Today, I notice the significantly growrth in popularity in STEM majors, particularly Computer Science. 100 years down the line, I can imagine this trend to continue further. Since liberal arts colleges are generally not the best in STEM, what do you guys think will happen with LACs or other schools that are more humanities-based?
“100 years down the line”, things will be changed in ways that we can’t predict. I could conceive that 100 years from now people might be talking about the old days when students used to study STEM, whereas now (in 2117) the STEM jobs are all taken up by robots and humans focus on arts and music.
However, I do expect that a lot of LACs will be in financial trouble long before 100 years go by.
100 years from now, we might see the end of work, with human labor almost entirely replaced with AI and robots. Long before then, I see two game changers: online education and if the COA continues to increase faster than wages, only the rich will be able to afford LACs.
“if the COA continues to increase faster than wages, only the rich will be able to afford LACs.”
Entirely correct. However, there aren’t enough rich people to keep all (or even half) of our current LACs in business.
The future may be bleak for private colleges that are undistinguished in terms of having anything that would attract enough students and parents to pay a premium for them over less expensive options (e.g. in-state public colleges).
Why do you say that LACs “are generally not the best at STEM”? It’s true that LACs aren’t known for cutting-edge STEM research. However, they can be extremely good at undergraduate-level STEM education. For example, take a look at NSF’s recent list of “Top 50 Schools by Per-Capita Engineering & Science PhD Production”.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-50-schools-that-produce-science-phds/
A majority of the schools on this list are LACs. As the news story points out:
The strong performance of LACs is even more impressive considering that the list includes Engineering, which most of the listed LACs don’t offer. If this was a list of “Top 50 Schools by Per-Capita Science PhD Production” (excluding engineering), LACs would perform even more strongly.
I would agree that less selective LACs, which charge high tuition but which don’t offer high prestige, may face hard times in the future. However, this will be true for any private institution, whether it is a LAC or a large university.
I was not restricting the comment in reply #4 to LACs when I wrote “private colleges”. Indeed, plenty of private colleges that are not LACs are likely to be in trouble.
However, it is possible that some private colleges that are generally not high prestige may avoid trouble if they offer something unusual that attracts enough students and parents to pay higher costs to attend.
Whether a LAC is strong or weak in some STEM subject is very college-specific. The same goes for whether a LAC is more humanities-based. Certainly, the answer to these questions is different for Harvey Mudd College and Sarah Lawrence College.
Here are some possible examples of things that LACs (even less selective ones) can offer to justify their high tuition:
- LACs can typically guarantee than your kid will get smaller classes and more personalized attention from professors than the local state university. A large private university may not be able to make that claim.
- LACs typically have Division III athletics, often without cuts, and can therefore guarantee that your kid will be able to play NCAA sports. This is a big deal to a lot of families. A large private university probably has Division I or II sports, and probably can't make that same offer.
- Some LACs only enroll women. This is often regarded as a minus by American students, but if you are a wealthy international parent from a conservative society in the Middle East or Africa or Asia, it may be a plus. In fact, it may be the only acceptable choice if your daughter wants to study in America.
These kinds of things may or may not justify the higher LAC price tag, but they do differentiate the LAC from the large state university. It may actually be more difficult for the large private university to come up with points of differentiation.
Why do people think a STEM class with 400-500 students at a big state U is better than a STEM class with 40-50 students at a LAC?
That said, I have a feeling lots of LACs are going to be pricing themselves out of existence over the next decade or two.
Another post by someone who doesn’t understand LACs. Of course things will change in the course of 100 years - more than you can predict but the basic premise here is based on incorrect suppositions.
I’m sure someone said LACs will be gone in 100 years, oh, about 100 years ago.
Interestingly, computer science pioneer Grace Hopper was a Vassar graduate.
Within the next 100 (really 40) years, many economists estimate that up to 2 billion with a b will be unemployed thanks to automation, robotics, and AI. While many of those jobs will be service/manual labor jobs, many will also be white collar, and many of those will be STEM jobs. For example, AI will likely be able to write software better than your average programmer. So you can future-proof yourself by becoming good at things computers are bad at: cross-disciplinary and critical thinking, communications and storytelling, and creativity—all things that LACs are very good at fostering. And if you are one of the 2 billion unemployed, LACs will have hopefully taught you how to spend your life, via exposure to the Humanities.
Also, in this same period, I think we’ll see a transformation in education. Only some schools (prestigious LACs and high-end universities) might have live professors teaching classes. You can easily see state systems going to a model where they use “best of” lectures, with one professor teaching every Intro to Psychology class remotely. Or students may “attend” classes using VR. I’d worry less about LACs and more about state and regional education.
^Yes, I am more worried about public education (both tertiary and K-12).
I do think many tuition-dependent LACs, with small endowments, lower selectivity/higher acceptance rates, a more traditional slate of majors, and low alumni giving will probably close/disappear/merge in the future. Colleges like Sweet Briar - they were able to reopen, but they had all of the above problems despite being an excellent college. As someone here on CC said, when your acceptance rate is already 80% and your yield starts going down, you don’t have much of a pool to dip into. Amherst or Swarthmore, should they find their yield dipping, could theoretically expand from a 12-14% acceptance rate to something in the 20-25% range to make up for lower yield. Plus there are always going to be wealthy parents (American and not) willing to pay a lot for an education they consider premium.
But it won’t be because they’re not good in STEM; which majors are hot at a particular moment changes every 10-15 years or so. When I was in college, there wasn’t as much of an imperative to major in STEM careers - most of the technology companies that are big and dominant now either didn’t exist or were mere shadows of what they currently are. (Of the big five, Amazon and Facebook were much, much smaller; Google mostly did search and none of the other cool stuff they do now; and Microsoft was in a bit of a rough period. Apple was beginning to rise, but this was pre-iPhone.) The common wisdom there was to major in what you love and the money would come, and the hot career at the time was lawyer, not software developer. And I graduated from college less than 10 years ago.
With falling investment in public universities and colleges state-to-state I do see more of them, in the future, offering online only or majority-remote educations - perhaps with a few exceptions at state flagship universities, which may ironically become unaffordable for the majority of middle-class (let alone low-income) state residents. That’s already the case in some states.
“But it won’t be because they’re not good in STEM”
There’s a fallacy right there being repeated. Many, many LACs are good at STEM.