More Than 20 Percent of Universities Could Fail Because of the Lockdowns

The upshot of all of this, according to NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway, is rather disconcerting. In examining some 442 US universities, Galloway estimates that more than 20 percent could fail because of the lockdowns, and that another 30 percent will struggle to remain open. That’s 50 percent of US colleges and universities at very serious (or mortal) risk.

None of this is all that surprising. The number of potential college students is limited by the number of college-ready young people. And that number has not been growing. Faced with a mostly stagnant population, universities started a sort of dance of death several decades ago. To attract more students, institutions started improving their physical plants - first with air-conditioning (that wasn’t a thing in colleges a generation ago), then with newer and better dorms, then with all manner of extravagances like climbing walls, personal trainers, state of the art gyms, campus-wide wifi, and transportation to local hotspots. But these amenities were expensive. To pay for them, universities had to attract still more students, which they did by improving their amenities even further.

And when they had tapped out the population of college-ready young people, universities lowered their standards and started admitting not-so-college-ready young people. But to keep those students in their seats and paying tuition, universities had to provide all manner of remedial help. And that required yet more physical plant and more personnel to get these students to a point that they had at least a chance of graduating. The numbers are unambiguous. In 1970, 17 percent of 18 to 24 year olds in the U.S. were full-time college students at 4-year institutions. That number rose steadily to over 30 percent by 2018. That’s more than a 75 percent growth in the number of college students relative to the population. How is it possible that, over the same decades that the inflation-adjusted price of higher education more than doubled, the population-adjusted number of 18 to 24 year olds opting to go to college increased 75 percent?