Clueless Colleges Closing

Because of a cash crunch

Hollis Robbins writes,

The voices the institution does not want to hear are the ones around the multi-college family dinner table, where mothers say what they would never say in an alumni survey: “What the heck is this?” “This is what I’m paying for?” “It actually doesn’t have to be this way.”

Her point is that college administrators are refusing to confront the fact that parents who attended college years ago are finding that the institutions have gotten more expensive and deliver a worse product.

Michael B. Horn writes¹,

In 2013, the late Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen and I wrote a piece in The New York Times predicting that within 15 years, 25 percent of colleges would close or merge. The claim rested on patterns observed in other industries where rising expenditures, declining demand, and structural change eventually forced institutions to consolidate or declare bankruptcy and restructure.

Since then, over 15 percent of the 4,724 degree-granting colleges or universities that existed at the time we made the prediction have shut their doors.

Yet college leaders seem not to grasp the scale of the problem and, in public, dismiss the danger to their institutions.

My main take-away from Horn’s article is that college presidents are remarkably inept at financial management. They are ostriches, incapable of making the decisions needed to sustain viability.

It strikes me that the very process for selecting college administrators, especially presidents, tends to produce poor outcomes. But it may be that no selection process can work.

If you dig down for the ultimate reason that it is hard to run a university competently, I suspect that it boils down to the personalities of faculty. They have a remarkable gift for putting their egos and status above everything else, including the viability of the institution that pays their salary. Things are different at most other organizations, where employees understand that there is an obligation of the employee to the institution, not just the other way around. Only a minority of professors could last 6 months in a business, where you are expected to care about the organization’s mission, not just your own citation rank.

So if you put a college in the position of financial difficulty, it isn’t going to do the things that a troubled business would do to save itself. It lacks the cohesion needed to undertake what is necessary.

Meanwhile, Sal Khan announces a new, to-be-accredited institution that will include

Applied AI skill-building in real world context, through AI app/product development, building AI agents, and team-based simulations.

As of now, it looks like vaporware. Pointer from Gad Levanon

substacks referenced above: @

A turning point in higher education?

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The most dangerous student on campus

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Your Local College Is Running Out of Cash

1. His article leads by noting that Hampshire College is closing. You may recall that as a high school senior I applied early-decision to Hampshire (I did not get in), which was then quite new and cutting-edge. It is possible that the closure announcement will lead some alumni group to make an effort to save Hampshire. For better or worse, the school wound up in the ultra-Woke lane, and somebody may decide that this is a cause worth keeping alive.