The Future of College

Needless to say, COVID-19 isn't going away anytime soon. All it'll take is one - literally one - kid on a college campus to get the disease, and it could spread across the whole school (e.g. in line at the dining hall, class, sports teams, group project study rooms, etc). College is already worthless for the most part... let's be real, your freshman year General Education english class was money thrown in the garbage. Also, ICE is trying to deport students whose universities switch to online only. What is the future of college going to look like? I think schools should just ditch the 4-year degree and get straight down to the major classes, but that's just me. What do you all think should/will happen?

 

Theres enough people willing to pay for school and easy access to loans for people to do so. The lifetime earnings difference between a bachelors and a high school diploma is also still quite high. I think whats more likely after COVID is a lot of bottom tier having to close due to financial issues. If top schools with billions in endowments(a small portion of which is unrestricted funds) are having issues, then these schools with

 

University cost structures may change to have fewer professors and more TAs. Already this is happening; first with a high specialty course (advanced accounting or something like that). For example you can have a world class lecturer teach virtually to a college classroom anywhere. There would be a TA or two and the students can collaborate. There still is value in schools being a hub for social and professional growth, so in-person is important and would continue. But a major OPEX category could be reduced and that is labor. I could see this trend trickle down to lower/basic level courses eventually.

My opinion is that is good since costs have gone up for students very quickly. Bad that there would be another profession (decently paying) greatly reduced. Regardless that has been the direction and this will accelerate.

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The funny thing is that, on average, being a professor isn't actually a good financial deal. And the situation has gotten much worse even as tuition has skyrocketed. It's a bimodal distribution. Being a tenured professor is pretty sweet, but more and more classes are taught by untenured adjuncts who make shockingly little money. You could teach a full course load that way and actually be below the poverty line.

What has really happened at these schools is that non-teaching administration has metastasized into a giant, resource-consuming cancer. There are so many administrators at these places making six figures while doing nothing that needs doing.

 

It will definitely be interesting to see what happens this fall. I'd guess that there are maybe 40 colleges and universities whose endowments are large enough to float them for an extended time. The others rely heavily on year-to-year tuition dollars, and many of them have serious debt loads to boot.

Now many of them are going fully or mostly remote, which will prompt a lot of kids to take gap years. The international student population will be way down (which will have a disproportionately large impact on tuition revenue, since they tend to get much less aid). A lot of schools will be under major financial strain, and it's a good bet that quite a few will close.

Something analogous will probably happen with K-12 private schools too. If classes are going to be on Zoom either way, why shell out five figures for a fifth-grader's education? You can bet that the number of homeschoolers will spike too (I know some people who already decided to do this next year, and some who are thinking about it.)

 

Right, but let's say schools open.

A college football player gets COVID.

Think of how many people that guy could infect... his teammates, classmates, people in line, all it takes is one kid and the whole school has to shut down.

 

Exactly... I think most schools are going to see an outbreak within a month of bringing their students back... just to send them home right after. Colleges are clearly trying to get as many kids as they can to enroll so they can generate as much revenue as possible. If colleges told their students they would be online now, they would see a massive amount of kids decide to take a gap year/year off. If they bring kids in and send them home halfway through the semester all they have to do is refund half of the room & board. This puts them in a much better financial situation than a large portion of their student body taking a year off if they go online right away. Just a fucked up situation because you'd like to think the #1 priority would be the safety of students.

 

The value prop will have to be re-done as current prices are based on a theory that you check a magic box for guaranteed upward social mobility.

That worked for a few decades because when GDP growth was consistently high, all you needed was a white collar entry point and the rest would take care of itself. So you’d pay anything for that entry point.

Those days are over, a $300k degree can still get you an entry point but that entry point is no longer a reliable path.

Meanwhile employers who want the smartest kids don’t value the education as much as they value that e kid was smart enough to get accepted. Certainly graduating is no special feat.

You can take it to the bank that 4 years of 100% school won’t be the norm much longer. What exactly will happen, I don’t know. I’d put my money on some kind of partnership between companies and top schools. The Google Stanford Institute or whatever. Some mix of work and school, or fast track degrees with pre-hiring.

I’d also bet on some sort of barbell distribution where cheaper schools get more known for lower-frills careers (something like trade school ish) and top schools get larger while also being more efficient (again my Google Stanford example). The schools that charge top dollar for low-level prestige won’t have much of a role to play.

 

My grandma tried to put two stacks on my hand for the baby's college fund I had to say grandma you know college a bunch of bunk and I am slightly offended you'd pre-relegate my child to some shit career that requires a college degree? And you'd want her to waste 4 years. Four precious formative years. In like a two square mile block with a bunch of sheltered identical kids learning all the exact same shit? Like grandma I could a gone and watched a movie if I wanted to see how other kids did it. I wanna see how this kids gonna do it. If you give me that cash it's going to soundz

heister: Look at all these wannabe richies hating on an expensive salad. https://arthuxtable.com/
 
MorganStanleyYes:
What would you say is a viable alternative

Entrepreneurship, art, stem, anything that requires expression of creativity and benefits the world. And no not by "adding value to the capital markets." Her dad already did that immigrant shit so she wouldn't have to.

heister: Look at all these wannabe richies hating on an expensive salad. https://arthuxtable.com/
 

I think what will be interesting to see is the consolidation that takes place in the higher education space in the United States. Enrollment at the undergraduate level fell 8 percent from 2010-2018 ending a 150-year stretch of enrollment growth. This, combined with declining birth rates domestically and you get somewhat of a perfect storm.

Now with this pandemic and the movement to online classes, I can picture large state schools and elite private schools surviving given their endowments but smaller, run of the mill schools will likely fold given the resources required to operate completely online. That mention above to basically any non state school with an endowment under $100M seems accurate from a survivability standpoint. Fees generated from food, parking, etc. are going out the window. Won't take long before a kid decides they don't want to shell out $50,000 a year to watch online videos. Sure the kid at Harvard will pay, but others won't.

Athletic departments are shifting too. They were already under stress from non-revenue generating sports (i.e. not football and basketball) and will be making broad cuts across the board (see Stanford this week cutting 11 programs and the Ivy League cancelling all athletics). At this point I don't care if fans are allowed into games, I just want football in the fall.

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Crab Chiggins:
Also, ICE is trying to deport students whose universities switch to online only.

Dumbass ideologue Betsy DeVos and easily swayed Trump single-handedly killed all STEM research going on in the US. US's world dominance in STEM is over. Who do you think does all the STEM research and literally hands it over to the US institutions? I mean graduate students are borderline indentured servants - who work like dogs and barely make ends meet - just for a slim chance of being a professor or a highly-seeked industry researcher. America's STEM dominance depends on internationals and high-skilled immigrants. The US didn't shoot itself in the foot, it just tried committing suicide.

Go to any major university and go visit an upper level STEM class - 80+% Internationals. It's not just the Chinese students, it's whole lot of Indians, Koreans, French, Germans, Canadians, and Brazilians.

Next thing you know, colleges are gonna be filled with bunch humanities majors who can't get jobs (aka bunch of SJWs and borderline Marxists).

This is why you should never allow ideologues, narcissists, and sycophants to serve in the government. They're gonna do dumbass things for dumbass reasons and pretend everything is fine.

 

Well, if our government actually gives these retarded social justice warriors free college, it'll be a REAL shitshow. But take something like business. Any business major can be learned virtually. There is literally zero need for in person education for any business major.

For things like chemistry and medicine, it's a different story.

 

Of course. Hard science needs to run experiments in an actual lab. But computer science, math, industrial engineering are very well suited for online learning.

On free education, if you can get 10 more STEM and business majors (or anyone who's actually gonna be useful) out of 100 new students (other 90 being humanities taking SJWs), that's a net gain.

I don't support all education being free, but the essence of the voucher program I like is about giving people money to choose the school they like to go to. Everyone's gotta have education. Worried about the budget deficit? Privitize social security and most other useless government organizations like we should've a long time ago. That one ght to cut government spending by 30%. What's more important, giving people free education or government doing something arbitrary that easily could've been done by private enterprises much more effectively?

 

the deporting of international students at online-only universities is simply a negotiation tactic to ensure universities are fully/partially open on-campus in the fall. do you really think the Trump administration would make this move in light of an election this fall? it would be disastrous for Trump to allow these lockdowns to continue for schools in the fall because it would build on the growing anxiety/unhappiness people are experiencing which would translate to them lashing out/seeking change in the polls which would give Biden more votes.

 

Of course it's a negotiation card. But quite frankly it's not a good one and it essentially is a threat. (Either open up or good luck getting your research done).

What's outrageous about this is what this negotiation card means - "either do what I say, or I'm gonna press the self-destruct button". Trump and DeVos is RISKING an essential part of American economic and technological dominance, a research pipeline that puts the US as the number one power in Engineering, Science, and Industry. Significant portion of the brightest minds in the US are immigrants who once were students in our finest institutions.

Also, let's consider it from the perspectives of the universities. Do you know what the average age of a tenured professor is? It's 55. I'd say 2 digit percentage if not the most of the brightest academic minds are highest risk groups when it comes to COVID. The choices for professor are now - "Either don't get your research done, or risk dying". You know who does that? Tyrants.

 

this election is the most important thing the trump administration needs to worry about. as a country we are at risk of pushing cultural marxism/communism to the forefront of american society with an election of biden. death rates and case numbers have been manipulated, covid is not the threat the hysterical media makes you believe. don't get a temporary threat to force universities to open mixed up in the greater scheme of things because america will remain the economic and technological powerhouse in the future. you are oversimplifying the message trump is giving to academia. universities need to open up to some degree in the fall.

 

Okay Intern.

You sound like a brain-washed zombie who can't tell the difference between what's propaganda and what's not.

Xanders:
as a country we are at risk of pushing cultural marxism/communism to the forefront of american society with an election of biden.
NO. This is just farcical. Biden is very much a centrist. If you actually looked at his policy views under the hood, you'd notice that there's really nothing "radical" about them. From a purely political point-of-view, Democrats chose Biden over Sanders because of that very reason - avoid more radical leftist ideas. As a matter of fact, if you actually examine Bernie's economic policy views, they aren't Marxist at all. In fact, they are very much standard social democratic views (which is very different from democratic socialism he says he believes in).
Xanders:
death rates and case numbers have been manipulated, covid is not the threat the hysterical media makes you believe.
If you really believe this, then I feel sorry for your tiny little walnut-like thing inside your skull you call a brain. Professors on average are in high-risk groups with COVID. That's enough reason to seriously consider staying online for quite some time.
Xanders:
don't get a temporary threat to force universities to open mixed up in the greater scheme of things because america will remain the economic and technological powerhouse in the future.
Clearly, you have 0 understanding of how academia or generally how STEM research works. If you consider the complexities of how academic journals and conferences work + competitive nature of academia, you'd know that even a temporary hiatus in research is devastating.

1) Other universities in other parts of the world could easily pick up on your research. There always are certain risks - other research labs in other universities doing similar work, time sensitive work due to the nature of the resources or types of projects being done, leakage of research ideas. In academia, if you're the first one to do a particular research, you and your institution gets all the recognition. Everyone else are just followers.

2) Statistically speaking, there usually are about a dozen very important breakthroughs in a particular field that occur each year. The impact of that dozen breakthroughs are massive - not only in terms of saved costs and money to be made, but also in lives saved, future disasters prevented, etc...

Imagine preventing that from happening.

 
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Xanders:
as a country we are at risk of pushing cultural marxism/communism to the forefront of american society with an election of biden.

Joe Biden, known Marxist and Antifa General.

Xanders:
death rates and case numbers have been manipulated, covid is not the threat the hysterical media makes you believe.

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

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Amen.

I'm not sure if Trump and DeVos are serious about going through with this, but I still take issues with this action for 3 reasons.

1) It's clear government abuse of power to meddle with how universities, many of which are private institutions, conduct their business. Coming from a guy who seems to support people not wearing masks inside because "FrEeDoM", this is just hypocrisy at its worst.

2) This is yet again a huge hypocrisy. Trump's reasoning behind this was that too many schools perform "Radical Left Indoctrination". Who is the same guy condoning Radical Right groups? There is this thing called freedom of speech and he clearly does not respect it when it hurts him. Double-Standard Alert. Yet another hypocrisy of the Trump administration.

3) I find it despicable that Trump & DeVos would even consider using this as a "negotiation tactic" (even if that were true) to get whatever it is they actually want. The choice between risking death vs not doing research is just ridiculous. That's textbook tyranny, pure and simple.

 

Exactly. China's typical tactic has always been to hire away talent from other countries.

The rise of Huawei, ZTE, and even Xiaomi and OnePlus has been partly dependent on those companies hiring talent away from companies like Samsung and LG. It was easy for them to do so since Korea is geographically and culturally more similar to China than other countries. Hence there was less of a risk there and slightly easier transition for these Korean engineers, researchers, and managers corporate culture wise.

Corporate culture, the "way" of doing business, etc... are main reasons why non-Chinese people shy away from working for a Chinese company. So the Chinese had to simply give out very generous offers that people could not refuse. I've noticed that lots of Chinese companies, especially in the up and coming industries like technology, are slowly building a more "attractive" culture.

It's crazy scary how well-engineered the Chinese plan is (and I mean this because the CCP is literally behind all the efforts) - build world-class universities, send their students to the top colleges abroad in the meanwhile, hire away top global talents, compete with the US toe-to-toe in almost every imaginable research fields and industries, attract foreign students, etc...

The rapid growth of their technology, biotech, aerospace, financial, entertainment, and other high value sectors along with the explosion of their research capabilities related to such sectors is absolutely crazy. Crazier thing is they are all directives of the CCP to do so.

How can the US ever compete with that kind of effort if all we're doing is shooting ourselves in the foot and bitching about "Evil billionaires" and "Immigrants taking our jobs"?

 
Crab Chiggins:
I think schools should just ditch the 4-year degree and get straight down to the major classes, but that's just me.

The negatives of course would be even less well rounded individuals. It is already an issue in business that people are really good at one thing - say finance - but lack an ability to write or any critical thinking skills.

The issue isn't college. The issue is the cost of college.

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