Future of Division III

[Oline89]

My take (NO insider info, but lots of reading) is that any colleges that go under in the next sixth months were probably doomed within the next few years anyway.  However, IF COVID-19 is not faced with effective treatments and/or vaccines within a year, I think MANY schools will buckle under. 

Who is going to pay private-school prices to have online teaching?  Community Colleges will steal HUGE amounts of private school  moneys if colleges can't re-open for face-to-face instruction.  If colleges are still shut down in 2021, it may be chaos.

The problem, of course, is that dorms are total vectors for infection.  Testing MUST be drastically ramped up or D3 schools are in deep doo-doo.

I will argue that dorms are not perfect vectors for the disease.  Colleges can create a closed atmosphere (similar to the Harry S Truman Air craft carrier: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/harry-s-truman-deployment-coronavirus)   Test everyone, practice hand washing, limit the visits from those outside the institution, maybe no "breaks" until Christmas.  Dorms are not nursing homes or cruise ships,  healthy/young vs sicker/elderly. 

[Ron Boerger]

My take (NO insider info, but lots of reading) is that any colleges that go under in the next sixth months were probably doomed within the next few years anyway.  However, IF COVID-19 is not faced with effective treatments and/or vaccines within a year, I think MANY schools will buckle under. 

Who is going to pay private-school prices to have online teaching?  Community Colleges will steal HUGE amounts of private school  moneys if colleges can't re-open for face-to-face instruction.  If colleges are still shut down in 2021, it may be chaos.

The problem, of course, is that dorms are total vectors for infection.  Testing MUST be drastically ramped up or D3 schools are in deep doo-doo.

I will argue that dorms are not perfect vectors for the disease.  Colleges can create a closed atmosphere (similar to the Harry S Truman Air craft carrier: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/harry-s-truman-deployment-coronavirus)   Test everyone, practice hand washing, limit the visits from those outside the institution, maybe no "breaks" until Christmas.  Dorms are not nursing homes or cruise ships,  healthy/young vs sicker/elderly.

Students are unlikely to be willing participants in a scheme that forces them to pay tens of thousands of dollars a semester to be cooped up for months at a time; they're not members of the Armed Forces who either do what they are told or are subject to serious discipline.   In addition, many students don't live on campus, and some/many schools are unable to provide on-campus lodging for all their students.

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

Mask wearing on campus will likely become the norm as it will be for the rest of us. Just look to Asia where mask wearing has become much more the norm because of viruses like this. Part of our norm will be masks for everyone - I don't expect full lockdowns on campuses, but I do expect there to be a different look.

[Gray Fox]

Mask wearing on campus will likely become the norm as it will be for the rest of us. Just look to Asia where mask wearing has become much more the norm because of viruses like this. Part of our norm will be masks for everyone - I don't expect full lockdowns on campuses, but I do expect there to be a different look.

Dating will be based on personality rather than looks.

[Gregory Sager]

Mask wearing on campus will likely become the norm as it will be for the rest of us. Just look to Asia where mask wearing has become much more the norm because of viruses like this.

Actually, Dave, mask-wearing as a contagion blocker has been the norm in East Asia for decades. Trust me on this one; North Park's campus borders on Chicago's Koreatown, and Chicago's Little Saigon (the center of Vietnamese culture in the Midwest) is two and a half miles east of campus in the Uptown neighborhood. The city's Far North Side is flush with East Asian immigrants, and I've seen them wearing masks throughout the forty years I've lived here.

It'd be more pleasant if Americans at large adopted bulgoki or pho or banh mi sandwiches as cultural borrowings the way that they took to sushi and chow mein in previous generations, but I suppose that there's worse things than to have your country's tradition of self-initiative with regard to public health become an American cultural import.

Mask wearing on campus will likely become the norm as it will be for the rest of us. Just look to Asia where mask wearing has become much more the norm because of viruses like this. Part of our norm will be masks for everyone - I don't expect full lockdowns on campuses, but I do expect there to be a different look.

Dating will be based on personality rather than looks.

Or TikTok skills.

[jknezek]

Mask wearing on campus will likely become the norm as it will be for the rest of us. Just look to Asia where mask wearing has become much more the norm because of viruses like this.

Actually, Dave, mask-wearing as a contagion blocker has been the norm in East Asia for decades. Trust me on this one; North Park's campus borders on Chicago's Koreatown, and Chicago's Little Saigon (the center of Vietnamese culture in the Midwest) is two and a half miles east of campus in the Uptown neighborhood. The city's Far North Side is flush with East Asian immigrants, and I've seen them wearing masks throughout the forty years I've lived here.

It'd be more pleasant if Americans at large adopted bulgoki or pho or banh mi sandwiches as cultural borrowings the way that they took to sushi and chow mein in previous generations, but I suppose that there's worse things than to have your country's tradition of self-initiative with regard to public health become an American cultural import.

Now I want banh mi for dinner... going to have to see if the thai place is doing curbside pickup...

[Ron Boerger]

An on-point San Antonio Express-News interview with Trinity(TX) president Danny Anderson about the impact of COVID-19 past, present, and future; while the emphasis is on Trinity, Dr. Anderson also discusses the impact to higher education and small, residential liberal arts schools like Trinity (and many other D3 colleges).   You may need to kill your ad-blocker to view this but it otherwise is not behind a paywall.  https://www.expressnews.com/news/education/article/Trinity-University-president-talks-about-15286108.php

[Ralph Turner]

Please permit me to post this link to a 17-minute video of Marketing Prof Scott Galloway, NYU's Stern School of Business, on the effect of COVID on higher education.

He cites 4500 colleges and universities in the US. Might 1000 be gone in 5-10 years?

The cost-cutting that we have seen in other sectors of the economy has not occurred in education, yet.

Thanks.

https://youtu.be/FM5HkpyXxsQ

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

It's very likely. The population of college age students is going to experience a 10-12 year dip anyway; this kind of disruption only exacerbates issues schools were already facing.

[OzJohnnie]

I don't think a quarter will go bust, not even close.  Colleges, even with the economy shutdown, won't go bust until the gov't turns off the free money spigot of infinite student debt.  Plus, when it gets really tight there is a lot of non-student facing expense (ie, non-revenue generating headcount) which can get the axe before a school goes bust.  The biggest driver of college expense has been an explosion in administrative staff.



In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see enrolments rise at the last minute instead of falling, and schools will happy to take the extra students on short notice.  With no jobs and no prospects why wouldn't a person go to school?  Are they just going to sit around a year playing xbox?  Almost certainly some student debt special will be offered as the election approaches and it will drive enrolment.  Perhaps not, but I wouldn't be surprised.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

I don't think a quarter will go bust, not even close.  Colleges, even with the economy shutdown, won't go bust until the gov't turns off the free money spigot of infinite student debt.  Plus, when it gets really tight there is a lot of non-student facing expense (ie, non-revenue generating headcount) which can get the axe before a school goes bust.  The biggest driver of college expense has been an explosion in administrative staff.



In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see enrolments rise at the last minute instead of falling, and schools will happy to take the extra students on short notice.  With no jobs and no prospects why wouldn't a person go to school?  Are they just going to sit around a year playing xbox?  Almost certainly some student debt special will be offered as the election approaches and it will drive enrolment.  Perhaps not, but I wouldn't be surprised.

A lot of small schools (especially D3 schools) have already pared back their administrative costs and are running pretty close to bare minimums.  A quarter may be high, but a decreasing potential student pool was already endangering those at the bottom of the economic ladder to begin with.

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

Federal money for student debt is one thing ... students choosing to use that money to go to a particular institution is another.

There are less students going to college. There was already a downward trend before COVID-19, but that trend has now been shoved. The idea of college is waning both in terms of it's overall costs (and debt one finds themselves in after college), but also because the trades have been found to be the best fit for students (and pays pretty well as the trades should). Also, some are realizing they can do okay for themselves without going to college and losing a few years in the workforce as a result.

I know college isn't a direct reason I am in my career field. I am not sure I would have skipped college, though. Trade schools, in hindsight, might have been a consideration if I had realized the potential, but that doesn't mean it would have been a fit for me. That is said to indicate, I think college students are thinking more and more on whether college is the right path. We have far more colleges than what is needed. That's just reality. I think community colleges and trade schools will see an increase in the near future and those colleges that don't have a place in our world will disappear (and some that are old and unwilling to adapt).

[OzJohnnie]

I used to agree with you, d-mac.  I, too, thought the higher education bubble couldn't last.  And it certainly won't, but it's not going to crash yet.  There is plenty of bilking to go before the tax payer (actually our grand children as we'll never need to pay back this debt we're racking up) is bled dry for loans funding useless "education".  Ever since the 2009 with whatever stimulus giveaways Washington has created, the debt which the Feds have assumed on behalf of the tax payer for student loans has skyrocketed with no end in sight.

About the only idea I've heard which perhaps has a chance of creating an approach to student debt which mirrors the debt we see everywhere else in the world would be to make colleges co-sign for the loans and therefore responsible for defaults.  If universities want to fill their halls with people who can't afford it and sell them degrees which will never earn a return (or most likely, no degree at all as about 2 million students drop out each year with about $7.5k of debt on average and nothing ever to show for it) then let the universities finance it.

But I doubt that will happen either.  Instead it will crash one day like the Hindenburg.  And it will be ugly.

[OzJohnnie]

I tried to find a general view of the trend toward higher admin costs but only found this specific example of the University of Minnesota with a general view of expenses from the Wall Street Journal.  I can't speak to any specific D3 school, but administrative bloat has been the most significant trend in higher education it seems to me over the last 10 years.

If the UofM is indicative rather than an outlier used by the WSJ to make a false point, then it seems that admin costs are far out stripping student enrolment and financed only by the free money of student loans.  Admin costs have been growing at 3x the pace of teaching costs, which have been growing slower than student numbers meaning the administrators appear to be bleeding the revenue generating teaching staff as well.  They should consider the implications of this graph in some political theory classes, methinks.

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

I don't think things will "crash" per se ... but I do think we will see a significant gut check.