I’ve been seeing colleges move primarily to online classes. The colleges have all these huge buildings that are empty. How long can the colleges last until bankrupt?
Really depends on the college and what you mean by a lot, there are about 4000 schools in the us, most can not afford to close for the fall, they have taken hits returning cash from closure of spring dorms and cancelling of summer rentals to outside customers, think HS band camp on college campus, but so far almost no schools have reduced tuition for online so that will help schools, if it goes into the fall, either parents will push for a tuition reduction or kids will take gap years, either one hurts colleges big time, so some school will bite the dust but that happens every year, maybe 10 a year, this year maybe 50, no one really knows. Schools are more dependent on tuition than anything else so if regular tuition rates happen in the fall most schools will be able to offset the loss of dorms but it will hurt no doubt
Many schools that can’t afford to take an attendance hit by going online will choose to take the risk of having more kids come back to campus earlier. That may or may not work out, either in not saving attendance enough or by getting a lot of kids sick and losing ground on that score. Now that the online model has been proven to be non-terrible for everyone, and after the financial hammering many families have suffered this year, there’s a good chance a lot more people don’t ever make it to the bricks and beer college experience they might have expected not long ago. Demographic trends and spiraling costs were indicating it was already going to be very hard in education in the next few years, but this just cranks that up to 11.