The Higher Education Bubble

College isn’t insurance—It’s a nightclub. If colleges were normal businesses, with the entire world clamoring to get in, they’d increase enrollment. If they’re offering a great product, more people should benefit from it. But not universities. Because it's not about learning, it's about status.

But the college bundle has always more than the sum of its individual parts. In COVID era, colleges are forced to unbundle, so now college is competing with other unbundled alternatives.

Colleges haven’t been merely facing a financial crisis, they’ve also been facing a credibility crisis.

The reality is that college is a crazy zero sum tournament in which what really matters is getting into the best schools, such that to many people a diploma from a third tier university is actually a negative signal.

Colleges are doing more and more teaching with adjuncts who get paid nothing and have no job security. What happens when professors have real alternatives, or are able to go D2C and decide to leave, the same way journalists have left places like The New York Times to go independent on Substack?

College is a NightClub. The value is calculated not by how many people entered but by how many couldn't enter