Will smaller universities survive an education recession?
Preface: I know none of you (nor I) can predict the future. However, I'd love insights from more seasoned professors.
I have been trying to estimate where academia in the United States ends up in 5, 10, or 20 years given I am still fairly early in my own career (Psychology at SLAC). Namely, I see 1) the gradual decline of ROI's from bachelors degrees for undergraduates (be that due to oversupply or otherwise), and 2) the erosion of academic standards at the hands of grade inflation, ChatGPT, and increasing class sizes that shrink a professor's ability to give students feedback as existential threats to higher ed.
We are allowing millions of students to take out hundreds of thousands in debt with shrinking ability to pay those loans back. Furthermore, it feels like the public is increasingly seeing higher education institutions as fraudulent - even after controlling for the current admin. Is this not an almost perfect parallel to the 2007-2008 financial crisis, in which a system that is supposed to produce value and regulate itself is packaged and sold irresponsibly? And more importantly, if that is the case and the crash is looming, where is the cutoff for institutions that survive versus go belly up? I just want to know whether I need to jump up to an R1 to weather the storm or if R2 institutions will survive decreased enrollment.