I actually only marginally care that celebrities and wealthy families engaged in fraud to get their students into a handful of well-known colleges and universities. I care that fraudsters exist, certainly, but when I consider the entirety of the mess that is higher ed, I conclude this scandal received way too much front-page press when it should have been relegated to the ‘crime beat’ section. A long-simmering problem that truly deserves more space, above-the-fold, concerns the economics of higher ed. How many colleges can afford to exist in this 21st century? Some have suggested that half of all colleges will be gone within the next few decades. Why? Expenses outpace revenue; a declining student population exists especially in the Midwest and Northeast; online and hybrid learning is disruptive. These factors have already led and will continue to lead to college mergers/consolidations/downsizing/bankruptcies.

Given the precarious state of rural America, I wish Michael Bloomberg had spread out his $1.8 billion higher ed donation to more than just his alma mater (Johns Hopkins). How cool would it have been if he had, instead, sent a $100 million cash infusion to 20 regionally-important but impoverished community colleges or small schools across the country. Small colleges are often the life blood of rural areas across our country. What will happen to the surrounding areas when these institutions disappear? Shouldn’t we care about that?

A few statistics that further inform my world view on higher ed. Around 3.5 million students graduate from high school annually and 40% of those students don’t continue on to higher education. Of the almost 17 million undergraduate students in the US, six million are at 2-yr colleges, seven million attend college part-time (usually b/c they have to work) and…wait for it…only 63,072 TOTAL are enrolled at the eight Ivies. So, yes, I think less emphasis is warranted on fraudsters trying to get their kid to be one of those 63,000 students and a lot more brainpower should be laser-focused on issues of access, jobs and the trillion-dollar debt load of 17 million college students. That it’s not is scandalous.

editor’s addendum: The above article was written two months before anyone had heard of Covid-19. It is abundantly clear that the virus accelerated the pressure on the way colleges budget and operate. Watching the trustees and the administrators respond to the crisis over the past few months has the feel of witnessing a slow motion, multi-car pileup during a winter storm…you want to yell “I told you not to get in the car!” But, you also want to rush in and lend a helping hand. There will be injuries. There will be survivors. Knowing that folks need to learn means that after the accident clears, traffic will cautiously resume to the destination that is higher ed. My hope is that the sudden (overnight!) movement to online forced a reconfiguration which increases access and flexibility and decreases costs and this stultifying focus on rankings.