Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

Scott Galloway of NYU called it, and has been increasingly louder about it.

Like he says, it seems like this is the turning point for many middle-tier universities. Once you start viewing colleges as brands and luxury goods, especially the Stanfords and Harvards, it becomes clear there’s a massive revenue shortfall for them.

>This fall, I’m scheduled to teach MKTG-GB.2365 (Brand Strategy) in KMC 2-60 Tuesday nights at 6-9pm. It’s not going to happen. The room would normally be filled with 170 full- and part-time MBAs looking to garner the skills to build economic security for themselves and their families, and improve the world. Mostly the former. However, a room full of 170 NYT subscribers, sitting elbow to elbow, spells one thing — recurrence. So, while Liberty University will likely welcome kids back to campus, I speculate we, and anybody else that does not have their head up their a, will not. https://www.profgalloway.com/post-corona-higher-ed

In medicine, people are regularly paying even more than that. Med school tuition is in the $60–70k/year range for four years. A top undergrad institution is around $50–60k/year for four years. Since med school admissions are so competitive, many students actually get a master's degree before applying to med school, which is another ~$60k/year for 1–2 years. In total, you're looking at $400-500k or even more in select cases.

The numbers vary depending on if you're paying in-state tuition or getting other scholarships, but the numbers above are pretty typical outside of those caveats.

This happened with my family. It was especially bad because earning $150k total for a household near an expensive urban area leads to purchasing power basically the same as a family with $65k household income in suburbia or small towns. Without adjusting parents income for cost of living (factors the kids in question have no control over), it’s totally unfair.

This has a lot to do with “last place aversion” - the people making $150k near SF having to pay full price for their kid (who probably worked their ass off) to barely scrape into Stanford are (rightly or wrongly) going to be totally NIMBY / selfish in terms of voting and policy when it comes to the $65k families from far away whose kids can pay much less than half for Stanford, say.

Those universities need a lot of money: professors don't work for free and buildings don't maintain themselves. You can be sure that you'll be paying for your college education out of your taxes for the rest of your working life.

It would be interesting to analyze what free colleges cost the average taxpayer, and to compare that with what non-free colleges cost in the U.S. Do countries that offer free college education offer the public a way to find out the itemized expenses of publicly funded universities?

> Online classes simply don't have the value that in person classes have.

I certainly agree with this (people aren't that stupid). But schools like Stanford and USC have been doing online MS programs for decades. As far as I know they are are just as valuable to your resume as an in-person MS from the same school.

The value is in the fact that your average student simply doesn't have the self-motivation to do fully-online classes (we certainly have been seeing this problem in the last few months). This is why they primarily have been for working professions part-time in the past, that's a group and mode of learning where people actually get it done.