A friend of mine’s granddaughter, a committed Evangelical Christian, is planning to go to college this fall. Before the pandemic, she had her eyes on several small Evangelical liberal arts schools. Now, she will, with regret, almost certainly end up at one of the colleges in her state. That’s all her family feels that they can afford in these times. When my friend told me about it, I said to her that even if her granddaughter had the money to afford one of those Evangelical colleges, it would be a risky proposition, because there is no telling whether or not those colleges will still be around for the next four years.

People have been wondering what was going to burst the higher education bubble. Now we know.

The New York Times writes this morning:

Read the whole thing. 

In my house, I’m concerned about my son going back to LSU in the fall. Will it be safe for anybody to go to class then? He’s been doing online instruction, hastily assembled by the university when the lockdown happened, and let’s just say that it’s … not the fullest expression of the grape, and that we have learned through direct experience that there is no substitute for the classroom. But the university has no control over the pandemic, and there’s only so much it can do to make students, professors, and staff safe.

I cannot even imagine what fall in south Louisiana will be like if there is no LSU football, especially coming off our national championship season. You thought cancelling mass on Sunday was a blow to people here? Just you wait.

More broadly, what kind of LSU will there be after this is over? The university has been eviscerated over the past two decades by budget cuts. Louisiana has a strange state college system in which there are an unusual number of public colleges scattered around the state. We have something like twice the number of state colleges that Florida has, with only a fraction of Florida’s population. The reasonable thing to have done would have been to make the hard decision to close some of these smaller state schools, and concentrate scarce resources in the flagship, LSU in Baton Rouge, and in one or two other, stronger state schools elsewhere (like ULL in Lafayette, and Louisiana Tech in Ruston). But that wasn’t politically possible, because no legislator wants to be the one to tell a town that it’s losing its university. So for a long time, the state has been slow-bleeding the entire system to keep from having to close any of its colleges.

This pandemic is bound to force change. Aside from the pandemic itself, the knock-on effects of murdering Louisiana’s tourism industry (a pillar of the economy), concomitant with the Saudi-Russia oil war, which has sent oil prices into the basement, devastating another pillar of the state’s economy, puts some extremely hard decisions before the legislature and the governor. Worse, the state’s weird constitution has firewalled so many programs from budget cuts that just about the only thing legislators can cut when they need to make up a shortfall is health care and higher education.

Anyway, that’s what it looks like from the point of view of parents of one Louisiana public university student.

I’d like to ask you readers — academics, students, and parents of students — what the higher education during the pandemic situation looks like from where you sit. The academic job market was pretty bad anyway, but now? What justification is there for anybody to plan for an academic career when colleges are going to be closing en masse? What is your college doing to ready itself for what’s coming? What is your student doing? What are you doing?

UPDATE: A college professor friend writes:

We’re only beginning to understand the long-term impacts of the pandemic, and they will primarily express themselves through the economic impact, I believe (the developing world situation, for example, is apocalyptic: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/28/coronavirus-biggest-emerging-markets-crisis-ever/)

This is going to burst the higher ed bubble. Only question is whether it is a big burst or a small one, and what this does to the politics of higher ed. The first question entirely hinges on how things look by the end of the summer. If the pandemic still looms…we’re going to see an extinction event for colleges/universities. Most colleges already had somewhat precarious finances in terms of revenue and endowment, with many being entirely dependent on international students for net revenue. Moreover, there is this quiet load-balancing that goes on in higher ed (see here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/college-admissions-paul-tough.html).

Schools use advanced econometric models to offer financial aid packages priced to produce a certain amount of tuition revenue while keeping the college’s other priorities of diversity in mind. This model pre-supposes a distribution of students by talent and parental income (and therefore ability to pay full-price). But it also pre-supposes the kind of waterfall structure of higher-ed. A few schools (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton) have the pick of the litter, but are also rich enough to reject plenty of people who can pay full-price – this enables the second tier (Dartmouth, UChicago, Georgetown, Duke, etc.) to make their picks, and so on. The loss of international students and economic downturn suggests many schools are going to set their algorithms for maximum revenue…and there is not enough money for all of higher ed. Expect to see poor financial aid packages and a banner year for admissions if you’re a mediocre white student who can pay full freight. This will still happen if we do go back to school in the fall, it may just be a slower and multi-year process, as this dip leads directly into declining US domestic enrollments for demographic reasons starting around 2024. Many schools have been planning for that, but this is going to be a double whammy.

That leads to the question of public universities. Many state legislatures have already been interesting in cutting or re-shaping higher ed. The pandemic may finally give them the political capital to do so. There is also the question of how this is going to transform university bureaucracies. This could be the thing that turns the tide against administrators…but I’m not sure I’d bet on it. I think there will be some staff cuts, but they seem better placed to preserve their positions than teachers, for the simple reason that there are a lot of ways university administrations can veto or shoot down tenure track hiring, and there is going to be a strong oversupply of desperate academics. It would take regulatory pressure in the other direction to reverse this trend.

There will be lots of other impacts but one “positive” one may be this: an acceleration of folks with PhDs teaching in (usually private) secondary ed. In some specialties this was already the trend, but many folks coming off of PhD programs in the humanities may just decide the job market is so beyond prohibitive that they move straight into teaching in high schools, where they may find they enjoy the experience more anyways. If you’re looking to start a classical school with really top-notch humanities talent, there has never been a better time.

UPDATE.2: Another college professor writes:

My university (public) is exceedingly wealthy, its endowment reaching into the double-digit billions. As far as public institutions go, therefore, we are built to weather even severe economic storms. Yet the dire socio-economic outlook is causing severe unease even here. The administration is dropping hints of unspecified salary cuts for faculty and has informed the university community that it is committed to paying full-time salaries for hourly workers (janitors, maintenance, secretaries, etc.) only through the end of April. There will be a significant reduction in paid hours thereafter since there is no need to retain full staffing when there is little for many to do remotely. Students are simultaneously circulating a petition demanding some amount of refund for this essentially lost semester. As an instructional faculty member, I know my colleagues are doing their level best to instruct under poor conditions. Still, I cannot blame students for wanting a discount on what is, admittedly, a shoddy offering on our part.

For our community, the major concerns are the following: although we must offer courses online for the Spring and Summer terms, a fully digital Fall semester will necessarily result in severe bloodletting. This because many international students and locals will simply refuse to take another online semester and will withdraw temporarily, thus dramatically reducing the tuition income we depend upon for operations. Again, though, I would hardly blame them. Further, we will suffer from reduced state appropriations, especially since this state is already distressed economically. This will be a perfect storm and drive into unemployment or reduced employment a vast number of people in the economic heart of an otherwise troubled area.

Side note: I feel badly for our student workers, several of whom I employ. I must release them on April 30 (by order of my superiors) yet they depend upon the income they earn to pay rent, buy groceries, etc. (only needy students tend to take the sort of dull research-assistantships I offer).

I say all this because there has been some crowing on the front page of TAC about the coming collapse of the whole absurd edifice of contemporary academia. Believe me, no one will be happier than I if we have to cut the salaries or the positions of many of our university’s diversity apparatchiks. They, however, are generally very well compensated and will either ride out the storm or simply return to well remunerated faculty positions. But what about an untenured assistant professor like me, with a young family, in a department the administration already regards as double the size it ought to be? I’m in the crosshairs. What about untenured lecturers, who in our department do a significant amount of extremely important teaching? What about our small cadre of underpaid but highly dedicated office workers who certainly don’t pull down $400K per year to “promote inclusion” but rather make sure our department keeps running? All of these folks will be the first to feel the pain of austerity measures, the diversicrats the last (and remember, they have significant financial resources to cushion their fall). The decimation of a university like this will also take a massive number of non-university people down with it, i.e the restaurant workers, hoteliers, and all manner of local businesses that serve the university community. So maybe let’s remind TAC readers not get too excited about the academic apocalypse just yet. Those who might, to the conservative mind, “have it coming” are those most ready and able to endure.

UPDATE.3: Another reader:

I saw the thing about the Higher Ed bubble bursting (or as I call it, Higher Ed Inc.) and it has been a surreal experience. I knew for years that colleges were on an unsustainable path with constantly rising tuition and empirically-demonstrated deterioration of quality. Major universities such as the one I am affiliated with receive feedback from the various industries who hire our graduates and I can tell you that they complain constantly about our graduates (at a major public Tier 1 Research University) not being capable of writing a coherent paragraph nor having much in the way of reading comprehension. The industries I am thinking of are not what you would call ‘white collar’ either. It is one thing if a major publisher in New York criticizes the reading comprehension ability of your alums and doesn’t want to hire them, but it is another thing when, say, Dow Chemical thinks your university needs a center for college kids who can’t read good.

Colleges are doing a terrible, terrible job at their primary function–educating citizens–and are becoming more and more expensive. Its a racket that produces nothing but credentialing services–that low income and even middle class students go into debt for. College finances are a joke, using debt to finance frivolous building projects, constantly raising tuition, cutting tenure lines, and paying worthless administrators exorbitant salaries. At a major university, your deans are making between 200-450k. Easily, And there are way more deans now than in the past. There are Associate Deans, Assistant Deans, (Assistant to the Dean 😉 ?) and all sorts of other deans. All are making salaries that put them in the highest income brackets and they are doing work that has almost no value for the end of education. Their only job is, in theory, to make efficient uses of money for the goal of better education, but they waste money on all sorts of things and the quality of education has only declined. It has never occurred to the powers that be that college is not a business and what works in business is not going to translate into college.

Maybe the universities will finally get what is coming to them. Probably not. I’m sure the Ivies like Harvard and Yale will be just fine, and the public ivies like UNC and Michigan Ann Arbor will be too. Probably any flagship state university like LSU or even Boise State will be ok. But if the name of your university has a direction in it or an ‘at’, you are probably in trouble. I feel for all the people who will be hurt by the closing of universities, but it needs to happen. Higher Ed Inc is a fundamental failure. It is the Turkish Empire in the 1800s–the sick man of Europe.