Almost half of them may be gone within a decade.
Good riddance. This was a bubble waiting to be popped, and the pandemic was the pin.
24 thoughts on “Universities”
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Almost half of them may be gone within a decade.
Good riddance. This was a bubble waiting to be popped, and the pandemic was the pin.
Comments are closed.
The brick and mortar type for sure. The online type is still likely to do very well.
Online study won’t need fancy sports facilities or student housing. And most of the admin staff–who make up a massive proportion of the employees–can be sacked.
The switch to online universities will be devastating to most of them. The good teachers will make a lot more money but everything else will be slashed.
There will always have to be what are called Vo-Tech (commonly called “Vocation Technological”) schools — this may very well swallow up the laboratory departments. Also facilities with invigilators to administer the tests.
Will this accentuate the cultural divide between the STEM and “Studies” sides of academia?
“Will this accentuate the cultural divide between the STEM and “Studies” sides of academia?”
Yes. Separating them is probably a good idea; then they (the “Studies”) can sink or swim on their own. Sure the “STEM” side will make out just fine.
If one can successfully get educated, using Zoom, to the point where a name brand school – say MIT – would accept you for graduate school or the best places for Medical school, then the lower tier universities could be doomed.
Still going to need labs and other hands-on places where students actually manipulate physical objects. I wouldn’t be surprised to see those facilities of existing colleges and universities being “spun-off” in such a way that any student of any on-line facility can use them under supervision.
As for the sitting in a small room three hours a week with some pseudo-intellectual forcing its opinion to be regurgitated to get a good grade– good riddance. The same for all those “student life” admins, whose existence is to keep the kiddies entertained.
There will be massive lobbying on the part of for instance the teacher’s unions to prevent the on-line colleges to receive “accreditation”. They will make a massive political/propaganda effort to convince the public/lawmakers that said online schools aren’t as good. Wonder how professional sports industry will take the loss of so many schools’ sports teams; after all that’s where their pro players come from.
“Wonder how professional sports industry will take the loss of so many schools’ sports teams?”
Baseball uses farm teams, doesn’t it? That should work. The local university stadiums can be bought by private firms starting up AAA (or whatever) football teams and the local population should be able to provide the willing spectators, as they always have.
Hockey, basketball, soccer? Should work the same way. Don’t worry, ESPN and their fellows will MAKE it work.
“Wonder how professional sports industry will take the loss of so many schools’ sports teams”
Given the rate at which the industry is alienating its fans by pushing SJW nonsense, I’m not sure it will matter.
Given what is being found about CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) the sports like football don’t have long to last, anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy
The pro teams may well find that their college farms drying up are the least of their problems when HS football is broken by parents who want their sons brain intact when they leave HS. Add the idiocy of their stands for the PRC tyrants, and they might not see Xi Jinping’s grand anniversary of 2049.
People will fight like hell to protect their livelihood; look how the failing miserable public schools fought/fight against “vouchers”.
It steam engines at steam engine time.
They can fight all they want, but no-one’s going to pay them to sit around doing nothing in an empty university.
If they wanted to fight, they should have fought against the communist takeover of academia which has driven away those who actually want to learn.
Federal and state governments would. They’ve been doing it all along. Title IX wouldn’t have any teeth, for example, if those colleges weren’t feeding at the trough.
“They can fight all they want, but no-one’s going to pay them to sit around doing nothing in an empty university.”
They will fight by arguing through the accreditation process; do everything they can to prevent said online schools from being recognized as “official”. State guv aren’t going to give up on the revenue of their universities without a fight. Didn’t say they would ultimately win the fight however. I would agree that the huge escalation in college tuition/fees will ultimately be their undoing; online schools will be just too much cheaper.
“If they wanted to fight, they should have fought against the communist takeover of academia which has driven away those who actually want to learn.”
The idea was thought control by controlling the tenured teachers that mold the minds of the young; especially at elite private colleges. Another advantage for online schools–no tenure. Teachers will sink or swim based on how well the clientele like their teaching abilities. Online schools lend themselves very easily to rating particular teachers/classes/schools and have said rating available to perspective students for their perusal.
“It steam engines at steam engine time.”
paraphrasing the late John Campbell I assume; let’s hope you are proven to be right. What about the human courtship aspects of the traditional brick and mortar school? What will replace that? After all even today many folks probably met their eventual husbands/wives at college…
“They will fight by arguing through the accreditation process”
But that’s less and less relevant all the time. Maybe they can keep their gatekeeper status for engineers and doctors, but most people don’t care whether someone has a piece of paper. They care that the person they hire can do the job.
And I’ve seen several employers in recent years say they now have a blacklist of universities that they will never hire someone from. That piece of paper may well be keeping kids from getting a job.
“What about the human courtship aspects of the traditional brick and mortar school?”
Already destroyed by the #metoo movement and campus rape hysteria.
Heck, many of the young men I know online say they won’t even think of marrying a girl who’s been to college because she’s sure to have been ruined by sleeping around.
And I’ve seen several employers in recent years say they now have a blacklist of universities that they will never hire someone from. That piece of paper may well be keeping kids from getting a job.
I googled around a bit and there’s not a trace of such blacklists. OTOH, I found several blacklists of unaccredited and/or fraudulent colleges. It would be nice if there was a way to publicize such blacklists so that students wouldn’t be wasting so much time with bad colleges.
I have never understood why the Griggs vs. Duke Power Co. SCOTUS decision of 1970 was not used against colleges.
This decision prohibited the requirement of a high school diploma for a job if that requirement had the effect of causing racial discrimination unless what was learned there was directly relevant to the job. No need to prove intent to discriminate was required. The same logic could be used against college degree or GPA requirements for many jobs.
Excuse me, 1971.
That our universities have been deranged, I don’t contest. But where will our scientists work, and where will research get done going forward?
Looking back at history, *most* basic and long-range research of any consequence got done in academic institutions. There were a few exceptions, such as the work at Bell Labs, but those labs were run so very differently from the way anything today is run in corporate America: They respected the sort of work environment needed to *do* research (much less any thinking of any depth!) – scientists and engineers had offices with doors. Individuality was respected, and scientists were given a very wide latitude to follow their intrinsically motivated programs. Pathological “teamism” hadn’t eaten the organizations yet.
I’m so frustrated in my own career. My graduate work in academia was useless to the world, and not anything I had chosen. My work in a supposed research lab in industry is also very frustrating: They’ll fund any nonsense that a manager, bean counter, external UFO consultant, thinks is interesting, but they’ll ignore all the ideas from their scientists and engineers. And they want to do it for free, because we have no money.
Americans seem to have forgotten how science and engineering *work*.
This has been, until very recently, my day job.
Thomas Edison’s most important invention was not the lightbulb, or the phonograph. It was the industrial research laboratory. Most of America’s inventions in the 20th century can be genetically traced back to Edison’s idea of performing scientific research with an eye for a commercial purpose (with a major concentration in Bell Labs). In modern language, they did both TRL1-3 and TRL4-6. I was lucky enough to catch the very end of the Bell Labs experience. We literally could work on technologies that were not expected to enter the marketplace for 20 to 30 years.
That model died / was killed in the 1980s and 1990s. The only entities suitable for picking up the slack were the Tier 1 research universities and the national labs. For various reasons, the national labs mostly didn’t step up. So the universities have become the engine of the innovation economy… producing both technologies and people.
If we throw the innovation engine out with the educational bathwater, we’ll regret it. But we won’t really realize the effects for thirty years.
“That our universities have been deranged, I don’t contest. But where will our scientists work, and where will research get done going forward?”
Just about every research scientist at a University complains about the fact that they have to deal with students.
I don’t see how students aid university-based research, other than supply cheap slave labor.
“Looking back at history, *most* basic and long-range research of any consequence got done in academic institutions.”
How much of that research is both useful and not something that a company would have done when they decided they needed to develop a new product?
And how much is even true, in an era where 50% of peer-reviewed papers can’t be reproduced?
Creativity, original thinking, and deep mental work *looks* ridiculous to anyone not involved in it, until it pans out. And you can’t know what will pan out and what won’t until you *do* the work and get to the end result. This isn’t the sort of thing you can pitch to a venture capitalist for a 100x return in 10 years. (At least, not honestly). This isn’t the sort of thing you can pitch to an IRAD board in a major corporation with a “research” arm, because there is no way you can *know* the damn things that are demanded of you by MBA managers: I don’t have a clue what the market segment will be, or how much money that is. No, I don’t know if $(division) across the country has a similar project we can “leverage”. I’ve been focused on physical possibilities and what we can do with what we can bodge together in our facilities. Why don’t we buy it from someone else? Because (if it even exists) if we get it from someone else, it isn’t *our* capability.
Academia has been a shelter from the world for a certain kind of mind for centuries: It allows waste and excess, but it also allows us to wander a bit from the local optimum of immediate practicality we’re nailed down to in every other context.
Undergraduates go to college for other undergraduates. If that wasn’t true, there would be classes in the morning and on Fridays. If the government would lend unlimited money for four years at the beach, the colleges would empty overnight. No social, no students.
The industrial research lab worked fine as long as the underwriting business had a guarantied profit like the phone company or the electric utilities. None of those businesses work that way any more, the investors expect to make their money now, not twenty years from now when the business will probably be long gone.