Higher learning’s future is troubled further by students’ changing attitudes about what they want from it. Simpson Scarborough, the higher education marketing and research firm, surveyed a mix of incoming freshmen and returning students in late July and made a number of troubling discoveries: 40% of incoming freshmen say it’s either likely or very likely they’ll change their minds about the school they picked. Only 17% of students want to go back in person full time. In fact, 40% of incoming freshmen said it’s likely they won’t go back to school at all this fall. (Kantrowitz calls the accepted or enrolled students who don’t actually attend part of the “summer melt.”)

Lower birth rates mean that colleges were already going to run into unhappy demographic shifts in their enrollments in the next couple of years, Walker says. The Covid crisis accelerated that problem.

EDMIT, a college advice site, did some data analysis that put 350 colleges at risk of closing. Even before the Covid crisis began, the Chronicle of Higher Education said in 2019 that 1,200 colleges had closed in the previous five years.

Kantrowitz says the EDMIT number of at-risk schools is exaggerated, but says the number of closings could still go into the double or triple digits. “It remains to be seen what Congress does to provide financial assistance to the colleges to help them with reopening costs and to help them defray all the other expenses that are related to the disruption. The money that they gave from the CARES Act wasn’t all that much. And it mostly went to the students, not to the colleges.”

The upshot to all this is that tuition is going up in the future, he says.

At public colleges there’s a feast to famine cycle, he says: Typically, toward the end of recessions, the states have to balance their budgets. Right now, their tax revenue, whether it’s income taxes or sales taxes, both are down significantly. “They have to make up that money somehow, and the first place they cut is support for post-secondary education, and when the public colleges suffer state appropriation declines, one of the main tools they have available is to [raise] tuition,” Kantrowitz explains.

They would normally try to milk this money out of international or out-of-state students—the very people now inclined to stay home in the epidemic era. “Maybe two years from now, assuming there’s a safe and effective vaccine, that’s when I would expect public college tuition to go up at double-digit rates,” he predicts.

The financial strain is going to force institutions to make hard decisions. “In most cases, except for the wealthiest colleges, they are going to reopen, not because the students want it, even though they do; it’s because the college needs money,” Kantrowitz continues. “Their pecuniary interests are dominating things. Any college that was at a financial precipice before the pandemic could possibly be pushed over the edge into permanent closure by the pandemic.” A 10% to 20% enrollment decline is enough to force closure of some of these institutions, he maintains.

Walker adds, “Whether they want to use this language or not, colleges are a business. Those that [can adapt] will figure out how to run more efficiently and survive, and those that don’t, won’t. It’s going to be brutal.”

What’s The Value?
Walker says that when the U.S. comes out the other side of the pandemic, college education won’t look like what it did before. People will now be asking what the return on their investment is—what are the value proposition and cost benefits, exactly? Would you want to spend $150,000 on an education and go into debt and then become an elementary educator or do social work? Might a cheaper associate’s degree or state college education give you a better value?

There are amusing internet arguments about whether plumbers actually make more in lifetime earnings than medical doctors (the argument being that plumbers aren’t saddled with debt and they get started earning earlier, though experts disagree on that). Regardless, not everybody needs an expensive education, Walker says. That’s the real argument Covid-19 has laid bare. The most important thing is to be smart about how you go about it.

“Why wouldn’t we knock out prerequisites and get an associate’s degree and then transfer to an expensive school at a fraction of the price?” she asks. “I think we really need to put our consumer hat on and think this through. I’m very clear about an associate’s degree. Not a couple of classes, not some credits. Not something that the big school can turn down.”