By Professor Doom
A recent posting
about official government predictions
of growth in our higher ed system by 2025, despite the fact that the
vast bulk of our high school graduates already go to college today and we’ll
have fewer people in that age group in 8 years, got me to thinking about the
future of higher ed in the US.
Around 70% of high school
graduates go to college right after graduation, and over
80% go eventually. The gentle reader really should consider the implications of
this: if you’re in the 20th percentile of intelligence (roughly an IQ of
87, low enough to qualify for mentally disabled), you’re still college
material…how much lower can we go? College
graduate IQ is already below average, so I suspect we’re pretty close
to the bottom as it is.
Growth in the
student base at this point would be preposterous.
While I’ve often
mentioned a possible collapse in higher ed in the US, I know this is something
of a pipe dream. Even though there are now many videos on YouTube of gurus
advising against going to college, against going deeply into debt for worthless
degrees, it’s a simple fact that our kids are trained from near birth that
college is an absolute necessity. Nothing anyone can say will change the great
demand for it, even if the ending of the student loan scam (not quite a pipe
dream, but not a near-reality) would close many, probably most, of our colleges
and universities overnight.
So, we’ll still
have them in 8 years, but how will they survive? What will they be doing with
all that money? Unlike government predictions that as near as I can tell, are
simply made up out of nothing, I like to have some empirical evidence.
I’ve written of
the immense
fraud of higher education in Australia before, and, again, a recent blog
post gives me some reason to believe the corruption and
debasement there is even more advanced than it is in the United States (I know,
hard to believe, but if they’re paying their admin even more than the luxurious
salaries admin here get, that’s at least a sign).
In addition to
the excessive pay for bogus jobs, like the US, Australian higher ed is all
about butts-in-seats, and they’re overbuilt. The latter concept is the most
important: our institutions are massively overbuilt, thanks to huge
construction sprees and an emphasis on online education, we have a system of stealing
student loan money education more than sufficient for 150% of the
population to go to college. The building hasn’t slowed, but at some point,
they won’t keep building 100,000 capacity stadiums and won’t need yet another
administrative palace to build. I guess.
Catallaxyfiles often
covers the fraud of Australian higher ed, and a recent posting gives an insight
to the future of American higher ed:
Liberal
senator James Paterson said he was “pretty sceptical about the value to
taxpayers of government-funded, not-for-profit universities spending up big on
marketing to attract students’’.
He
said this was “particularly so when many of those marketing activities were not
about the substance of what the universities offered but resembled gimmicks
and irrelevant sponsorships’’.
And there’s my
answer: marketing. For-profit institutions in the US already spend ridiculous
amounts of money scraping the bottom of the barrel for suckers willing to sign
up for student debt (University
of Phoenix was spending $200,000 a day just on Google advertising before
realizing there were no more kids to plunder).
Spam
received 12/13/17:
Immediate
Action Required
You now have approval to request to receive
$5,920 via check and/or direct deposit.
You would just have to take few classes online.
The best part you don't have to pay any of this
money back.
--the money referenced above is from the Pell
Grant scam, fraudulent use of which supplies 25% to 70% of the student base for
community colleges. What other business has so much of the customer base being
fraud?
I already get a
dozen spam mails a day from colleges and universities wanting me to sign up for
“fast, convenient” degrees from campuses throughout the country, thanks to
their “easy” online programs that nevertheless cost every bit as much as a
brick-and-mortar degree despite the nearly no overhead to run such things.
This spam is just
fallout from my research into higher ed; I had no choice but to say I was
interested in higher education when I was investigating the massive, widespread
fraud that is our higher education complex here. I accept this is my fault
but…It’s going to get worse. It has to.
Most of our
institutions have justified their huge construction projects, their legions of
Vice Presidents of Debasement and Diversity, upon future growth. No growth
means collapse. They need more students.
In the past,
those students were readily supplied by the public school system, which
advertised relentlessly on behalf of higher ed. Many of our public schools even
boast just how many kids they screwed over by sending them off to college.
But all our
schools need constant growth…growth that can’t happen because they’re already
getting every kid that could conceivably benefit from higher ed, and a huge
number of kids who cannot conceivably benefit from higher ed.
The mathematics
of our population make it clear that not all institutions can grow…but some
can.
The only way some
of our public institutions can grow past this point is to cannibalize from each
other, somehow getting kids not to go to the campus a few miles from where they
live, and instead go to the campus 10 miles from where they live…or even
further (I ask the gentle reader to consider how many colleges and universities
are within a 50 mile radius; for me it’s over a dozen). There’s only one way to
succeed in such cannibalization:
Marketing.
It’s the conclusion reached for Australia:
Given the existence of price controls universities cannot
really compete on price. Given excessive regulation and TEQSA Australian
universities cannot really compete on product differentiation, or product and
process innovation. That leaves advertising and marketing.
The universities in the US might not have price restraints,
but the student loan scam means most kids think the price is basically free
until that nebulous day in the future after they graduate. As far as product
differentiation, well, much of college coursework has no requirements as it
is…hard to differentiate “nothing” from “nothing.”
I rather suspect the most “successful”
institutions in the US in 2025 will be those that devote huge sums of money to
their marketing departments, we might even start to see Super Bowl ads from
State U (assuming football is still popular in 2025, not exactly a given at
this point in time).
I know, the most popular advice given to
kids about to hurt themselves in college education is “get a STEM degree,” but
I have my doubts (the “M” in “STEM” is mathematics, and to judge by own career
in mathematics, I wouldn’t call it exactly stellar). Besides, the only reason
STEM is of some value is scarcity…not everyone can master the half dozen or so
books necessary to get a degree in these fields.
But, look, marketing is going to be the big deal for higher education. For the
many kids who honestly can’t cut it in a STEM degree (and there’s no dishonor
in that), might I suggest marketing? At the very least, it should offer more of
a chance at life than yet another Gender Studies degree…
That said, it saddens me that we’ve poured
a few trillion dollars into higher education, with the end result that, in the
future, most of higher education money will be spent, not on education, but on commercials,
billboards, and spam.
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