Drinking from the Firehose | Alex Taussig, Lightspeed | Substack

The High-Level This Week: There are 4,000 universities in the United States that generate over $650 billion in revenue and educated 20 million people annually. A perfect storm involving declining revenues and state funding are putting many of these universities at risk of bankruptcy. Many will not survive. Is this the end of University Inc in the U... See more

Declines in enrollment are life-threatening for most universities, as tuition is the primary source of revenue for most universities. Edmit, a college planning tool for parents and high school seniors, examined financial trends at 937 private universities. The company conservatively estimated the Covid-19 impact as tuition losses of 10 percent in 2... See more

We’ll see a culling among universities. Just as retail closures are accelerating from 9,500 stores in 2019 to more than 15,000 in 2020, we’re going to see dozens, maybe hundreds, of universities not reopen. In academia, we have been preying on the hopes and prayers of the middle class, offering parents the chance to check an instinctive box, giving... See more

This is where the opportunity lies. Through severely overdue cost reductions and deploying small and big tech, we can dramatically lower the cost per student of a college education. The corporatization of campuses, bloated administrations, tenure, a lack of accountability, and a god complex that we, academics, are noble when in fact we’ve been prey... See more