<p>Unfortunately for colleges you reap what you sew…and kids and parents click right into the mentality. Get past the pool reference early in the article and the author does give a quite accurate portrayal of market forces at work in higher education</p>
<p>How is that different from what higher education has historically been?</p>
<ul>
<li>Slick advertising – a generation ago, taking the SAT or ACT resulted in a deluge of brochures in the mail from colleges you’ve never heard of.</li>
<li>Easy credit – haven’t student loans existed for a while? Of course, the higher price of higher education does mean that many students are looking at larger loans than before.</li>
<li>Brands – HYP, state flagships, and others have been recognizable brands for generations.</li>
<li>Funding by student population – how does the author expect state universities to be funded? Private universities also get funding by student population (tuition-paying students and donating alumni).</li>
<li>Vocationalizing higher education – given that most do not have the luxury of spending college costs without even looking at “return on investment”, is that unexpected. Of course, state universities exist in part because state governments realized that a better educated population resulted in higher economic growth and more tax revenue – and a better educated population includes those educated in pre-professional fields like accounting, engineering, nursing, architecture, agriculture, etc. that are commonly found at state universities.</li>
</ul>
<p>So, any suggestions on how do we break the vicious cycle of high college costs spurring a consumer mentality which triggers colleges to spend more on blinginess, which spurs higher college costs?</p>
<p>Not always. Many public universities in the past had nominal tuition or was sometimes even completely free for in-state/local area students. However, the way they allocated the limited state/local taxpayer subsidies for in-state/local area students was to either institute high academic admission standards* or allow lax/open admission policies for such students, but allow for massive weedout programs so around 1/2 of those admitted in-staters/local area students are gone by the end of sophomore year. </p>
<p>In the latter system, every in-stater/local area student at least gets a chance at a college education without incurring a large loss beyond losing a year or two of their time and a nominal sum which could easily be paid off within a matter of months or at the most, a year or few. </p>
<ul>
<li>CCNY/CUNY had such high admission standards till 1969 and free tuition for city students until 1975.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>Many colleges have no unique identity or educational mission. Historically, successful colleges are those that imbue their graduates with a strong sense of communal identity. They offer prospective students a compelling mythology, either secular or religious: “Come here and you’ll become part of a great ongoing collective narrative.” In the long run, pools and climbing walls and dumbed-down transferrable gen ed requirements and illusory promises of guaranteed white-collar employment will not be enough. But we’ve got too many providers right now, so there will be a great scramble in the next 30 years or so. Demographic changes will “solve” the problem and a lot of institutions will close their doors. The great cargo-cult belief that a college degree magically guarantees a middle class life is already imploding, and demographic changes will reverse the late 20th-C. boom in higher ed.</p>
<p>Online education does very little to address the need to belong to a community. </p>
<p>Is that more for the benefit of the college (alumni donations, political support for public schools)?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Lots of people belong to communities that are defined in ways other than what school one attends.</p>
<p>While it may be a more interesting experience for some to attend a college with a sense of community around it (and actually embed oneself in the college community), it is not strictly necessary to do so in order to benefit from the education. Indeed, the cost and other constraints that many college students encounter may preclude the “college community” aspect of attending college, but they can still benefit from the education.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>However, the ongoing devaluation of the high school diploma may continue to push people into college education even if not strictly necessary from the point of view of actual qualifications needed for the job (as opposed to creeping credentialism of employers requiring higher credentials than those which should theoretically indicate sufficient qualifications for the job).</p>
<p>Well, yes. All the more reason that if a given college does not offer a meaningful sense of identity or community, its market value is diminished. </p>
<p>
[</p>
<p>Colleges and universities that cannot command alumni or political support will not survive. The college-going cohort is in decline as a percentage of the population. Enrollment managers at every college know this.</p>