Better than listening to lectures online? $2,000 per course better?
by James A. Bacon
The COVID-19 epidemic will permanently alter the landscape of higher education, one of America’s most broken industries, contends Stephen McBride, writing in Forbes. College costs have ballooned “beyond all reason,” he says, but as recently as a year ago, he held out little hope that anything would change. Why? “It’s a tough sell to convince an 18-year-old kid not to attend the four-year party all of his friends are going to, especially when the US government is financing it through student loans.”
But the coronavirus, McBride says, “will be remembered for transforming college forever.” Many colleges are moving their courses online next semester. Instead of living on campus and walking to lectures, kids will be sitting in their bedrooms and watching professors on Zoom.
This is FAR more disruptive than most folks realize. College is about much more than just the learning. There’s the education, and then you have the experience. The learning part has barely changed in a century. Kids still sit in 60-year-old lecture halls listening to professors. But now the “experience” has been stripped away. Do you think teenagers will be willing to mortgage their futures in order to watch college lecture videos on the internet?
McBride cites data showing that colleges reopening “online only” this fall have cut costs by $9,000 on average. “By slashing tuition for online courses, schools have permanently changed the perception of what college is worth,” he says. (McBride doesn’t mention it, but the perception of millions of parents is changing, too, as many universities reinvent themselves as political indoctrination camps. What conservative parent wants to pay a hundred thousand dollars to send their kid to a college where he learns to spit on his parents’ values?)
As learning shifts online “nimble disruptors” will enter the marketplace, offering college degrees at much cheaper prices. McBride crunches a few numbers to show how this might work. The disruptors would hire world-class professors to create online courses for, say, $200,000 a year. If each professor taught 250 students per school year, that would work out to $800 per student. Tack on the cost of technology and profit, and a disruptor could charge each student $3,000 a year. Tuition could be slashed by 70-80%.
Remember, under such as scenario, we’re talking about world-class instructors here.
The Harvards, Yales and Stanfords will always attract elite kids and command huge tuitions. But the thousands of schools that sell “standard issue” degrees taught by less distinguished professors could be in for a world of hurt. Online schools will do to traditional colleges what Amazon did to department stores.
Here in Virginia, higher ed institutions seem to be oblivious to the risk of oblivion. Their obsessions with racial and gender issues are distracting them from the existential challenges they face. While a small percentage of students and their parents may share the their fixations, most don’t. Some find them actively offputting. Indeed, some will cheer the demise of higher-ed institutions seen as champions of values most antithetical to their own.
While some Virginia institutions do seem determined to reopen, all are imposing COVID-related restrictions that will severely cramp the college lifestyle. What fun are drunken bacchanalia and hookups if you’re forced to wear face masks and keep your social distance? There goes the college “experience” McBride talks about.
We’ll get a much clearer picture when higher ed institutions report enrollments for the 2020-21 academic year in just a month or two.
