The Higher Education Bubble Pt. 2

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

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

Students pay colleges enormous sums of money because they want to grow into better and more knowledgeable thinkers—because they want to, before entering the workforce and adult life, spend four critical years sharpening their most important tool: their brain. And they’re not getting what they were promised. Normally, when brands in an industry stop

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They had a commandment to maximize performance in fifteen areas, and keeping costs low wasn’t one of them. In fact, if they raised prices, they’d have more resources for addressing the areas where they were being measured. Tuition has skyrocketed ever since. Between 1985 and 2013, the cost of higher education rose by more than 500 percent, nearly f

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The levy was bound to break at some point, but COVID-19 has accelerated the timeline of the collapse of the conventional university system.