Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Although the pandemic threatens schools that depend on tuition, some of these colleges are demonstrating their ingenuity.
Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity
By Scott Galloway
Portfolio
Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education
By John Warner
Belt
Never let a good crisis go to waste—Winston Churchill’s old saw has been deployed so many times that it has mostly lost its punch, but COVID is the kind of mega-crisis that Churchill had in mind. Disruptors in the mold of Clayton Christensen have rushed to predict that the pandemic will generate massive changes in every American institution, including higher education. Descriptions of the current disorder in academe—students arriving on campus, only to be sent home weeks later, while professors struggle to master Zoom—segue into cataclysmic predictions.
NYU business school professor Scott Galloway is a self-styled disruptor who regards universities as inefficient businesses, ripe for the picking—the sailing ships of our time, put out of business by steam power. In Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity, Galloway defines the “value proposition” of higher education in simple market terms—in exchange for time and tuition, universities offer a credential, an education, and an experience. Measured by this metric, most schools cost too much and deliver too little.
COVID-19, says Galloway, will simply accelerate the inexorable dynamic of the marketplace. While highly selective schools like MIT and Yale will flourish, because they offer a 24-karat credential, the pandemic will prompt a ruthless culling of traditional higher-education institutions, with their emphasis on the experience—and expensive—component of the value proposition. As many as half of the non-elite private colleges and regional public universities will be forced to close their doors.
The universities that weather the pandemic will put online learning front and center. They will become profit centers by exponentially expanding their enrollment at a far lower per-student cost. Undergraduates will take souped-up versions of MOOCs, the “massive open online courses” touted in the mid-2010s as revolutionizing higher education. Mega-tech companies will partner with brand-name universities—“MIT, brought to you by Apple”—to offer watered-down bachelor’s degrees (“80 percent of a traditional four-year degree for 50 percent of the price”) as well as two-year STEM degrees, gussied-up certificate programs. Eventually, these partnerships will gobble up most of the market.
Galloway is not the first to anticipate the demise of the university. In 2011, Christensen forecast that online education would drive half of the country’s 4,000 colleges and universities out of business in 10 or 15 years. But these institutions have proven staying power: Between 2015 and 2019, just 53 of them closed. Although the pandemic threatens schools that depend on tuition, some of these colleges are demonstrating their ingenuity—for instance, by cutting the tuition sticker price to keep the doors open, as Wells College did. If anything would decimate these colleges, it is free tuition for public universities, an idea advanced by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But that proposal is going nowhere.
Whether regional public universities go under is more a matter of state and federal priorities than technology. In some states, the signs look ominous. Last summer, the chair of the University of North Carolina’s public university system warned those schools’ presidents to prepare for as much as a 50 percent reduction in their budget. Cuts of that magnitude would spell curtains for public higher education—goodbye, Chapel Hill—but I’m betting that this ax-wielding won’t come to pass. Indeed, with a strong supporter of public universities installed in the White House, the federal government is likely to work with the states to strengthen these institutions. While state budget cuts will force the merger of some regional state universities, as recently occurred in the Penn State system, that’s a far cry from extinction.
If ever there were going to be a rush to embrace virtual education, the pandemic would provide the opportune moment. Galloway muses that, after a year of living online, “we may have raised a micro-generation of innate distancers.” But the opposite has occurred—undergraduates who feel shortchanged by Zoom U have come to appreciate how much they value the classroom and the campus.
You don’t have to be a dinosaurian professor to understand that there is no substitute for in-person education. And what happens in the classroom isn’t the half of it. In a recent Atlantic article, “America Will Sacrifice Anything for the College Experience,” Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost contends that undergraduates care more about experiencing campus life, with all its post-adolescent debauchery, than education. What’s more, “America is deeply committed to the dream of attending college. It’s far less interested in the education for which students supposedly attend … The process—not just the result, a degree—offers access to opportunity, camaraderie, and even matrimony.” There is just enough truth in this provocation to make any professor cringe; ask college graduates what mattered most and it’s their long-lived friendships, not their courses, that come first to mind. Even among those who never set foot on a campus, except perhaps on a football Saturday, college life is a cultural aspiration, baked into the American dream, that no online course can hope to match.
Undergraduates who feel shortchanged by Zoom U have come to appreciate how much they value the classroom and the campus.
This isn’t a Luddite assault on virtual instruction. The Zoom classes that students have been enduring, with bathrobe-wearing professors struggling to master the technology, represent the worst of the breed, and it’s small wonder that most of these students say they are receiving a third-rate education. But well-designed online courses can be as effective, in terms of what students learn, as many face-to-face classes, and much better than huge lectures.
The University of Central Florida, which enrolls nearly 70,000 students, is among the institutions that have invested heavily in developing these courses. The students who take them, many of whom cannot afford to spend four years on campus, do almost as well as their peers in the classroom, and those whose courses meld online with classroom instruction fare even better. These courses bear no resemblance to the impersonal, sage-on-the-stage classes for the masses that Galloway and his fellow disruptors anticipate will dominate the market. While the students praise the enticingly presented curriculum, I learned from my visit to Central Florida that what matters most to them is whether they form a personal connection with their instructors, through rapid-fire responses to email queries and helpfulness during virtual or in-person office hours.
“WHY WOULD WE GO DOWN [Galloway’s] path if there’s an alternative?” This is the question posed by John Warner, a Chicago Tribune columnist and longtime writing instructor, in Sustainable. Resilient. Free. Explicitly taking aim at Galloway, Warner argues that colleges are not in trouble because they lack commercial savviness. Quite the contrary—the existential threat stems from the fact that “they are not oriented around the mission of teaching and learning. Instead, they exist to recruit students, enroll students, collect tuition, and hold class.”
Warner envisions a post-COVID future in which higher education’s inequities have been laid bare. In fact, the pandemic has already had a worrisome impact on low-income students—a 2020 survey of 292 private colleges identified a nearly 8 percent drop in enrollment among Pell grant recipients.
The remedy, says Warner, is a liberal arts education for all, which will “develop the intellectual, social, and economic potential of students, while also engaging with the needs of the broader local, state, and national communities in which its institutions operate.” What’s necessary to accomplish this is a “Marshall Plan” for higher education, whose centerpiece is free tuition and cancellation of all college debt.
At least since the Great Recession, many states have cut higher-education funding. Restoring those cuts would have a significant impact, as researchers have shown that additional revenue can boost graduation rates. But Warner’s approach is wrongheaded. Eliminating tuition is a hyper-expensive giveaway to the rich. Graduates of professional schools, not undergraduates, have racked up the biggest bills, and I’m disinclined to let MBAs and JDs skate.
Warner envisions a post-COVID future in which higher education’s inequities have been laid bare.
Beyond the dollars-and-cents impracticalities, this prescription is too paternalistic by half. Not every student needs or wants a four-year dose of the liberal arts. Many have voted with their feet, migrating to majors with a sure payoff, like accounting and kinesiology, while the most popular liberal arts major, sociology and anthropology, ranks tenth in enrollment nationwide. A 2018 Harris poll found that “adults want a degree to provide broad learning, and they understand the relevance of their education even if it’s not readily apparent. Younger students, in contrast, want college to provide financial security and to apply immediately.”
While we may lament this shift in priorities, why should it be otherwise for Generation Alpha, born in the 21st century, who have known only economic insecurity and political turmoil?
Complacency about the post-COVID era—the comforting idea that things will return to normal—is as misguided as anticipating the death of the university. The biggest change is likely to be a considerably greater role for top-flight virtual instruction. Faculty were “thrown into the deep end of the pool for digital learning and asked to swim,” says Michael Moe, CEO of GSV Asset Management, which focuses on education technology. “Some will sink, some will crawl to the edge of the pool and climb out and they’ll never go back in the pool ever again. But many will figure out … how to stay afloat.” Professors ostensibly respond to evidence, and the proven worth of blended classes, with lectures posted online and class time devoted to discussion, will likely convince more of them to take the plunge.
The answer to the challenges higher education faces today is neither disruption, as Scott Galloway proposes, nor John Warner’s brand of nostalgia, but adaptability. Between 1940 and today, enrollment grew from 1.5 million to nearly 20 million, higher education evolved from an elite to a mass enterprise, and with the emergence of community colleges, it has become a nearly universal one. Colleges and universities proved sufficiently resilient to manage an expansion of this magnitude, emphasizing “practical” fields to meet student demand, and most will rise to the challenges that the pandemic has highlighted.
