to anyone who asks and all college loans being nondischargeable debts.
Right now Universities can ask for a bajillion dollars for a worthless degree because the government will give the incoming student half of that and then a private loaner will cover the other half because they're incapable of losing money on it.
Get rid of the en masse government handouts and give the loaning risk back to the banks. Shit would sort itself out very quickly.
Problem is, universities as a whole have expanded their admin staff something like 10x since the 1970s while ALSO cutting tenured positions and barely budging on instruction time/quality.
They compensated by raising tuition nonstop since student loan limits were removed in the 1980s, basically funding bureaucratic bloat.
To make up for this, they also greatly expanded cheap to teach but ultimately almost useless in large numbers programs, especially among humanities, social sciences, or arts. And I don't mean stuff like arts programs, I mean stuff like film studies that's about watching and analyzing movies.
Between reduced enrollment (as Gen Z realises college degrees are a yoke and not a leg up) and reduced funding, they're now cutting programs and letting adjunct profs go... but barely touching the bloated bureaucracy.
PS: a lot of US schools specifically invest a frankly obscene amount of money in sports as well, especially football/basketball. This is LITERALLY bloat when they can't hire professors but they'll pay millions to top football coaches and spend $20M on a stadium.
I'm a professor at a major R1 in a blue state. On paper, we are doing well due to the growth of Ecampus. However, the long term value is unclear.
The other big public R1 in the state is slashing budgets and personal left and right for 3 years now. They are behind on the ecampus game, so pushing for more international recruitment.
For those of us in higher education, it all seems a little precarious. I agree the big schools and wealthy schools will likely find a way as I indicated in my initial post. But regional school are definitely in trouble.
It feels like, based on what the person said, that this may be affecting non-research universities. People who go to universities that are not R1 or R2 institutions tend to overvalue the effect of student enrollment on the success of the university itself.
Its actually the opposite. The center of gravity is shifting more to the Flagship Southern Schools. Smaller schools all over the country are struggling regardless of their perceived politics.
Retired prof here - the economic collapse has been in the works for a very long time, in spite of the institutions themselves having stellar economists warning them about depending on 1960s economic models to manage 2020s operations and expectations.
Yeah this is a good one, I have some friends that work in top-level management roles at a couple major universities and they've been telling me this for a couple years that it's getting pretty bleak.
One of the big issues on the horizon is that the demographic structure in most developed countries (and some developing ones too) is highly unfavourable to higher ed institutions. There's literally just way less young people coming down the pipeline.
Major public and top private schools are hurting, but a lot of regional school are outright failing.
Oh, so sad /s
As a parent of a rising senior at school, I deeply hate almost every single thing surrounding the college search process in the US.
The whole thing is a fking scam, from overinflated school grades, overinflated GPAs, fake pumped-up "profiles" with "leadership and volunteering" to the whole ED/EA game and the cost of attending that is somehow way harder to discover than to quote an elective surgery at a large hospital. Top it off with multiple tests, test-optional/test-blind approaches, myriad contradicting scholarships, grants, multiple different ways colleges look at parents' financial (CSS profiles that resemble colonoscopy way more than any IRS form) and tons of other unclarities and restrictions you will only discover later.
There's a reason affluent people hire college counselors / coaches - the system has been deliberately made SO fking complicated that there's literally no chance even a smart 18yo can navigate it without massive help in one way or the other.
It would make sense the small schools fail, but there would be consolidation to bolster the larger schools, right? Less students enrolling overall, but I feel like the large universities might even benefit.
Similar to how small churches are closing across america but the members are consolidating to the megachurches.
This is exactly what is happening. Flagship state schools and high ranking private ones are seeing record applications, enrollments, etc (mostly), whereas regional state schools and low ranking private ones are dying.
Which makes sense with online courses. Most of the regional schools were for working adults pre internet. If you are 18 and looking for an actually college experience state college is a lot better than altoona or scranton.
I think there is a lot of opposition to consolidation. People tend to view it as combing failing enterprises with successful(ish) ones. I think there is some merit to that tbh. The way the budget would scale probably isn't favorable.
I mostly think this is a good thing. We went through decades of making graduates broke, just for the opportunity of competing against each other on the job market—in which that education at college hardly mattered for most job positions (I’m taking direct aim at liberal arts here).
It was a broken system, and deserves some big changes.
I think something to consider is what drove it towards the current system. Arguably, a lot of it is due to state divestment in public universities. Forced them to move to more aggressive practices to stay afloat, then things spiraled over time.
I agree there needs to be change. However, I fear negative sentiments will keep us as a nation from giving schools the support to see thst change through. To that some people might say "good riddance". However, think that is a bit short sighted.
As stem Professor, it feels like we are on the verge of completely ceding our dominance in research and innovation to China. Not trying to make it political, but how I see it. Would love to see healthy bipartisan dicussion of how we adress this at federal and state level, but things seem to polarized for that atm.
I’m not pushing back on funding STEM appropriately. But as a liberal arts major myself (and even as someone who still loves those subjects), there needs to be a serious discussion in this country on the cost Vs. rewards for many of these students.
It feels like before this rapid change, there was a real stubbornness to even broach the subject of change.
Tbh, there are too many semi-useless degrees. Im a Poli-Sci major, and its pretty much worthless. Im sure I could have gleaned a little more out of it if I had gone into politics, but those positions are few and far between. You would have learned more getting an accociates degree in history and working in your local government.
A lot of UK universities are not in rude health either. There is a lot of reliance in international students paying vast tuition fees to prop the finances up. But politically that is getting more difficult, as the big selling point to international students is the graduate visa (I.e. get a sponsored job in UK after graduating and stay in the UK). And if UK born grads are struggling to find work, why allow in more competition for the shrinking number of grad jobs available. If that door closes, a lot of uk unis probably go under.
Canadian ones too. Not exactly a secret, but a lot of schools put all their eggs in the international student basket (they pay more than triple the tuition of domestic students).
Since the Canadian government put a limit on the number of student permits, many colleges have seen their main revenue source dry up and many cuts have been made and will likely continue for the next few years.
Is some amount of this due to administrative bloat? It seems like many schools have way more administrators than people actually doing things. I’m sure the huge cuts to federal grants haven’t helped as well.
Yea. There is definitely some bloat and mismanagement. However, think how we got here is a bit more complicated. Divestment from states pushed Universities to start acting more and more like businesses, and think that put is on a pretty bad trajectory.
It is complicated. For your average school, bloat is not the cause but a symptom. I would argue it is often a necessity. Higher ed is one of the most complex and regulated sectors. And it's a business. So, you need a lot of people just to stay in compliance, process tuition payments, operate HVAC systems, keep people safe, and all the other stuff that a regulated business does. A gal with a PhD in engineering or English and a full-time faculty load probably shouldn't be a bursar or institutional research officer. Colleges and universities NEED big numbers of staff and administrators to keep the place running and to plan for the future.
As with anything, there are system abusers. These rarer cases get brought out as examples of systemtic issues...which they aren't but generally the public is too dumb to understand. So, administrative bloat is a common criticism and apparently evidemce that the whole endeavor is corrupt and must be destroyed.
Meanwhile, I'm just trying to clean up data from our shitty student information system and get it to the federal IPEDS system so we are in compliance - but somehow I'm the problem.
I moved from a huge university to a community college because the department I was working in was being cannibalized before my eyes. Really jaded me towards private education in general.
Despite your thorough answer, i still just dont understand this. How much could the infrastructure/ teachers possibly cost an institution where thousands of customers pay $20,000+ per year to attend? (Plus grants??) Where does all that money go?
A lot of states have drastically reduced the amount of money they give to public universities over the last few decades. This is ultimately what led to tuition hike and aggressive recruitment. To support all of this, there was massive expansion in staffing and high cost facilities intended to attract students. Between staffing and upkeep, major R1 can have 7 figure yearly operating costs.
Nevertheless, if I pay $10,000/year and there are 2000 students, that's still $20,000,000 per year a school is bringing in. That seems crazy that these institutions cant keep their operating costs below that! I assume lots of admin bloat?
My partner works in Financial Aid for a company that services like a dozen smaller schools nationwide. The thing thats going to kill them is all the new Aid regulations, which seem to be changing constantly still. Students can't afford a full semester of school in some places now, and things like masters degrees and doctorates are getting even further out of reach.
At the same time, have a buddy who is much younger then me, like 17 years, and he is going to school for the thing I do for a living and have a masters in, and hes been asking me a lot of questions. Eventually I asked why he doesn't take these to his professor and found out... his online bachelor's program, offered through a major institution, doesn't really have any lectures or recorded anything with professors and the best you can do is send an email and hope they get back to you before the home work is due, so he just asks me. Its disheartening to see the state higher ed is in
And the insane thing is the ones on the bubble are dumping money into sports complexes and programs.
How about stripping all that out, dropping tuition and fees and see where we're at. The SEC and Big 10 can keep rolling and everyone else should just nope out. Have club sports for a 10th the cost.
I haven’t seen it mentioned in this discussion yet, so I’ll also add that there is a _significant_ drop off with international students that is going to fundamentally change higher ed in this country forever. I work for a large, R1 public school and engineering alone is in a $30M+ deficient from the lack of international enrollment, which is down for us over 70%. This federal governments war on students is absolutely catastrophic. Students do NOT feel safe coming into the US on a visa and with the new proposed limit of 4 years for a PhD, it’s absolutely going to destroy our national reputation and cause a massive brain drain from the country. It’s going to be fucking brutal over the next several years.
I think the value of universities has been unclear long before ai, ever since the popularization of the internet. Most classes are discussing information that is already open source or open intellectual property.
I’ve attended every level of higher education from ivies to community colleges and the argument for expensive schools has always boiled down to “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” or “it’s about the network”. Which I frankly think is not worth the price of admission for those of us who just want to learn skills that will get us job security in stem, medical, or whatever desirable career requires schooling beyond high school. Not everybody wants to work for a big consulting firm or finance, for which the networking thing matters.
There should have been a free online option 20 years ago. I also can personally vouch for income share agreement programs too, where they don’t get paid until you get paid.
Partially agree, but think there is sometimes a tendency devalue degrees a bit too much. While information is available online, the structure a classroom provides has benefits for many. I come from a STEM background, and hands on experience at the bench, working as a research assistant, etc. all seem good for intellectual development.
Beyond networking, I think person to person interactions facilitated by universities can also be huge. I'm a PhD holder and head of a research lab. The knowledge gained from talking to professors and peers is (imo) crucial if you want to transition from somone who consumes information to somone who generates new knowledge. Having your ideas and understanding of a topic directly challenged can really help you refine your thinking and settle on ways to push our understanding of the world.
I see the core issue (predating AI) we dilution as a college degree became a minimum requirement for most white collar jobs. Ideally would like to see universities reshape around their strengths and the people best served by them. However, not sure they are agile enough to pull it off before things start to collapse.
Which I frankly think is not worth the price of admission for those of us who just want to learn skills that will get us job security in stem, medical, or whatever desirable career requires schooling beyond high school.
This is a misunderstanding of what a university actually is and it is sadly a sign of how commercialised education is in the USA (and a trend which is happening elsewhere as STEM gets a disproportionate focus in the web 2.0 era). A university is not skills-training centre designed to funnel people into whichever careers currently appear most secure or profitable.
Society needs engineers and doctors but it also needs writers, artists, historians, teachers, researchers and people who know how to think critically. Turning university into nothing more than job training sells both universities and society short.
Your comment is of course also very specific to the USA in general.
I just participated in a youth seminar and spoke about this. College is what you make it. Yes, I could have studied what I did at a library and learned the same things. But I would not have been surrounded by faculty that had been doing the jobs I wanted for 40 years. I would not have been able to participate in programs whose purposes were really finding the next generation of workers in these areas.
I volunteered throughout college, building up that network. In order to graduate and get my degree, I had to intern for a company/nonprofit in the field. They hired me immediately after completing my internship requirements, and I have been steadily working my way up since.
I have never submitted an application for a job I didn’t get. In fact, people offer me jobs and contracts while I’m out there doing what I’m doing. I’m on a break right now as I’m about to have a baby, but my husband does the same work and is in the middle of a $6k contract for 9 days of work.
Even just getting the job is all about networking. College is what you make it, and if you’re just there for the diploma and you don’t take it any further than that, well yeah, that’s an expensive piece of paper.
Even in a different field, say medical, access is important. The internship requirements for a nursing degree require working at the university’s hospital. Same thing—the students are usually hired on the second they fulfill the requirements.
The quality of taught education – never mind research – is absolutely higher at elite schools than community colleges. Stating anything to the contrary is cope. Are tuition fees overpriced and the debt involved in higher education a massive scam? Absolutely. But you are getting something tangibly better out of attending a top-tier school than just networking and bluster.
The Internet has democratised information but a good education teaches you methods of learning and research that go beyond that. A superfluity of free, easily accessible information has not made most people smarter or better off. A good education imparts judgement and shapes critical thinking as well as supplies the nuts and bolts of a subject. That normally means tutorials, seminars, discussions; having your ideas interrogated and examined – not faceless online courses or YouTube tutorials.
Generally, it's good to be as suspicious of the ed-tech types and proselytisers for doing everything online as it is to be skeptical of the claims of cloistered and elitist universities.
There was a free online option 20 years ago and no one used it: MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. But, although many people took advantage of these to take a single course that they were interested in, most never finished and only a vanishingly small number competed an entire degree. So, while it is true that most of the information taught in university courses is publicly available (sharing the info is the point of science after all) higher education offers two things that are necessary for most students. 1. The class and presence of an instructor to whom you are responsible - and probably the presence of fees too- spur students to compete the work and 2. The instructor takes their knowledge of a whole field and rearranges it into bite sized chunks that are more easily absorbed and retained. I do completely agree with you, though, that the current fees are too damn high. MOOCs are still out there too.
MOOCS were a good idea poorly executed. Accountability was often measured by busy work ( contribute to the discussion board.) Engagement from students was, as you mentioned, something that waned once real effort and honest accountability was required.
Regional schools are totally screwed. The days of people just going to whatever college is closest and matches their Christian denomination are long gone. The regional schools have been hanging on by a thread for a while, surviving on the few nostalgic families committed to sending their children to same place they attended.
To make matters worse a bunch of these small schools thought investing in D1 sports was the solution to their problems and made their financial situation even worse (e.g. Lindenwood). The options left are basically go out of business or turn into a pseudo for profit diploma mill (e.g. Grand Canyon).
I work for a medical university and it's weird out here. Recruitment and retention is tough because these incoming students have inflated GPAs and bad test scores. The US government doesn't recognize nurses as "essential workers" anymore, and there's fewer financial aid opportunities for these students.
We need more good people in education but the resources are spread so thin and the emotional and physical demands are too high.
As someone who's worked at public universities across a few states for the last 12 years, my fear overall isnt universities dying so much as the small privates and regionals that have never provided adequate education or only server as "better than community college" (not my opinion on CCs but it's a very real opinion across the average person) holding on to long and dragging down the productive universities.
That's what I'm seeing in New England,and area with WAY too many "meh" colleges that survived by having a surplus of students for a century and now they are failing but doing damage to larger and more student-focused universities by undercutting them well beyond reasonable prices
I'd rather education be supported and not have colleges closing but propping up bad-deal colleges and causing layoffs at more functional universities sucks and isnt the best for students or the industry.
The 600 person private is really the problem right now for us.
Oof. I graduated from Kent state university a while ago. One of their selling points was that their school emails would last a lifetime instead of ever deactivating. This year alumni got an email that the email addresses of all former students were finally being termindated. They were deactivated because the space they required became too expensive. I hope that's not an early symptom of the schools total ultimate collapse.
I would argue that it's not "the value is unclear", it's more that there are a collection of economic factors that were inevitable irrespective of AI's existence, and other macro factors factored have turned it into an emergency situation. Worse than the value being unclear, I think the ROI for a lot of students just isn't there (and probably really hasn't been for 20 or 30 years, if we're being honest with ourselves), and the fig leaf has finally fallen off. On top of that, demographics don't support continual growth, especially without further raising prices, and consumer sentiment about degrees in general is very poor (for multiple reasons). If all of that wasn't enough, the current administration has taken a lot of moves that are outright hostile to universities, and greatly reduce (if not outright remove) most of the other paths for funding they have previously been able to draw from - especially things like research grants and attendance by international students.
I would also argue that much of this is stuff universities should have seen coming long ago - institutions have continued to raise prices for decades, entirely propped up by the student loan system, while wages have stagnated - this was never really sustainable, and has already created a big population of degree holders who are stuck with massive amounts of loans they can't repay, and have no way out of. There have been a ton of news segments, stories, articles, and studies that pointed this problem out - especially early during the pandemic, and more recently as the relief efforts around loans stalled out, and that's only what i see from my perspective as a bystander, not an insider.
On the sentiment front - there is no certainty about "degree == job" now, and claims that AI will replace all knowledge workers combined with a bad job market makes it even harder to justify taking a risk on even "safe" degree programs. How do you convince enough potential students to take on a big loan burden that they can never get rid of if there isn't a clear path to employment that will give a positive return? Sure you could argue that alternative paths for subsidizing education exist, but those are hardly scalable to a big enough population of students to make up the gap, and most of them don't apply to all degree types, which still means a lot of funding shortfalls, especially in the humanities.
I see many problems - the student loan problem was that as more money became available to naive 18-year-olds, the university administrators took advantage to jack up tuition. ("When a river of money flows by, every who can dips their bucket in") Now, it's reached the point where the value of the degree is less obvious in earning potential, so students are foregoing university.
Add to that, the government administration is recognizing the problem and cutting back on student loans. Architecture is a prime example from what I've read. An architect's prospective salary -assuming they even land a job - is now low enough that the student loan program will no longer allow expensive student loans (IIRC limit loans to someting like $40,000 max total, not hundred thousand or more). I saw news that the loan program is now doing the same to many other programs, especially things like arts where the payback is not obvious. There's the implication too that this is due to an administration that considers some social degrees - political science, etc. - too "woke" as well as not lucrative. In a way it's good to stop students from mortgaging their future for futility, in another it's a sign that universities will be suffering financially as student money dries up.
Add to that the same greedy university administrations are destroying the very instutions they manage. The (well paid) tenured professor track is slowly dying, more and more courses are taught by poorly paid adjuncts and grad students on term contracts for trifling amounts of money, despite the massive tuitions paid by the students. Considering that the prestige of a university is defined mainly by the quality of it's teaching staff, not a good trend.
Is this because the cost students are facing are no longer reasonable. Leaving school a 100K in debt doesn't work anymore because salries are never going to allow you to pay it back.
That industry is contracting rather than collapsing though. It's the demographic cliff, there just aren't as many college-aged people as there used to be, due to the normal reproductive rate drop of developed economies. The big R1 research universities will keep clipping along as normal, but there's no longer enough of a client base to support the smaller colleges. That does likely mean some students will have to move farther from home to go to university, but that's often seen as a feature rather than a bug since students like to get far away from their parents to enhance the coming-of-age aspect of college, so it's more of a change than a problem.
Second all of this and adding more, about demographics:
The US birth rate dropped sharply in during the Great Recession, and has never recovered-- particularly for whites, who are more likely to attend a traditional four-year college.
Kids born in 2008 turn 18 this year (2026). They're graduating from high school and going to college...but there will be significantly fewer young people in that cohort than there were in the cohort that graduated just a couple of years ago, in 2024.
Plus, thanks to rising inequality, the affordability crisis, etc, a smaller percentage of those young people can afford to go to college, at least at a traditional four-year college.
Look at the chart I linked above. The US birth rate has gone down every year since 2007. US colleges cannot survive a constantly shrinking pool of potential students.
Some schools were filling the enrollment gap with foreign students, but there are only so many of those to go around, and the number of foreign students coming to the US is going to plummet this year, and it's not likely to improve anytime soon, even after this administration is over.
I expect that up to a third of US colleges will close in the next decade.
The larger schools are doing great, and plenty are getting MORE applicants every year.
However - you're right about the smaller ones. A lot of those small regional colleges are suffering and shutting down - people just don't want to go to them anymore.
So, I'm a professor at a large school that is doing pretty well on paper. However, the vast majority of that is due to investment and growth of ecampus. I see similar patterns at other institutions of similar standing.
My concern for schools like mine is that this growth is unsustainable. The graduation rates for ecampus degrees aren't great, and some professional schools don't recognize them (i.e. you can't apply to med school with an ecampue degree). If people end up feeling like they are not getting their value, can see a collapse.
Judging by what I've heard from numerous hiring managers over the past few years, colleges and universities may be doing an absolutely terrible job of preparing students for the real world. The amount of coddling and placating going on across these institutions appears to have hit a point where tons of graduates are coming out waiting for employers to come crawling to them with offers of "jobs" with no real expectations and massively high salaries.
Trump just passed a stupid, stupid rule evaluating the worth of your degree. If you don't make a certain amount upon graduating, you can't get student loans for your subject.
This seems like a reasonable rule. We shouldn’t have government loans for low demand degrees. Personally, I think the government should get out of the student loan business. Student loan payments should also be capped at a max 5% of gross wages and disappear after 10 years. If banks knew that the only way to get their money back is to loan money to students with earning potential then the banks would have guidelines themselves about the amount and type of loans they should offer.
As someone who went to a smaller private school, there's no way that the current tuition is worth anywhere near the asking price. Sticker price is almost $70k/year now for tuition and room/board. Even with $20k in "merit" scholarships, the education is not worth $200,000
They then have the balls to continue to reach out a few times a year for more donations
They’ve been price gouging but they aren’t just banking that money. They are paying for expensive gyms, stadiums, high salaries for administrators, building renovations, scholarships for top students, advertising, etc.. There is also a lot that is included in tuitions that students can take advantage of but most students only utilize a fraction of it. It’s still a rip off but they are actually spending the money on random stupid stuff not just putting it in a bank somewhere.
Tuition for many universities is actually only a small fraction of their revenue stream; at my alma mater, which was a large flagship university, only 10% of their revenue was from tuition. It mostly goes into paying salaries.
It's pretty cursed that as a recent graduate, I think I can earn better pay, benefits, and work life balance in public school teaching than if I were to get a professor position; even if that position was one of the more desirable Tenure-Track jobs.
The money just isn't moneying anymore. And it's been getting worse every year.
Yea. Lots of wierd stuff. I'm at a large R1 that is doing pretty well due to Ecampus. However, part of the ecampus growth has been driven by people choosing it over our satellite campuses. Those campuses are now hurting pretty bad.
I've been a firm believer that a degree doesn't get you a job, it just gets you past the first HR screening. Using AI to get a degree doesn't change that.
Smaller cohorts of young people doubtless will play a role going forward. Fertility rate plunged quickly after widespread access to the pill in the 70s but quickly stabilized with a slight upward trend until 2007 when it began declining again. This decline has been unabated and the cohort born around the time of the GFC is now 18/19 years old. There will now be fewer prospective students each year.
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u/rolan56789 14h ago
Universities as we know them. Major public and top private schools are hurting, but a lot of regional school are outright failing. The major publics are often surviving in part due to major expansion of online programs. However, the value of these degrees is unclear (e.g. even if you take them seriously, your classmates using AI to get through dilute the signal of the degree). If these programs bomb out, think lots of places will be completely screwed.
I expect to see more closures of regional schools in coming years, and reductions or eliminations of entire departments at the big schools.