Will "the college experience" become less important when choosing a college?

[ucbalumnus]

@Lindagaf

There are too many current college students and high schoolers with older sibs in college for “the college experience” to become a thing of the past. We are social creatures. If anything, demand might increase. Then again, some parents might balk at the price difference, but that could also be due to a recession. In short, I don’t think campus living is going to disappear.

The residential part of “the college experience” will not disappear, but it is already an unaffordable luxury item for the majority of college students (who commute to a local college from where they lived before college, and who must prioritize B (from post #0) within cost constraints when choosing a college). As it is, attending college as a residential student tends to signify either parents with money, or being a good enough high school student to get admitted to a college with good financial aid or get a sufficient merit scholarship.

But with concerns about pandemics adding to the increasing cost of college, will going to college as a residential student become less common?

@gwnorth

We will need a lot more engineers, scientists, researchers , computer scientists and designers .

I would submit that training programs for those careers are very difficult to deliver on-line. You need labs and specialized tech equipment that most people are not going to have access to at home.

While many kinds of engineering and science require expensive labs and equipment for instruction, computer science has a considerably lower cost of entry to access the needed equipment. Granted, that is still a barrier for those from low income/wealth backgrounds, but the computers needed for education in computer science are much more accessible cost-wise than most engineering and science labs and equipment.