Tag Archives: unemployment

Higher Education Teeters

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Every sector of the economy is going to be severely tested by pandemic closings and related fallout.

As one example, the pandemic will test every college and university and could be a deathblow to some of the growing number of economically distressed colleges and universities. Here are a few of the pandemic’s probable ripple effects:

  • fewer campus visits of prospective students, leading to a decline in applications
  • far fewer international student applications
  • reduced yields of accepted students because families will be unable to afford even deeply discounted tuition, room and board
  • a loss of good will as upset families seek refunds from March-May tuition, room and board
  • shrinking endowments meaning less “passive income” to pay salaries, keep the lights on, and maintain campus facilities*
  • reduced alumni giving due to widespread loss of income and wealth
  • due to a spike in unemployment, graduates will struggle even more to find white collar jobs that pay a “livable wage” and provide benefits, further complicating the sine qua non of higher education

Educational institutions change slowly, but the pandemic is likely to accelerate The Great Contraction. The most distressed institutions will close shop. Others will seek partners with whom to merge. Every college and university has to become much clearer about the two or three things they do especially well. Even if they successfully refine their missions and curricula, a growing number of faculty, administrators, and staff will lose their jobs.

Tough times indeed.

*the total amount of deferred maintenance is an excellent indicator of relative fiscal health

 

Forego College?

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Consider the recent higher ed news. Absent remediation, most high school graduates are unlikely to succeed in college. Too many college students aren’t learning much. Tuition inflation continues at a faster pace than even healthcare insurance and total student debt now exceeds credit card debt.

At the risk of simplifying things, there are two types of eighteen year olds (and people more generally): risk-averse single hitters who plan on working for someone else and entrepreneurial power hitters not afraid of starting a biz and possibly whiffing.

Neither group is inherently better than the other, but a college degree makes more sense for the first group since most livable wage paying organizations and businesses require at least one. One hopes the single hitters understand a college degree doesn’t guarantee nearly as much as it did a few decades ago. Like a miler standing stationary at the firing of a starter’s gun, they’re paying considerable money up front to increase their odds of future employment success as illustrated by this dramatic graphic.

Of course there are many intangible benefits to a good college education—such as greater independence and self understanding—but those things aren’t necessarily exclusive to those populating leafy college campuses.

Given the escalating costs of higher education and the unprecedented internet-based accessibility to knowledge and people around the world, why aren’t more ambitious, talented, smart, hardworking, risk-oriented, entrepreneurial eighteen year olds using the time right after high school to refine their knowledge and skills on their own in order to create new niches within the economy? Why isn’t there more of an Abraham Lincoln or Mark Cuban-like autodidacticism at work today?

Is it because everyone is afraid to go college-less first, or because parents fear their childrens’ short-term business failures and long-term economic vulnerability, or is something else at work?

Empathy Impaired

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The New York Times’ commentators have been writing a fair amount about how to revive our moribund economy and related issues like consumer and government spending, taxes, and unemployment. Sometimes I find the readers’ “recommended comments” more interesting than the essays themselves. They’re liberal and decidely cynical about life in the U.S. today. Their most common rallying cries are corporate greed, class warfare, out-of-touch politicians, and right-wing media.

Recently, they’ve been most fired up about members of Congress being out-of-touch with ordinary citizens, many who have been laid off, and too many that appear to be entering into permanent unemployment.

The question I haven’t seen asked is how does one, whether a member of Congress, or a college professor, develop empathy for the under-employed or short, medium, or long-term unemployed? The best answer of course is direct personal experience, but giving up one’s job in the interest of greater empathy doesn’t make much sense.

There have to be better ways, whether documentaries, essays, novels, photographs, music, and plays, that can help humanize the out-of-touch among us. The arts seem especially well suited to this task. I wish The Times’ irate, cynical commentators would each choose an art form and begin telling their stories with the out-of-touch Congress as their primary audience.