Boston College ex-dean warns "colleges are losing billions of dollars"

a reply to: Never Despise

Gosh, sounds like the public school system, and it's what happens when government makes education affordable. No incentive and no pressure to ever allocate money wisely.

originally posted by: Edumakated
The college / student loan bubble will burst. People are reassessing the value of higher education.

I see the top schools surviving as they have the endowments and cache to warrant the price.

The mid tier schools are the ones that will suffer. They don't offer the prestige of top tier schools but still cost a boatload in tuition and still have a lot of overhead with amenities that aren't being utilized.

Schools that can respond quickly and offer online learning and a reasonable cost will do well.

I will give you credit for being out in front of this, as my recollection is that you authored a thread on this very subject, i.e. the impending burst of the student load debt bubble. IIRC you wrote it before the pandemic, but the lock-downs are merely exacerbating what already was an unsustainable system.

As you pointed out, it's all about the endowments. The Ivy League and upper tier schools (I attended such a private college in the N.E. that has an outrageous endowment fund) will weather the storm. In fact, as alluded to in the ZeroHedge article from the OP, the upper crust institutions will likely come out ahead of the game due to the impending consolidation/contraction in academia, similar to what we see in terms of more $$$ flowing up to the already wealthy as a consequence of COVID's economic disruption.

What on earth does Harvard need 40 billion dollars for?

a reply to: Never Despise

Whatever they want.
That is the sad reality of higher education.

The UC system has billions in the bank, but they expect each department to pay for things like waste collection, maintenance on UC facilities, and other obvious costs that should be covered by the University.

Higher edu is a money scam. Plain and simple.

a reply to: Nivhk

Corporate data and "important" peoples data aren't exactly safe either. I can't call out companies or individuals, violation of NDA, but I can tell you no person or entity is safe from cyber attacks in this country. I get an alert from our incident response queue whenever it's updated, it updates quite a few times each day, some big, some small. That doesn't even count the business we turn away because of the lack of capacity.