For years I have been dumbfounded by the blind acceptance of the scam that colleges – and financial advisers – have run for decades about the inevitability of higher tuitions year after year and the need for parents to start their college funds from their baby’s first day out of the womb. No one questioned annual increases at two or three times the inflation rate because of the essential article of faith that a college degree is crucial to that precious child’s success in life, and a degree from a prestigious, name-brand college is even more of a lock on riches. Price did not matter.
What families are really paying five-figures a year for is not an education, but a certification that accelerates some “into the upper echelons of what is a caste system that is largely dictated by your college degree,” chides Scott Galloway, a business professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “Other than health care, no industry has raised its prices faster than education… We have become drunk on exclusivity.” Colleges, he told Christiane Amanpour on PBS, have become less of a social good than a luxury brand.
For the first time, that high cost of college, even the value of a college degree, is being scrutinized as the country faces the most significant economic downturn since the Great Depression and the most significant public health crisis since the Spanish Flu of 1918-19. This is happening as outstanding student debt has reached $1.6 trillion – a lifetime albatross that inhibits the ability to raise a family, buy a home, even choose a fulfilling career that is not relieved by bankruptcy or death.
Now, with college campuses under lockdown and making their own early decision as to whether reopen, families are making their own crucial decision: whether to accept placement at that exceedingly expensive brand name college, go instead to a community college or public school and transfer later, or take a gap year and do something that might be useful, even life-changing during this time of crisis and despair. In fact, for the first time student consumers have leverage over colleges, which are going deeper into their wait-list to fill their classes (yet another example of how disasters create their own set of winners and losers).
One part of the calculus has to be the fact that what one learns in a college classroom is only a piece of the college learning, growing experience.
But so much of college is the campus experience – for many students, their first opportunity to engage in a diverse society populated with people very different in culture, class, outlook than the people they grew up with, build lifelong friendships, even find a mate. Also, the opportunity to discover the plethora of new talents and interests through clubs and activities that simply aren’t available in the real world they will graduate into.
Many colleges – like hospitals which are going broke because they can’t do elective surgery – are facing financial calamity. The cash-cow for colleges – foreign students who pay full freight – has been completely shut off, as have all the other sources of revenue, from dormitories to food services to book and event sales, study abroad and alumni donations. Parents are suing to reclaim money for a less than complete college experience; colleges are refunding dormitory fees. Galloway is predicting that COVID-19 will force disruption and consolidation in the higher education industry, much as Amazon and Walmart will cement the demise of Main Street.
But here are some thoughts about how colleges and students might get through these next couple of years until the coronavirus pandemic is no longer an all-consuming threat:
Faculty and students who are in vulnerable categories – age or medical conditions – can continue with online classes (postpone the classes that must be conducted in person to another semester), but these faculty would be dedicated to this purpose and work with only one or a few students, which would make up for the difference between classroom and on-line setting. This would also help provide the extra space/capacity in classrooms to meet social distancing requirements. (This works for K-12, too.)
Indeed, there could be a tier of students who sign on for distance learning at a lower tuition. In this way, colleges, even the brand-name ones, could dramatically expand their student body and tuition revenue without undermining quality in the classroom.
Lectures – those giant gatherings – can be done online without losing anything and may be improved by the ability to integrate other learning materials into the presentation.
Classes that need to be conducted in person – labs, research, engineering – can be smaller with social distancing in well-cleaned and sanitized rooms (UV light fixtures during nightly cleaning?) with improved ventilation and reducing the amount of exposure time.
Everyone on campus should be tested and know if they have the virus or the antibodies, much as schools require proof of vaccinations, just as all workplaces need to be.
Then you could also have team sports and even people in stadiums more properly spaced. But until fans are allowed back, college teams, along with professional teams, can get back some of that stadium revenue by turning parking lots into tailgate parties, with big screens and boxed meals for sale, to preserve that rah-rah atmosphere (and revenue).
Students who don’t want to miss out on campus life should be able to take a gap year – and there should be an expansion of National Service programs like AmeriCorps, Peace Corps and the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, where students could get credit toward their degree, as an added benefit for the life-enhancing experience while performing essential work for communities; colleges could even organize it like an internship. Perhaps colleges could get a fee (like an application fee) to hold a space in the class or sponsor the service.
Get rid of student debt. Either refinance the whole lot to the near-zero rate of interest that banks are paying or like Obama did during his term allow people to pay a percentage of income and have the whole thing disappear over a 10-year period. Give students more opportunities to turn loans into grants in exchange for, as example, working in a rural clinic or school for a couple of years. More colleges should make tuition a sliding scale based on income (as Yale has done). Sallie Mae loans enable parents to pay tuition in monthly installments without interest.
And restore higher education as a social good rather than a luxury brand.
