The Higher Education Bubble

Book Description
Publication Date: June 26, 2012

America is facing a higher education bubble. Like the housing bubble, it is the product of cheap credit coupled with popular expectations of ever-increasing returns on investment, and as with housing prices, the cheap credit has caused college tuitions to vastly outpace inflation and family incomes. Now this bubble is bursting.

In this Broadside, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explains the causes and effects of this bubble and the steps colleges and universities must take to ensure their survival. Many graduates are unable to secure employment sufficient to pay off their loans, which are usually not dischargeable in bankruptcy. As students become less willing to incur debt for education, colleges and universities will have to adapt to a new world of cost pressures and declining public support.

About the Author
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee. He writes for such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, Popular Mechanics, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Examiner. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

Also see:

.

From DSC:
Note many of the relevant categories and tags I put this under — items I’ve been covering for years:

  • Walmart of Education
  • Cost of obtaining a degree
  • Reinventing oneself
  • Dangers of the status quo
  • Game-changing environment
  • Future of higher education
  • Leadership
  • Strategy
  • Staying relevant
  • Disruption
  • Surviving

 

Doctors on demand: 5 startups wiping out the waiting room — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner

 

Tagged with:  

Beyond Siri - A report regarding the future of Virtual Assistants -- from VisionMobile -- June 2012

 

Contents

  • Virtual assistants: four generations in 20 years
  • The evolving VA technology landscape
  • The VA Competitive landscape
  • VA business models: Revenue share rather than paid app downloads
  • Leaders and challengers in the VA value chain
  • Beyond Siri: What’s in store in the VA market

Behind this report

  • Lead researcher: Marlène Sellebråten
  • Project lead: Michael Vakulenko
  • Marketing lead: Matos Kapetanakis
  • Editorial: Andreas Constantinou

 

How would you like a graduate degree for $100 — from forbes.com by George Anders
Sebastian Thrun wants to fix what’s broken with higher ed. How about a master’s degree for $100?

Changing the Economics of Education -- John Hennessy and Salman Khan at 2012 All Things Digitall

 

Excerpt:

Is there anything to be done about the rising price of higher education? That was the question posed to John Hennessy, president of Stanford University, and Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit online-learning organization. They sat down with The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg to discuss how technology might be part of the solution.

Here are edited excerpts of their conversation.

 

Addendum on 6/7/12:

  • D10: Stanford, Khan Academy, and the future of higher ed — from techhive.com by Jason Snell
    Excerpt:
    Though the crushing cost of college education wasn’t a major topic of Khan and Hennessy’s conversation with D10 co-host Walt Mossberg, it’s certainly a major cause of anxiety for parents. But most of the time, the conversation dwelled on the simple issue that technology is going to radically transform education—and right now everyone’s trying to figure out how to manage that change. “There’s a tsunami coming,” Hennessy said. “I don’t know how it’s going to break, but my goal is to try to surf it, not just stand there.” At its simplest form, technology needs to find ways to make education more efficient. That means serving more students, but also teaching them more effectively.

 

7 things colleges worry about – from CBSNews.com by Lynn O’Shaughnessy

Excerpts from “What’s worrying college administrators?”

  1. After peaking in 2008, the number of high school students has been declining slowly.
  2. While high school grads in the West and South have remained mostly stable, the number of teenagers has declined significantly in the East and Midwest.
  3. Between 2000 and 2010, the real median income for families dropped nearly 11 percent.
  4. High unemployment remains persistent.
  5. Many families owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.
  6. With flat and falling income and high unemployment, many American families are poorer now than they were five years ago.
  7. Looking further into the future, the financial reality for younger families (ages 25 to 34), who will eventually be sending their children to college, is grim.

Also see the below items from Lawlor.com

From DSC:
Just looking at the title one of the above items — “When Market Conditions and Public Perception Collide: A Looming Crisis for Higher Education” (by Amy Foster) — those of us working within higher education don’t want to be in the “Have you driven a Ford lately?” mode. That is, once we lose the public’s confidence and trust in our products and/or services, it will be very hard to get those things back. Not impossible, but difficult.

Two additional thoughts here:

  • Reputation, like china, is easily cracked and hard to mend.
  • There is tremendous and lasting power in the ideas and perceptions that reside within people’s thoughts. Once an idea catches hold, it’s hard to stop.

 

 

The Campus Tsunami — from The New York Times by David Brooks

Excerpts:

But, over the past few months, something has changed.The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.

What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

From DSC:
What David Brooks said in this last bolded sentence (above) is what I have been saying, but in a slightly different way:

Other industries have been up to bat, and the Internet was pitching.  Higher education used to be on deck. But now, higher education is at bat.

 

Harvard, MIT to partner in $60 million initiative to offer free online classes to all — from Boston.com by Mary Carmichael and Johanna Kaiser, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent

Excerpt:

CAMBRIDGE — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said today they will team up to launch a $60 million initiative to offer free, online, college-level courses under a joint superbrand known as edX.

The announcement instantly makes the entity a preeminent player in the burgeoning worldwide online education sector, which has seen several major start-ups — including some affiliated with top-tier universities — in recent months.

Also see:

  • MIT and Harvard announce edX — from mit.edu
    Joint partnership builds on MITx and Harvard distance learning; aims to benefit campus-based education and beyond.
  • EdX: A platform for more MOOCs and an opportunity for more research about teaching and learning online — from InsideHigherEd.com by Audrey Watters
    Excerpt:
    At a joint press conference today, Harvard University President Drew Faust and MIT President Susan Hockfield announced a new nonprofit partnership, edX, that would offer free open online courses. If the “X” sounds familiar when paired with MIT, it’s because the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled its plans for MITx late last year, its online learning initiative that would allow anyone with an Internet connection to take an online class from the university and receive a certificate upon successful completion. The first class, 6.002x Circuits and Electronics, is currently underway.
  • EdX: The Future of Online Education is Now
  • Harvard and MIT launch edX to offer free online classes — from CNN.com by James O’Toole
    NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Always wanted to take a Harvard class? Soon you’ll be able to do so from the comfort of your own home.
  • Massive Courses, Massive Data — from InsideHigherEd.com by Steve Kolowich
    Harvard joins MT in platform to offer massive online courses

“Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice,” Wales said. But it won’t be Wikipedia (or Encarta) that kills the moviemaking industry: ” Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica,” he said.

— quote from Jimmy Wales to Hollywood: You’re Doomed (And Not Because of Piracy) at wired.com by Ryan Singel

Yes, University of Phoenix is disruptive; no, that doesn’t make it the end-all — from Disrupting Class by Michael Horn

Excerpt:

A disruptive innovation is one that transforms a sector by introducing a product or service that is more convenient, simple to use, and/or affordable than the existing products or services in a market. Disruptions tend to start as not as good as the existing products or services as judged by their historical measures of performance, and then, over time, they are able to march up market such that they are able to handle more complicated tasks. Many people flock to the disruptive innovation over time as it becomes good enough, as the customers are delighted by something that carries this new value proposition around convenience, simplicity, and/or affordability. As a result of these dynamics, disruptive innovations first serve nonconsumers (people who previously could not participate in the market) or people who have been overshot by the incumbents in the market. A critical thing to keep in mind is that this process does not occur over night; sometimes it occurs over several decades. And not every incumbent or traditional institution will be wiped away. Some will continue to perform important jobs for which a, relatively speaking, small set of customers are willing to pay.

Lastly, for something to be a disruptive innovation, it has to have two components: a technology enabler and a business model that together allow it to extend a low-cost value proposition up market.

NTT videoconferencing system transplants faces onto mobile telepresence screens

 

From DSC:

  • Another innovation that aids web-based collaboration.
  • Make that one more movement up the disruptive innovation curve (of online learning).

 

 

As an addendum on 3/4, check out:

The higher education monopoly is crumbling as we speak — from The New Republic by Kevin Carey

Excerpt:

In the last few months, however, that monopoly has begun to crumble. New organizations are being created to offer new kinds of degrees, in a manner and at a price that could completely disrupt the enduring college business model. The question is: Which colleges and universities will be the G.E. of the twenty-first century, and which will be as forgotten as U.S. Leather?

Student-loan debt tops $1 trillion — from WSJ.com by Josh Mitchell and Maya Jackson-Randall

Excerpt:

The amount Americans owe on student loans is far higher than earlier estimates and could lead some consumers to postpone buying homes, potentially slowing the housing recovery, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Total student debt outstanding appears to have surpassed $1 trillion late last year, said officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency created in the wake of the financial crisis. That would be roughly 16% higher than an estimate earlier this year by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

From DSC:
Phrases/words that come to my mind include (which many readers of this blog and my archived website will instantly recognize:

  • Reinventing ourselves
  • Staying relevant /addressing our customers’ needs
  • Innovation
  • Strategy
  • Leadership
  • Vision
  • The business side of higher ed / new business models
  • Game-changing environment
  • Disruption
  • Dangers of the status quo
  • Student-related
  • Future of higher education
  • The Walmart of Education
  • Learning from the Living Room

Addendum on 3/23/12:

 

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