6
votes
The coming disruption - Scott Galloway predicts a handful of elite universities and tech companies will soon monopolize higher education
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- Title
- The Coming Disruption to College
- Authors
- James D. Walsh
- Published
- May 11 2020
- Word count
- 2536 words
This is an interesting prediction, but it makes a lot of assumptions that aren't valid, and I don't think it holds much water as a result. University enrollment is a lot more complicated than "we have to get more students." The largest colleges in the US are public university systems like SUNY. No individual campus gets above 70,000, which is still astronomically high. The Ivy League's student bodies are significantly smaller than that; the largest is Columbia, with about 31,000 students, only 9,000 of whom are undergrads.
There are many reasons that elite universities are not already the absolute largest ones out there. First and foremost, elite colleges are by nature elite, not just socioeconomically but academically. Not every student can get into Harvard, even if they want to. This means that although their application pools are large, their realistic application pools aren't. This could certainly change if less prestigious schools end up going out of business, as the article predicts, but the other side of the coin is that not every student who can get into Harvard wants to go to Harvard. I certainly wouldn't. This is something that universities are aware of themselves; admissions officers of elite schools usually try to cultivate a particular culture within their student body, and even if they don't, that culture still exists, and is extremely obvious to prospective students upon a campus visit. It is not possible to maintain that culture while also "expanding enrollment dramatically." Galloway says that "the reality is these schools can double or triple their enrollments without sacrificing anything in terms of their brands," but I really don't think that this is true. Housing 3x as many students on a single campus would be a logistical nightmare solved only by pushing them to off-campus housing, which I think further evaporates any sense of a desirable "campus culture." College in the US is intentionally a very different experience than in Europe.
It is also mathematically impossible for the colleges remaining in the world this theory envisions to "have student bodies composed primarily of the children of the one percent" while also being the largest ones in the country. Apparently this will be the case because non-wealthy students will have moved to online learning, but I seriously doubt that most students will voluntarily do that, and strictly speaking nothing them is forcing them to right now either. I have not met a single student who is already at a brick-and-mortar school who enjoys the online experience, primarily because "going to college" means a lot more than "taking college classes." It means living on a physical campus, surrounded by other young adults. I don't think that most students would even accept a "hybrid" approach for more than a couple of semesters. It would have to already be the norm for them to begrudgingly do so, which it isn't. Because they still have a lot of choice now, universities which make this their exclusive model are not going to see much benefit. The University of Phoenix's online graduation rate is literally 5% compared to 17% overall. Clearly, being for-profit in and of itself is not the deciding factor; being online is.
Tech companies also do not control the entire economy, and most college graduates are not computer science majors. I dislike the obsession that so many people have with these "tech giants"; Google has 118,000 employees, not 118,000,000. There are a lot of places to work that are effectively outside of the model that he suggests; small, mid-sized, and large companies already "partner" with universities all the time via career fairs and networking tools, but this isn't limited to strictly elite schools to begin with, and plenty of students end up working for significantly smaller companies (and do just fine). New niches are constantly being created, and the people who fill these aren't necessarily the employees of Silicon Valley giants.
I do not like doomsday predictions, and the pandemic we're going through doesn't change that perspective. It wouldn't surprise me if a few brick-and-mortar universities did close after this academic year, but I can't imagine anything to the extent that this author suggests.
Just to give a bit of context, Galloway regularly makes big, sometimes wild claims (for example, he repeatedly said that Michael Bloomberg was definitely going to win the Democratic primary). I find his predictions amusing to read and it gives you something to consider, but I would not take what he says as any sort of indication of the future. That is, he's good at imagining future possibilities (that others might not consider), but he doesn't really seem to be good at predicting which one will actually happen.
From the article:
This is literally my worst nightmare, and truly the natural conclusion to a trend I noticed that ultimately led to me dropping out of college. Universities exploit students.