“Our higher education system is at the tail end of an ominous bubble. The United States has a whopping 3,026 four-year degree-granting universities, with another 1,700 two-year universities. Within the next few decades, a sizeable portion of these institutions will have shuttered their doors for the last time.” …
I think higher institutions of learning are just reflections of what we as Americans have normalized: carrying never-ending debt throughout our lives. Carrying hefty mortgages, car payments on multiple vehicles, college loans in the $100,000’s and credit card bills we never seems to pay off are common for many people now, not just those considered to be “living on the edge”. The federal, state, and local governments also running in the red for the most part certainly don’t set good examples of fiscal responsibility. It will just be one “bubble” after another. Higher education will experience a major correction at some point. You can only charge so much tuition…
Yes, I think we are already in a higher ed bubble. In my opinion, the losers will be small tuition-driven colleges (like Colby-Sawyer, which was in the news a couple days ago, and another college that just closed) and, sadly, many smaller regional public universities - as states slash funding for higher education and diminish the quality of education those places can provide. The State of Georgia is already on a merging spree, putting together institutions that don’t even make sense like the mostly two-year, open access Georgia Perimeter College was recently merged with the up-and-coming research university Georgia State University. GSU professors were upset - they’d done all this high-profile work to try to raise GSU’s profile, and now they have to deal with being attached to what’s essentially a community college. They’re not sure what that’s going to do to GSU’s rankings or reputation as an up-and-coming urban research university.
The thing is, at the state level, the folks making decisions about funding, slashing tenure (as is happening in Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri) and merging universities have little to no experience in education. They’re just doing stuff.
When online education comes to be regarded as just as good as in-person - and it will take some time, but I do believe that eventually you’ll be able to get lots of different kinds of bachelor’s degrees that are highly regarded - then the small tuition-dependent colleges and regional colleges will close faster. The kinds of students who attend those schools are the kinds who would be attracted by the lower cost and greater flexibility of online education.
That seems like an odd merger. http://consolidation.gsu.edu/files/2015/11/GSU-GPC-Substantive-Change.pdf (linked from http://consolidation.gsu.edu/ ) does indicate that GPC will remain open access, and that “Admissions from Perimeter College to the other GSU colleges for baccalaureate studies will be selective and comparable to undergraduate transfer standards.” I.e. it does not seem all that much different from before.