Has anyone seen this academic prediction yet? (Boston, Harvard: lawyer, dorms)

[mdovell]

Originally Posted by GeoffD

It would serve the people in the state better to move the flagship university to where the people live. Not that any of this is ever going to happen. The South Coast is already enough of an economic third world without closing the two commutable colleges.

Well CT did the same. You have to remember that not all cities want academia. Higher amounts of students and non taxable entities add up. How much of Boston is non taxable? Yes of course there are pilots but that's never at 100%.

I'm not saying I told you so about corona but online education has been tossed as a concept for awhile now. One of the last things Governor patrick authorized was online schools for kids that were bullied, bullying, too sick to come in, had some sport or acting job etc. So the assumption is that this would also expand to take the place of snow days (by the way it would be hard to argue for that to continue at this point). I finished my degrees (bachelors and masters). Most work is not by hand infact most isn't even in a physical document it's just uploaded. I know we can talk about teachers and professors getting to the students and everything but going online means zero marginal costs. Those ideas were going one way and on the other side it acted like the 1990's didn't even happen. New sports stadiums coaches getting 1 million , endless buffets, swimming amenities for dorms. It was only a matter of time before administrative bloat and excess would get too far. Even companies don't want to deal with this.

Education is the new retail.

[robr2]

Originally Posted by Lampert

Yeah but the vulnerability score is literally just endowment/ students and % international students.
And it says: Struggle: Tier-2 schools with one or more comorbidities, such as high admit rates (anemic waiting lists), high tuition, or scant endowments.

How is Wellesley on the struggle list? Tier-2 school?

It has a $2.1 billion endowment and a 22% acceptance rate. I'm guessing the issue is that it excludes about half the market of students from applying.

[airunxc]

This article was crap, plain and simple. here's the problem he compares the top 437 schools in the country against each other. I would argue the top 437 schools are safe, its the schools outside the top 437 that are in trouble.

If you want to know the financial health of a college, look at their bond rating. The banks know risk because they see it day after day.

Here is who is in trouble:
state universities in declining population state centers: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, etc
small private colleges in remote areas with less than 1000 students.

Brandeis may not compare as favorable to Tufts, but it is still better than 98% of the other colleges in America.

It's time for people to stand up to this lazy, sloppy journalism/publication without proper data analysis or comparison.

Think of it this way, if you compare the top fortune 500 companies against each other and said 25% are going out of business in a year, you would create shock and awe at some of the names. But name the last fortune 500 company to go out of business. Here are a few to think of.
Blockbuster 2010
Polaroid 2001
Toys R Us 2017
Pan AM 1991
Compaq 2002
Kodak 2012 and in some of those cases, they were bought by other companies.

So you have to ask, will any of the top 437 colleges stop getting customers, not likely...

[yesmaybe]

Originally Posted by airunxc

Brandeis may not compare as favorable to Tufts, but it is still better than 98% of the other colleges in America.

Apparently Brandeis has a very large % of international students. That's going to be down for awhile.

[Shrewsburried]

Originally Posted by airunxc

Here is who is in trouble:
state universities in declining population state centers: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, etc
small private colleges in remote areas with less than 1000 students.

Spot on, IMO.

Unless institutions like Clark or Brandeis are saddled with very high debt, I don't see how they were short listed over the Nichols or Anna Maria's of this state. The former at least have some greater recognition and reasonably high standards even if considered a secondary option for many who may apply.

As student enrollment shrinks institutions like Brandeis are likely to expand applications and suffer through this demographic shift. I don't see smaller lesser know institutions having this flexibility.

[Beachcomber4]

Originally Posted by OtterTrees

I think they are better off unloading Bridgewater and Dartmouth.

Why is that?

[mdovell]

It isn't so much a matter of debt but how many students are coming back and what exactly are they paying. If it gets reduced to online then you have a structure that frankly cannot cut costs. You build a football stadium well you can't really sell that off now can you? I have a neighbor that works in athletics in higher ed and he's screwed. If there's no high school sports then there's no feeders for new athletes. You can only stay a student for so long. Higher ed sports is pretty much cancelled anyway at this point.

Higher standards are fine I get that but there's only so much you can make from students in an economic downturn. So what do you do? Lower the standards or raise the prices? It's like the Laffer curve all over again. There has to be some way of a Pareto optimality.

Saying a school is "better" has no bearing on the financial solvency. My mothers best friend went to higher ed at Green Mountain College. The WHOLE campus is being auctioned off starting at 3 million. For that set of buildings is insane. That's like half a block in Hingham. Even in Springfield that would be cheap. Most of the small privates (no pun intended) can't make it. But the only way higher ed survives is doing the opposite of what has been preached for generations. small class sizes, individual instruction and attention, well rounded education etc.

Why do people go to higher ed? Well there's a fair amount of reasons but the real true reason these days is you can find a better job and better opportunities. All the talk about being well rounded and knowing about other subjects that you couldn't have is straight bullocks now. Between Project Gutenburg and Wikipedia you have every book made before 1929 for free and the worlds largest encyclopedia. Add in Coursera, Khan Academy etc. The idea that a company would value higher ed is that it would be a standard above high school which made sense but the additional costs and bloat get questioned. If business knows what they want and they cannot teach it that's their own fault. If it makes it to be proprietary that doesn't make sense because that leads to NDA's and non competes which are shaky on a legal perspective. Some might say there is a vetting process. Fair enough but the recent entrance examples on ivy leagues shows that isn't really the case. Grease some palms and you get into ivy.

So I have to ask if an employer is will to hire and train why take higher ed at this point? At the very lease they should have some sort of tests to verify knowledge as it would be more of an assurance and be what many other professions already do.
https://www.necn.com/news/local/bids...at-3m/2296620/

[Shrewsburried]

Originally Posted by mdovell

It isn't so much a matter of debt but how many students are coming back and what exactly are they paying. If it gets reduced to online then you have a structure that frankly cannot cut costs. You build a football stadium well you can't really sell that off now can you?

Yes, you must maintain existing infrastructure assuming normalcy in the near future. Costs can be managed to a degree here, but if you have debt load to build that football stadium you have a much larger cost issue ... particularly if enrollments/revenue dry up.

Originally Posted by mdovell

Higher standards are fine I get that but there's only so much you can make from students in an economic downturn. So what do you do? Lower the standards or raise the prices? It's like the Laffer curve all over again. There has to be some way of a Pareto optimality.

Lower standards. Accept kids with 1200 SAT scores instead of 1280. As enrollments lower Brandeis may lose students to the tier 1 institutions, but it is prestigious enough to pull new enrollments away from the hundreds of lesser institutions. Cut costs where appropriate.

Originally Posted by mdovell

Saying a school is "better" has no bearing on the financial solvency. My mothers best friend went to higher ed at Green Mountain College. The WHOLE campus is being auctioned off starting at 3 million.

Yes, it does. Higher rates of application/admittance (i.e., incoming revenue) and downstream endowments. Green Mountain was a tiny college with minimal reputation and enrollment. It's exactly the institution you'd expect to face closure ... not a Brandeis or even the smallish Clark.

[in_newengland]

In some instances, I hope their greed finally catches up with them. I worked at one college that kept raising tuition and fees and I can remember people asking what they were going to do when students could no long afford the high prices. Their answer was that they would get rich foreign students. So they got their foreign students. Now those students probably won't be coming back. Maybe this is the answer to making college more affordable.

[Lampert]

Originally Posted by mdovell

Higher ed sports is pretty much cancelled anyway at this point.

Hopefully stays cancelled for ever. The emphasis american colleges put on competitive sports in ridiculous.