What Will Higher Ed Look Like After the Deluge?

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

On another blog somewhere one of the posters opined that American colleges should be more like "European" colleges, essentially buildings with teachers----no gyms, no dorms, no psychological counselors, and (obviously) no huge sports complexes.  I don't know enough about education in Europe to know if this is an accurate description----certainly not colleges in Great Brittan, from what I have heard.
I should read the other thread, but I do wonder if that is one possible future.  No gyms unless a Planet Fitness franchise moves in.  Parking garages owned and run by corporations.  No shuttle busses funded through student fees.  Schools sans advisors, student health centers, cafeterias, computer labs, and dorms.

This description is far from my experience. Cafeterias and dorms are not only present, they also aren't treated as cash cows.
Though, gigantic stadiums are indeed missing from campuses (as are stadium-sized parking lots).

[Ruralguy]

I'm not worried about admin generally. I think the faculty can do far greater damage. At least at my school.

I'm not saying the key is engineering. That's unlikely to appeal to more than 2% of graduates any time soon. But if you think of a set of these majors across the disciplines that can draw in more students than with plain vanilla Physics, Econ or English, then you might have a path forward. Or you can bloat the ancient languages staff or STEM that isn't practical, or what have you, but guess what, that will bring in 2 students, maybe, for all of your effort. And we know how that story ends....

[Wahoo Redux]

What will the academic landscape look like in 10 years?

We know the Ivies and other elites will be there offering a wide array of majors and experiences...

But what will the other colleges and universities look like?

We will always have STEM doctorial programs...

But what will the graduate landscape for other disciplines look like?

[marshwiggle]

On another blog somewhere one of the posters opined that American colleges should be more like "European" colleges, essentially buildings with teachers----no gyms, no dorms, no psychological counselors, and (obviously) no huge sports complexes.  I don't know enough about education in Europe to know if this is an accurate description----certainly not colleges in Great Brittan, from what I have heard.
I should read the other thread, but I do wonder if that is one possible future.  No gyms unless a Planet Fitness franchise moves in.  Parking garages owned and run by corporations.  No shuttle busses funded through student fees.  Schools sans advisors, student health centers, cafeterias, computer labs, and dorms.

This description is far from my experience. Cafeterias and dorms are not only present, they also aren't treated as cash cows.
Though, gigantic stadiums are indeed missing from campuses (as are stadium-sized parking lots).

Agreed. Also, (in Canadian universities), there are gyms (for intramural sports, and kinesiology programs)  and counselling centres, and even stadiums. However, stadiums will rarely seat more than a couple of thousand. I remember friends moving to the US who noted that the high school stadium where they lived was vastly beyond the university stadiums here.
Sports are still a thing, they're not just "the" Thing-Above-All-Things. They are something one can do at university, not the reason for going to university.

Remember,we don't rely on people paying $50k for tuition, so we're not catering to the sliver spoon mentality.

[Caracal]

On another blog somewhere one of the posters opined that American colleges should be more like "European" colleges, essentially buildings with teachers----no gyms, no dorms, no psychological counselors, and (obviously) no huge sports complexes.  I don't know enough about education in Europe to know if this is an accurate description----certainly not colleges in Great Brittan, from what I have heard.

I should read the other thread, but I do wonder if that is one possible future.  No gyms unless a Planet Fitness franchise moves in.  Parking garages owned and run by corporations.  No shuttle busses funded through student fees.  Schools sans advisors, student health centers, cafeterias, computer labs, and dorms.

I spent a semester at a public Irish University. This was 20 years ago, but it was a lot like that. There was a cafeteria, but it was pretty bare bones, just a place you could get a grilled cheese sandwich or a coffee. I don't think there was any school shuttle service, but that's mostly because there wasn't any need. The school was served by the municipal bus system, nobody lived on campus, so I think that worked fine. That said, it seemed more like the system was chronically underfunded than that they were spending all their money on academics. Don't know what the labs looked like, but the library was about the same size and had about the same collection as my high school library. The teaching was good and there were some big names. I enjoyed my classes. Hard to say what the experience of the Irish students was. It was very British in the sense that lots of classes just had a final exam given by an outside examiner. (Side note, that part seems great. I want an outside examiner. Last day of class, see you guys later. Or is it one of these deals where everyone ends up having to be an outside examiner for some other class at some other school and its the same amount of work?) The students mostly responded to this by never coming to lecture. I mean, really, you'd have classes that had 150 students and in the middle of the semester 15 people would be there. This never seemed like a particularly good plan. I got very good grades without a huge amount of effort, mostly because it turned out that reading the books, and then listening to the instructor talk about them was a much better way to retain information than trying to just read everything at the end with no actual guidance on what to pay attention to.

The system seemed set up in a way that meant you could get a perfectly good education if you wanted to bother, but if you didn't, nobody was going to spend any time worrying about you. I sometimes got the impression that was a little dispiriting for a lot of students. It was also based around almost free tuition (there was a big controversy with protests when I was there about the government raising student fees from 70 euros a semester to 200 or something.) In that system I suppose the logic was that everyone should have had decent secondary schooling, college carried only opportunity costs, so nobody really owed students anything outside of the minimum. I'm not sure how that really worked in practice. But then again, it isn't like the American college system reduces inequality...Not sure how much has changed. I'd be shocked if fees haven't continued to rise, but I don't know if they've gotten high enough to change the basic dynamics.

[Caracal]

Are we really so sure that there's going to be a wave of colleges closing? Over the past year, I only counted 11 non profit colleges or universities that shuttered. That's actually basically on par with the numbers over the last five years or so. That number itself isn't really historically high.  Is the deluge of closures coming? Maybe? I don't really have any insight on the numbers and dynamics. I'd just point out that these predictions keep being made and they keep not really being fulfilled. Are we so sure that things aren't going to limp along on the not particularly great trajectory they have been following?

[Wahoo Redux]

Are we really so sure that there's going to be a wave of colleges closing?

Yeah, probably, unfortunately.  A lot of this is on the say so of a single Harvard Biz. Prof. Clayton Christiansen, but it seems he might be right.  This is a pretty good summary:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhorn/2018/12/13/will-half-of-all-colleges-really-close-in-the-next-decade/?sh=7ca740b152e5

[mahagonny]

One prediction is easy. It will have lots and lots of people occupying a subclass of stigmatized educators doing jobs that the others don't want, called 'contingent faculty.' This arrangement will be implemented by a cadre of administrators, tenure track and other, who claim they hate doing things that way.

[downer]

It looks like the proportion of part time faculty has been decreasing recently
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/27/federal-data-show-proportion-instructors-who-work-full-time-rising

With declining numbers in the student population, that may well continue. There was a piece in the NYT this week about how the student population has not increased but instead has declined in the current hard times. Either they are expecting to get a job or their lives have become so difficult they are not in a position to take classes.

Maybe there will be fewer grad students, and fewer grad students looking for part time work. But there will likely be more faculty from recently-closed colleges looking for part time work.

I will be interested to see what the effect of the last year has been on student readiness to take online classes. I'm guessing it will increase quite a lot. That may  make it more difficult for some colleges to fill their dorms.

[Wahoo Redux]

I will be interested to see what the effect of the last year has been on student readiness to take online classes. I'm guessing it will increase quite a lot. That may  make it more difficult for some colleges to fill their dorms.

I can offer no real hard data, but I do know that our students have been very unhappy with online education.  Part of this may be that we were all suddenly plunged into online teaching, and there has definitely been a learning curve for faculty there.  I wonder if students didn't decide to wait out the bug before returning to the classroom.  I certainly hope so.

[downer]

It was always clear that a pretty large proportion of students are not well suited to online education, and so forcing them to do it probably really turned them off it. Especially with the way the transition was done.

But I had a good number of students who turned out to do really well in online classes. I especially found that with students who used to be in an evening class. It was meant to be 3 hours, but it was basically impossible to get past 2 hours because everyone was wiped out, and learning stopped after 2 hours. The online class was a far better experience for most of them.

[RatGuy]

I will be interested to see what the effect of the last year has been on student readiness to take online classes. I'm guessing it will increase quite a lot. That may  make it more difficult for some colleges to fill their dorms.

I can offer no real hard data, but I do know that our students have been very unhappy with online education.  Part of this may be that we were all suddenly plunged into online teaching, and there has definitely been a learning curve for faculty there.  I wonder if students didn't decide to wait out the bug before returning to the classroom.  I certainly hope so.

Some faculty here felt that our university was caught with its pants down in Spring 2020, compared to over universities in the state. I felt that we didn't do a bad job of pivoting online at the last minute.

For Fall 2020, the university had invested quite a bit in social distancing protocols, tech for online and hybrid sections, and insisted that faculty offer an in-person experience when possible. That meant that a lot of us were teaching in a classroom at quarter capacity with the other 3/4 online at any given moment. The university told us to "be flexible." Students who wanted to party loved it. Students who wanted to learn hated it.

For Fall 2021, faculty have been told to return to Fall 2019 procedures. Barring any real-world changes, there'll be no distancing and no online component. That means that even though classrooms are now equipped with cameras and mics, we've been told to refuse student requests for online or hybrid delivery. We're no longer told to "be flexible."  I wonder what people think about this policy, and how will it shake out?

[Caracal]

Are we really so sure that there's going to be a wave of colleges closing?

Yeah, probably, unfortunately.  A lot of this is on the say so of a single Harvard Biz. Prof. Clayton Christiansen, but it seems he might be right.  This is a pretty good summary:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhorn/2018/12/13/will-half-of-all-colleges-really-close-in-the-next-decade/?sh=7ca740b152e5

He might be right, but I'm suspicious of these kinds of macro predictions because they're quite often wrong. Chriistiansen originally made that prediction in 2013. It isn't on track to come anywhere close even with COVID.

[marshwiggle]

It was always clear that a pretty large proportion of students are not well suited to online education, and so forcing them to do it probably really turned them off it. Especially with the way the transition was done.

But I had a good number of students who turned out to do really well in online classes. I especially found that with students who used to be in an evening class. It was meant to be 3 hours, but it was basically impossible to get past 2 hours because everyone was wiped out, and learning stopped after 2 hours. The online class was a far better experience for most of them.

As I've said before, even if this is only 10%* of the student population who liked online education, that's a huge opportunity going forward for the institutions willing to cater to them. And since online education can scale easily, a few places could get the lion's share of the business by jumping in with both feet.

*(For a rough comparison, since the US is about 10x the population of Canada, then 10% of the US student population would be comparable to the entire student population of Canada.)

[Wahoo Redux]

I sure hope you are correct, Caracal.  I am afraid that we will be the era that let North American higher education devolve into a shell of elites on top and business trade schools everywhere else.