NYU Business Professor: Covid Has Begun a Long-Overdue Collapse of the American Education System, and They Deserve Everything They're Going to Get

Two videos of him, below, making the same basic points. He's on shows hosted by people you wil not like (Amanapour, Cooper), but he's worth listening to.

His basic notion is this:

American education has long been absurdly overpriced. He notes this is the only industry in America which has yet to face significant pressures to cost-cut.

He says that parents are getting to see what their $76,000 per year is buying them-- because now they can see the witless profs lecturing to their kids on the Zoom sessions they have online.

And parents are thinking: "This is worthless. I am spending $300,000 for something absolutely worthless."

Not just worthless -- in addition to the debt, there are four years (at least) of lost wages and lost experience to consider.

He also notes that many students -- maybe the most in recent history -- will decide to skil college next year, because college might not even be all the way open. Many will take "a gap year."

This will cause many colleges to go bankrupt.

The top tier schools, he notes, will be fine, because 1, they're sittting on billions of dollars in endowments (which he thinks should be taxed -- and so do I) and 2, because they have long, long wait lists, and they can grab up as many just-as-good-as-our-first-pick students as are needed.

Second tier schools will have to dig down deeper into the wait lists and will have to admit students that would not be considered qualified in normal years, but most of them will be fine. (Most.)

But third tier schools do not have waiting lists, and all the students that would have gone to them will be going to second tier schools.

They will go bankrupt. He says that education will face what every other industry has faced, a bunch of weak concerns going bankrupt and pressure to cost-cut for the rest.

Some second tier schools will go bankrupt or at least will be forced into drastic changes: specifically, second-rate schools that charge very high tuition.

And I know America has a lot of those. The high tuition doesn't seem to be justified except to exclude less wealthy students from a school that isn't really exclusive in any way except for having an exclusive pricetag.

Jonah Goldberg's beloved alma mater Goucher College might soon see its final few semesters.

posted by Ace at 06:55 PM

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