Maybe worth noting that 8 years later, Sweet Briar is still going, after drive-by punditry pronounced it inevitably dead. There is in that sense another side to the story for some of the small places that are struggling, which is incompetent or indifferent administrative leadership--in the years before the leadership tried to close the place down, they didn't have a development team trying to reach out to the alumni, they didn't have an admissions director or an admissions strategy that was looking for students and families that might prefer an all-woman's institution, and they weren't working with faculty to think about some kind of planned, coherent restructuring of the curriculum. Maybe some, by no means all, of the places that are in trouble are in trouble because they're badly led.
Moreover, every time folks announce an institution has closed and say "oh here comes the wave!", I go and look at the details, and so far it's almost never a conventional long-standing liberal arts college that's been in continuous operation for more than a century with more or less a stable identity. It's institutions that are much younger, that have renamed or rebranded themselves multiple times, that never really had much of a toehold to begin with, even in a very local market. I am sure that there are going to be some non-selective small colleges with little to no endowments that are going to go out of business in the next decade, but nothing like the 50% out of business predicted by Clayton Christensen, a number that a lot of pundits repeated credulously. Sometimes because they didn't know that Christensen was basically flacking for ed-tech companies that have a lot invested in the idea that higher ed is a failure and only ed-tech can save it with online courses; sometimes because the pundits are also flacking for them. The bloom being off the rose of online courses after we all got an involuntary taste of what they're like, the flacking has moved on to AI, but it's the same message.
Community colleges to me seem like the genuinely big story here--that's a place where my own predictive instincts have been consistently off. I don't really understand why they're seeing the precipitous drop that they are experiencing--they're still fairly affordable and they provide courses and degrees that have direct, tangible links to specific fields of work. It's possible that the main issue is one that Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about in Lower Ed, which is that too many of them are still offering most of their courses when working students or students with families can't manage to take them. Another is maybe that everybody who thinks the answer is to have a very tight fit between post-secondary education and specific vocational training is wrong, either because the vocations aren't very appealing or we don't actually have a skills gap and a hungry labor market or because there is training that most CCs aren't offering that potential students would like to take. Or maybe the people who aren't enrolling in CC aren't enrolling in anything because they're giving up, or they're seeking work that doesn't require any kind of ongoing education or certification. But it's a major question.
Hi Tim! Thanks for this. Just have two minutes here, so have to be quick...
Sweet Briar survived *because* of drive-by punditry, which helped rally its unusually sentimental alumni who donated a lot of money to rescue the school.
The community college problem is really complicated.
The issue about inconvenient class times isn't an issue anymore. A huge chunk of the classes are all online. They are run async by teachers who might not even live in the same state.
Those classes are really bad, btw. Students who didn't have a great K-12 education need awesome teachers in person. That's not happening. The in-person classes aren't great either. The adjunct rate at my local community college is less than $3K per class. It's just people with random masters degrees plopped in the room.
Registering for classes is insanely tough with clunky online portals and administrators who are just punching the clock.
Meanwhile, there's a lot more competition. Ian is half way through his Google IT certification (a coursera class, $55 per month), which is accepted everywhere and is widely respected. There is absolutely no reason for him to go to the community college for this credential. The Geek Squad would hire him now. Ian will keep taking his community college classes, though, but only because he actually loves college. He might transfer to a technical college after that. Not sure.
I'm going to say that the drive-by pundits did not have it mind to call attention to a situation with the hope of a better outcome--it was just a notch on the belt for a lot of folks who already had committed to the idea that Christensen was more or less right; most of the coverage was "I told you so", and very little of it took any detailed interest in whether the causes were more local, specific and contingent (in the sense of 'could have been avoided'). So I don't think the punditry gets any credit here--it's like someone writing a blog post about the dead body in the alley near their apartment, which then spurs someone else in the neighborhood to investigate and find that it's a sick person who needs medical attention. Technically the blogger helped, but they didn't especially intend to.
Maybe worth noting that 8 years later, Sweet Briar is still going, after drive-by punditry pronounced it inevitably dead. There is in that sense another side to the story for some of the small places that are struggling, which is incompetent or indifferent administrative leadership--in the years before the leadership tried to close the place down, they didn't have a development team trying to reach out to the alumni, they didn't have an admissions director or an admissions strategy that was looking for students and families that might prefer an all-woman's institution, and they weren't working with faculty to think about some kind of planned, coherent restructuring of the curriculum. Maybe some, by no means all, of the places that are in trouble are in trouble because they're badly led.
Moreover, every time folks announce an institution has closed and say "oh here comes the wave!", I go and look at the details, and so far it's almost never a conventional long-standing liberal arts college that's been in continuous operation for more than a century with more or less a stable identity. It's institutions that are much younger, that have renamed or rebranded themselves multiple times, that never really had much of a toehold to begin with, even in a very local market. I am sure that there are going to be some non-selective small colleges with little to no endowments that are going to go out of business in the next decade, but nothing like the 50% out of business predicted by Clayton Christensen, a number that a lot of pundits repeated credulously. Sometimes because they didn't know that Christensen was basically flacking for ed-tech companies that have a lot invested in the idea that higher ed is a failure and only ed-tech can save it with online courses; sometimes because the pundits are also flacking for them. The bloom being off the rose of online courses after we all got an involuntary taste of what they're like, the flacking has moved on to AI, but it's the same message.
Community colleges to me seem like the genuinely big story here--that's a place where my own predictive instincts have been consistently off. I don't really understand why they're seeing the precipitous drop that they are experiencing--they're still fairly affordable and they provide courses and degrees that have direct, tangible links to specific fields of work. It's possible that the main issue is one that Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about in Lower Ed, which is that too many of them are still offering most of their courses when working students or students with families can't manage to take them. Another is maybe that everybody who thinks the answer is to have a very tight fit between post-secondary education and specific vocational training is wrong, either because the vocations aren't very appealing or we don't actually have a skills gap and a hungry labor market or because there is training that most CCs aren't offering that potential students would like to take. Or maybe the people who aren't enrolling in CC aren't enrolling in anything because they're giving up, or they're seeking work that doesn't require any kind of ongoing education or certification. But it's a major question.
Hi Tim! Thanks for this. Just have two minutes here, so have to be quick...
Sweet Briar survived *because* of drive-by punditry, which helped rally its unusually sentimental alumni who donated a lot of money to rescue the school.
The community college problem is really complicated.
The issue about inconvenient class times isn't an issue anymore. A huge chunk of the classes are all online. They are run async by teachers who might not even live in the same state.
Those classes are really bad, btw. Students who didn't have a great K-12 education need awesome teachers in person. That's not happening. The in-person classes aren't great either. The adjunct rate at my local community college is less than $3K per class. It's just people with random masters degrees plopped in the room.
Registering for classes is insanely tough with clunky online portals and administrators who are just punching the clock.
Meanwhile, there's a lot more competition. Ian is half way through his Google IT certification (a coursera class, $55 per month), which is accepted everywhere and is widely respected. There is absolutely no reason for him to go to the community college for this credential. The Geek Squad would hire him now. Ian will keep taking his community college classes, though, but only because he actually loves college. He might transfer to a technical college after that. Not sure.
I'm going to say that the drive-by pundits did not have it mind to call attention to a situation with the hope of a better outcome--it was just a notch on the belt for a lot of folks who already had committed to the idea that Christensen was more or less right; most of the coverage was "I told you so", and very little of it took any detailed interest in whether the causes were more local, specific and contingent (in the sense of 'could have been avoided'). So I don't think the punditry gets any credit here--it's like someone writing a blog post about the dead body in the alley near their apartment, which then spurs someone else in the neighborhood to investigate and find that it's a sick person who needs medical attention. Technically the blogger helped, but they didn't especially intend to.