No,I don’t agree with him.
Are you asking if readers agree with Prof. Galloway’s assertion that college towns will likely become the next Covid-19 hot spots ?
If so, then yes, I agree with his assertion.
So many of his private Ohio perish schools provide some of the best value to families with generous merit and/or need aid packages - often beating public in state options on net price. Did he confuse Ohio State with Ohio University? Weird.
100% agree with Prof Galloway when he says that students returning to campuses will lead to college towns becoming “mini-Wuhans” and that colleges are in a form of collective denial about this. If people have been unable to do such fundamental things because of corona, as have a memorial service in a house of worship for someone who recently passed away, how is it that these colleges can now congregate students from all over the country together in dorms? How is that responsible citizenship? What about all of the sacrifices that people have made to avoid spreading the virus? Those will be for nothing.
Prof Galloway predicts that colleges will either become even more exclusive or they will leverage technology to dramatically increase enrollments (expanding access). So far, I have only seen the maintenance or expansion of exclusivity with almost every top school summarily closing its waitlist and rejecting everyone - including Berkeley, UCLA, MIchigan, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Duke, Penn, and others. So I think his prediction was wrong that colleges would use this crisis as an opportunity to reduce the costs of tuition and enroll more students, thereby addressing the problem of access and skyrocketing student debt. Looks like this turning point is not really a turning point after all.
Yes - I am asking first about the hotspots that are likely to grow from colleges and universities.
Secondly - I am curious if others agree that this may also lead to a new normal - a new thinking of how higher education serves the needs of society?
I’m skeptical that institutions of higher education care about anything more than their prestige and their bottom line.
MODERATOR NOTE: This post was merged here as the current thread on this topic was already active.
Scott Galloway is a UCLA graduate and current NYU marketing professor and has likely been the most provocative voice challenging students, families and university leaders to rethink higher education.
His Prof-G podcast has made me think carefully about many topics at the intersection of education, COVID-19 and income inequality.
You can research his articles from the The Atlantic, NY Magazine or just find google him and you will learn more. So do you agree or dis agree?
"Think about this. Next month, as currently envisioned, 2,800+ cruise ships retrofitted with white boards and a younger cohort will set sail in the midst of a raging pandemic. The density and socialization on these cruise ships could render college towns across America the next virus hot spots.
Why are administrators putting the lives of faculty, staff, students, and our broader populace at risk?
The ugly truth is many college presidents believe they have no choice. College is an expensive operation with a relatively inflexible cost structure. Tenure and union contracts render the largest cost (faculty and administrator salaries) near immovable objects. The average salary of a full professor (before benefits and admin support costs) is $104,820, though some make much more, and roughly 50% of full-time faculty have tenure. While some universities enjoy revenue streams from technology transfer, hospitals, returns on multibillion dollar endowments, and public funding, the bulk of colleges have become tuition dependent. If students don’t return in the fall, many colleges will have to take drastic action that could have serious long-term impacts on their ability to fulfill their missions.
That gruesome calculus has resulted in a tsunami of denial. Universities owning up to the truth have one thing in common: they can afford to."
RE: Post #45.
If Covid-19 & other strains of novel coronavirus persist, then I do think that the current higher education model (socialization & academics in a communal setting over a 4 year period) will change. Already happening with respect to MBA programs.
Technology enables remote class attendance.
Also, I suspect that the 4 year degree model will be shortened to 3 years for full-time students although most will attend part-time while working and graduate in 6 or more years.
P.S. Too bad that the two threads were merged as each presents very different issues in my view.
As I noted in my post above, MBA programs are already changing. Several (WFU, Illinois, Iowa, & others) have done away with their 2 year full-time residential MBA programs. (The University of Illinois charges just $22,000 total tuition for an online MBA.)
Just read that BU’s online MBA program enrolled twice as many students as was expected. Low cost at $24,000 total tuition and taught remotely, this shows that higher education is changing in the US.
Most elite MBA programs charge over $70,000 per year (over $140,000 total) tuition for the 2 year program of study.) (NYU’s Stern MBA charges over $77,000 per year tuition.
Students & families are fed up with large student loan debt.
Students do not want to sacrifice almost 2 years of earnings to attend a full-time MBA program.
Covid-19 has affected the opinion of what an educational experience should include.
Competing with low cost China & India & Vietnam, etc. in the business world will cause / require colleges & universities, families & businesses to produce results in a more efficient & more cost effective manner.
Going to a three year BA/BS would seem to be the low hanging fruit. Will be interesting to see what happens over the next decade…and how individual schools try to adjust to remain viable.
I don’t agree with Galloway’s analysis nor his use of terminology…I think it’s irresponsible to say any school will ‘perish’. Also agree with the poster who mentioned above the veracity and/or applicability of some of the source data he’s using as well as the mistakes he made…makes me assume there are more mistakes in his analysis that we haven’t yet found.
I do think we will see covid-19 breakouts on many campuses, and whether right or wrong, preventable or not…that is to be expected.
I disagree @Mwfan1921 .
I agree with Prof. Galloway’s warning that many colleges will perish. I truly think that it is irresponsible to ignore the obvious. However, I do not agree with Prof. Galloway’s formula for predicting which schools are likely to perish.
P.S. Why is “going to a 3 year BS/BA degree…low hanging fruit” ?
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BU states up front that the $24,000 cost of their online MBA program is the bottom line cost. There is no institutional aid: No grants, scholarships or tuition discounting.
I also agree that there will be a number of colleges that perish, and same as you, don’t necessarily agree with Galloway’s methods and predictions. I do think it’s not responsible to name schools that he predicts will ‘perish’ using data sources that are nonsensical and/or unreliable.
Maybe low hanging fruit wasn’t the best choice of words, but what I mean is that going to a three year degree generally wouldn’t require changing curricula for a given major, and there are other country’s university systems that one could use as a model for a shorter undergrad degree. This would be an easier switch than a school going to fully online model, to take just one extreme example.
Shortening the requirement to a bachelor’s degree would decrease core requirements, which would likely put most pressure on liberal arts colleges. And we all already knew that the less selective and/or low enrollment LACs were at risk.
Dr Galloway is my new mentor. Forget about his categorizations, when you take a close look you will see that flaws and biases in the underlying data sets produce the same in his predictions. But Dr Galloway is a huge help in the way he provides a framework for the analysis of college costs that anyone can use for their personal decision making.
For example, experience is one of the three components of total cost. By better understanding how much of a college bill is for experience, the consumer can decide for themselves how important experience is to them and how much they are willing to pay for it.
Regarding the present value calculations that influence the credentialing component, one can ask how much of that is geographic in nature and access to better jobs is really people living and working on the coasts.
No doubt, the results of the pandemic may include certain school going out of business but I’m not sure that Dr Galloway can predict that any better than anyone else. But the framework for analysis he provide for us can help us all make better choices.
Which is fine as most of the top MBA programs cost near or over $200,000 when tuition, fees, books, room & board is included in the cost projections. Additionally, participants in full-time MBA program lose almost 2 full years of income.
P.S. Many graduate business degrees are now offered as one-year specialty masters programs in an effort to trim the excess off of 2 year full-time programs.
Would regional accreditation organizations go for changing the minimum number of credit hours for a bachelor’s degree from 120 to 90?
However, even if that occurred, some majors could still have more than 90 credit hours of subject requirements just for the major. Also, colleges with high volume core or general education requirements may have to reduce the volume of such requirements to allow students to fit all of the requirements into 90 credit hours.
Along similar lines, some professional degrees that currently require a bachelor’s degree as a prerequisite could be moved down the degree food chain to become bachelor’s or master’s degrees, possibly started as college frosh, or started as college juniors the way other undergraduate majors are declared (or competitively admitted). That could reduce the cost to earn the credential, although that would probably be resisted by incumbent professionals who prefer the barrier to entry be higher rather than lower (because of this, the trend has been to move professional degrees up rather than down the degree food chain).
But don’t those other countries’ universities with three year bachelor’s degrees assume that university-bound high school graduates have completed in high school the equivalent of many college frosh or AP level courses (e.g. A-level courses in the UK system)? I.e. the students entering university are ready to start university course work at a more advanced level than US universities generally assume, and may be assumed to have gotten their general education done while in high school.
Three year BS/BA degrees could easily be accomplished by eliminating or shortening summer vacations / summer break. This should result in a more efficient method for higher education.
I agree that “naming names” as Prof. Galloway has done is a bit irresponsible because his study only focused on the most prominent 450 or so colleges and universities out of well over 3,500 four year degree granting institutions.
I think that a partial study is irresponsible because the “perish” & “struggle” schools would almost certainly benefit from the closings of many of the over 3,000 colleges & universities not deemed worthy of inclusion in the US News rankings (the source of the schools examined by Prof. Galloway). Most likely these non-ranked schools would “perish” at a faster rate than those included in Prof. Galloway’s study and their students would matriculate at surviving schools.
Change is here & more change in higher education is forthcoming.
Within the past week or two, one of the Big 4 accounting firms introduced their own MBA program. Free to EY (Ernst & Young) employees, this MBA degree program allows EY employees to continue working while earning their MBA degree part-time.
Additionally, online certificate courses of study are popular in many industries–especially in CS & business. Employers like certificate programs because employees remain on the job while learning the latest material in their field. Certificate programs are tailored to specific industry needs and delivered in an efficient & flexible manner. Google, for example, has created their own course of study which satisfies their business needs. Google treats this certificate as the equivalent of a college degree for hiring and promotion purposes.
I found the number of schools or lack of schools to be curious. What does he think happens to the other 3k schools not on his list?
If they close, that’s an absolute worst case scenario. Maybe online becomes much, much more prevalent and consolidates schools?
That said, I think the analysis was a little more anecdotal than I like to see but the conclusion isn’t out of the realm. I think of my parents. College wasn’t an option out of high school. A college education and the college “experience” is a fairly recent phenomenon fed by the rise of the middle class. There are many industrialized countries like Germany or France that don’t send nearly the number of people to college as the US. Maybe we’ll revert to the mean?
Lots of headwinds besides just the pandemic and its effects. Things like demographics, loss of middle-class, and student debt.