“There is not enough federal bailout money in the Treasury to save every pointless university in a bad recession”
Tucker Carlson on how Coronavirus will affect higher education.
As I pointed out in a recent Quick Take, people are already wondering if the Coronavirus crsis will burst the higher education bubble. Tucker Carlson addressed this issue in a monologue on his show this week which was right to the point.
In Tucker’s estimation, we have already crossed into new territory because the country now sees how much of the learning experience can be done differently and at lower cost.
Here is part of Carlson’s monologue, via FOX News:
Coronavirus crisis has exposed the higher education establishment charade
The long-term effects of the moment we’re in are hard to know exactly. Restaurants and hotels have a long road back — that’s clear. But what about higher education?
The nation’s entire college population is at home right now, at exactly the same moment the economy seems to be heading south because of the coronavirus. So what effect will that have?
Well, the first thing to know is that whatever happens next, it will not affect Harvard, Yale, Stanford and a handful of schools like those. These places are richer than some countries. They’ll be fine no matter what happens, perhaps unfortunately. Big state schools are likely to weather the crisis, too. They have legislators behind them.
But for everyone else on campus, this is a life-changing moment. Consider the confluence of factors right now. First, endowments are likely to shrink as the broader economy struggles. Donations will drop, too, for the same reason. There will almost certainly be a big reduction in students from China, a group whose main appeal has always been their ability to pay for tuition. Take that money off the ledger.
Meanwhile, and most critically, an entire nation has just been shown that it’s possible to deliver higher education in an entirely different way. You don’t have to drive to campus, buy textbooks, pay for room and board in order to get an education. You can do the whole thing online.
A few moments later, Carlson drops the hammer:
Unless they change radically, a lot of these places are likely to go under in the coming years. There is not enough federal bailout money in the Treasury to save every pointless university in a bad recession. They will be gone for good, closed, repurposed, we can hope, into much-needed efficiency apartments with loads of appealing green space.
Watch the whole thing below:
As Carlson pointed out, schools like Harvard will be fine. They have an endowment that’s worth tens of billions of dollars. Which is why it’s rather surprising that the school is reportedly not going to pay certain people on their workforce during this crisis.
Harvard is laying off nearly all dining workers. While the univ. has agreed to provide 30 days’ pay for the directly hired dining workers who work at the College, they are refusing to provide this pay for the subcontracted dining workers at @Harvard_Law https://t.co/7tlcyq7fIH
— Jared Odessky (@jaredodessky) March 20, 2020
From the story at the Action Network:
Harvard, Pay All Your Workers
As Harvard shuts down operations to protect the public’s health, it must take steps to ensure that all university employees — including subcontracted and temporary employees — can support and care for themselves and their families during this global pandemic. Currently, many workers at Harvard face an immediate loss of pay and will be unable to make ends meet in the midst of this crisis.
If only Harvard had a bank account with vast sums of money it could dip into to help set a model for appropriate corporate responsibility during times of national crisis https://t.co/XxbeRBKICe
— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) March 21, 2020
Harvard is an investment fund with a university attached. https://t.co/Yy0u1v1SH3
— Stephen Wertheim (@stephenwertheim) March 22, 2020
Let’s do some math
Harvard has 22,947 students
Charges $50,420 for tuition
That’s $1.2bn per year from tuition
The receive $596m in grants from the govt
Endowment is $40.9bn
They can’t afford to pay their employees?
BS
Students should not go into debt for these misers https://t.co/dbxAYieJO0
— Dylan Stevenson (@StevensonForNY) March 21, 2020
Microsoft is paying dining workers for lost time and started doing this weeks before the govt told people to stay home.
Harvard has a $40 billion endowment. https://t.co/mOMp9w6dap
— PoliMath (@politicalmath) March 21, 2020
There is not a single person who works for Harvard who should be forced to go without during this crisis.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
The future includes panty raid via Skype. Oh the humanity!
“Public” education IS DEAD.
So, then we’re talking about Kathleen Sebelius and Sylvia Burwell
With the coming glut of liberal arts profs and admins on the street, can we cancel, or at least dramatically pare back, the H-1B visa program?
Generally, the H-1 visa goes to people in STEM disciplines.
Generally H-1B visas go to run-of-the-mill programmers and analysts who work for far less than more skilled Americans.
I don’t think my degree could be earned online. Too much is lab work. Too much is screwing something up and having to figure out what happened so you don’t screw it up next time.
There are some degrees which can’t be learned entirely online. Nursing, for example. Or (at the community college level) auto mechanics. And for science and engineering labs, a virtual lab can only go so far: at some point you really should have some real hands-on lab experience.
BUT 90% of most curricula, and nearly 100% of those introductory survey courses taught in auditorium-size “classrooms,” could be taught online.
And you’d get better instruction, as the instructors would be selected abovfe all for their ability to teach.
Of course, the one thing that accredited and name-brand schools retain is a lock on the ability to award meaningful education credentials. And although we might wish to believe students are on campus primarily for the education, it should be obvious they wouldn’t be writing those checks for the same educational content if it were offered in not-for-credit courses.
So, sure, most instruction could be delivered at far lower cost. And, really, seat-time (aka credit-hours) could be replaced by well-designed and well-proctored comprehensive exams. But so long as these schools retain a monopoly on accepted credentials they can and will continue to charge whatever the traffic (and the taxpayer!) will bear.
There are some disciplines which it is clearly in the national interest to support. E.g., science, engineering, medicine.
Others are much harder to justify on that basis: gender studies, history of cinema, drama, etc.
Then are things that fall somewhere in between. It might be controversial to say it, but I don’t think the nation would suffer too much if, for example, law schools and the political science departments had to pay their own way.
Speaking of visas, I also think it’s important to encourage and support American citizens enrolling in those fields that are clearly in the national interest. It does us little good as a nation to bankroll someone’s education if they’re just going to take what they learn back to some other country — especially if we’re not growing the same expertise in our own population.
Schools of “journalism”? Or “education”?
Nix on them both. Almost seems like they’re deliberately doing damage to the nation. And we get to subsidize the costs. Just super, eh?
You don’t understand how this stuff works — constant leftist virtue signalling means they get a pass on actually acting virtueous.
Contract workers at Harvard are not employees of Harvard, they’re employees of a contract agency. That’s pretty much the whole idea of contract work. Harvard is no more responsible for their financial well-being than I’m responsible for the solvency of the Chinese restaurant down the street just because I’m an occasional customer.
As for the fantasy that college education can be performed remotely . . . well, to the extent that it’s possible, that’s been going on for years. All the material to be learned is in print, and we’ve had an excellent library system for years. Yet we still have brick-and-mortar colleges. Evidently they supply something which can’t otherwise be done from afar. And computers and video don’t change that.
“Independent study” track is successful only if the student is motivated. University of WAshington School of Medicine offered two paths , one classical lecture route and the other a mix of independent and lecture studies. That said, after graduation maintenance is both lecture and independent study …so for professionals it is already part of ongoing education.
I wonder if Oberlin will create a “novel” Wuhan argument of why not the pay Gibsons?
Depending on how you define “college education” you may be correct. But as you also noted all the stuff one needs to know to become a productive person is available to any and all who seek it. Its a matter of motivation.
Right now many colleges are shifting to on-line instruction so that students can complete the semester (or quarter). Will people discover that they do not need to sit in a lecture hall so that some professor can read the text book they wrote to them (where said text book is a required purchase). Maybe they could just read the book. Will this cause a shift in the direction of on-line and self-instruction? Who knows.
Of course this pushes the responsibility for determining who really knows what they need to know off onto the business world. College served as a decent screening process to see if people could put up with the BS that they will face in the real world. Maybe if will push businesses, separately or as a group, to provide their own training specific to the jobs or job sectors that benefit the business.
This whole mess just might stimulate some real thinking going forward.
During the 1950s, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev instituted huge cuts in the military and, understandably, there was considerable opposition to his efforts. The military’s demand for resources was insatiable, and Khrushchev remarked, “If you gave the military their way they would impoverish the country and say at the end, ‘This is still not enough!’ ”
So it is with America’s education-industrial complex. You could devote the nation’s entire GDP to that sphere, and they would still complain about inadequate funding.
The military in the Soviet Union at least had a point: they were the glue holding millions prisoner in the fascist empire.
In the case of corrupt leftist hacks at American universities brainwashing kids with useless and destructive b.s., they are all about the MONEY. Period.
I would say that ideology and power are more important.
Perhaps they could redistribute the endowments…
Socialists do not redistribute their own money. Just ask Bernie.
There is a lot wrong with higher education in the US, a lot right about it as many foreign folks desire to get into one of our universities for the prestige. But that prestige was earned many decades ago and is being chipped away.
I would suggest this, a moratorium on hiring by state and federal government from so called elite colleges, such as Harvard. These government should be recruiting from the colleges they created such as state schools. This would improve the quality of students going to these schools and lessen the significant influence from the elite, which has been excessive the last 100 years.
Those schools charging a tuition that is greater than 100% of what a student could earn during the summer should justify that cost. It is wrong to be subjecting these poor people to debt they can never repay. Revamp the student loans so that they are not just a cash cow going to excessive college expense. Room and board should be drastically reduced to the point that it can be covered by a working student during the year. This was the system when I was in school. Sure we did not have air conditioning, or other fancy assets, but we survived.
Finally, colleges are judged by some of the most bizarre of parameters. Such as number of students retained, what the hell. LSU used to accept every student in the state that desired to go to college. Some years that was 20,000 or more. Classes were held in large auditoriums, it was truly something to see. But the next semester, 10,000 were not there, the follow semester only 5,000 were there and the numbers kept going down. When you finished, you knew that you could take on anything. The consequence to failure was going to Vietnam and dying. Think of the snow flakes facing that.
“There is a lot wrong with higher education in the US…”
Oh, come on.
In the aggregate, higher education exists in the US ONLY as a propaganda machine and a fascist left corrupter of young people.
Destroying most of the higher education b.s. liberal arts mills would be the best thing ever to this nation: kids would have to work to get into college. High school would become academically relevant again, instead of being another leftist corrupter of young people.
Hear Hear!
Explains the “ALL” of why DEMS want free college for all….
RE: “In the aggregate, higher education exists in the US ONLY as a propaganda machine and a fascist left corrupter of young people.”
Long distance learning from an Israeli mom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U6zU4MXmnA
My parents plunked me in the middle of Iowa at a big university when I was 18… There was Sorority rush / joining and my huge dormitory was co-ed.
Besides the non stop partying, I remember a few classes.
I transferred to a different university; more partying and a few more classes.
I. HATED. EVERY. MINUTE. OF. IT.
I quit, got a full time job and have been working full time in IT for 30 years – learning as I went and taking job related training. All good and a great career!
More Trade Schools
Less Universities
Just my $.02
Hear Hear!
We need more like you Lisa!
I hope I live to see leftist Harvard professors working at Starbucks.
That’s too high end for them……..
Walmart Greeter is what their IQ might qualify them for….