The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Likely Bring More College Closures in the Fall
“many schools are beholden to semi-annual tuition payments, which are about to undergo the biggest shock since the Second World War”
This spring sent a shock wave across college campuses, but it could get much worse next fall.
Charles Fain Lehman writes at the Washington Free Beacon:
American Colleges Are Headed for a Meltdown
They’ve been through riots, protests, and natural disasters—but America’s colleges have never seen anything like the financial meltdown the coronavirus is about to bring to their campuses.
The rising wave of health fears, added costs, and vanishing tuition payments could crush small colleges, many of which were already hanging by a financial thread. Those that can weather the crisis—including big-name universities with billions in their bank accounts—in turn stand to gain big from the fallout.
The emptying out of schools and the mass transition to distance learning has already been “the largest all-sector hit that we’ve ever seen,” Jim Hundrieser, a vice president with the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), told the Washington Free Beacon. But the challenges of this spring pale in comparison to the shock many colleges are expecting in the fall, when social distancing measures and a possible second wave could create the most surreal semester ever.
That strangeness, experts project, could in turn cause a massive drop in college revenue. Well-endowed colleges and big research schools have the savings to weather those effects. But many schools are beholden to semi-annual tuition payments, which are about to undergo the biggest shock since the Second World War.
The result could see the shuttering of many universities, particularly small liberal arts colleges, accelerating a trend of rising closures since the Great Recession.
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so, basically, it sped up the slow death that was coming anyway.
The college bubble makes the 2008 housing bubble look like a small hiccup.
Guess what?
Even those obsencely over-endowed colleges are going to be lacking enough students.
Most Students at Princeton Would Take Leave of Absence
if In-Person Classes Don’t Resume
Posted by Mike LaChance Tuesday, May 19, 2020 at 8:00am
From the article: “The result could see the shuttering of many universities, particularly small liberal arts colleges, accelerating a trend of rising closures since the Great Recession.”
The colleges with courses like Navel Gazing 101 are a waste of any resources one cares to name. However, there are many with genuinely valuable curricula that will also suffer greatly.
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