- NYU marketing professor and author Scott Galloway told Business Insider some colleges and universities in the US will not reopen because of the
coronavirus pandemic. - Most colleges are dependent on tuition and room and board from semester to semester, Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, writes in The New York Times.
- A growing number of colleges are facing financial hardship, according to research by a Boston-based
college advising company. - Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at the New York University Stern School of Business and the author of "The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google," spends a lot of time thinking about the future.
For starters, he's accurately predicted Amazon's Whole Foods acquisition a month before it happened. He also was one of the first to say WeWork was headed for trouble with its IPO.
Now, he thinks higher education is about to be shaken up like never before.
In an interview with Business Insider, Galloway said the second-most-disreputable industry, after healthcare right now is education. He expects the top institutions to see a "dip" and come back stronger, but says many second-tier universities may never reopen.
"You're going to see a lot of universities, whether it's a university like Drexel, or Pace, or even a Fordham, I think schools like that may never reopen. We're about to see the disruption in education we've been predicting for decades," he said.
In some ways, the colleges have already seen significant change. The coronavirus pandemic has forced colleges and universities across the nation to go fully remote, taking lectures and labs online in the form of video chats and shared online documents. And many students aren't happy. Some have sued their college for tuition reimbursement, including students at Indiana University, Purdue University, University of Michigan, George Washington University, Boston University, Brown University, and others.
This might just be the beginning.
"We in academia have lost the script and see ourselves now as luxury brands as opposed to public servants," he said, citing high costs and rising debt among young people.
"But here's the thing, the jig is up. People are recognizing that a bunch of Zoom classes without the campus experience is not worth $18,000, much less $58,000 or $68,000," he added.
Most colleges and universities are dependent on tuition and room and board from semester to to semester, Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, writes in The New York Times.
"Remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue," she writes.
In other words, if many students defer a semester or a year, things could drastically change.
A growing number of colleges face serious financial problems, The Boston Globe reported. Before the pandemic, 13 higher education institutions in New England paced financial peril and were in danger of closing within six years, research by Edmit, a Boston-based college advising company showed. Now, that number has jumped to 25.
The president of Wells College in Aurora, New York, said in a statement to the college community that if the college doesn't receive room and board payments for the fall semester, it will be forced to shut down.
Inside Higher Ed reports that colleges are seeing an uptick in questions about deferment.
Galloway expects it to be "a terrible year for the end consumer, as we, as academics try to maintain this hallucination that we can continue to charge what we're charging for a totally substandard experience via Zoom."
He encourages students who are about to start their undergraduate program or a business-school program this fall to take a gap year.
Read the original article on Business Insider