Drinking from the Firehose | Alex Taussig, Lightspeed | Substack

The High-Level This Week: There are 4,000 universities in the United States that generate over $650 billion in revenue and educated 20 million people annually. A perfect storm involving declining revenues and state funding are putting many of these universities at risk of bankruptcy. Many will not survive. Is this the end of University Inc in the U... See more

We’ll see a culling among universities. Just as retail closures are accelerating from 9,500 stores in 2019 to more than 15,000 in 2020, we’re going to see dozens, maybe hundreds, of universities not reopen. In academia, we have been preying on the hopes and prayers of the middle class, offering parents the chance to check an instinctive box, giving... See more

In fact, you can probably make the case that in the long run, the coronavirus pandemic might help sustain the current paradigm of higher education, rather than destroy it. All it takes is one year of seriously threatening to take away everything that makes college great for us to be reminded why it’s so hard to opt out. Yes, some schools will go un... See more