The author says that they're not able to predict what will happen when the bubble bursts but I think we might have some ideas about that. Are we in a higher education bubble?
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria! Seriously schools go out of business.Professors are hurt,Admin are hurt, Alumni are hurt, students are hurt and higher education changes. THe bigger the endowment the less it hurts if you are private, if you are public there will be changes and some may still not be saved by the state.
It's true. But homes are also foreclosed. Businesses fail. It's only really an issue when those two things happen in great quantity all at once. That's the difference between normal market fluctuation and a bubble bursting. For generations the conventional wisdom has been "Go to college and get a degree otherwise you'll end up working at McDonalds." Well, my classmate from high school who stuck with McDonalds is now a regional manager and making nearly twice what I make. Meanwhile, a classmate who graduated from law school and passed the bar is struggling to pay the rent on his office and recently decided it was best to move back with his parents until his one-man firm "gets off the ground" (he's been at it for almost 10 years). There are people with bachelor's degrees working in call centers and warehouses and not in the sort of roles that conventional wisdom taught us the degrees would help you secure. So, I figure we either accept that the bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma or people stop going to college with the same sort of expectations. There are career paths that, if you want to pursue them, will require college. And some of them don't command amazing salaries. But there are a lot more people who don't want to be teachers, social workers, nurses etc who just want to go out and get "a job" that pays a living wage. I think that there are a handful of startups and even some well established and desirable companies out there now that are basically leading the charge against degree inflation by favoring skills over degrees. Personally, I don't think it unreasonable that we might see a shift in young people simply choosing not to go to college or, at least, not following the traditional path. Maybe more people will enlist. Maybe more will sign up for AmeriCorps. Maybe more will spend that time learning a trade or a skill on their own. If that happens, even if the shift is in the single digits of our overall population, the impact on higher ed could be drastic. Some of these older private schools who are struggling to attract students could go under. We may have fewer schools. And maybe that's a good thing for our society. My father flew into a rage when, in high school, I threw out the idea of not going to college. I used to like tinkering with electrical kits and thought I'd like to be an electrician. He couldn't believe I would "throw my life away" by working some blue collar job (like him). I'd be thrilled if my kids decided to become neurosurgeons. But I'd be thrilled if they decided to be locksmiths, too. I want them to be happy and to be financially independent. And since college is providing neither of those things to many people I suspect today's parents might raise their kids with a more nuanced view of what "success" means and a more open opinion of alternatives to the traditional college path.
I wish I'd trained as an electrician. (Sigh.) One thing at least a few young lawyers could do is move. Law school doesn't guarantee a law job let alone a law job in the community where the young attorney wants to live. San Francisco? Denver? Boston? NYC? Chicago? Sure, there are lots of big firms with some employment opportunities in those places and who wouldn't want the lifestyle? (Well, me for one, but that's beside the point.) But guess what, folks...if you didn't graduate high in your class from one of (now) about a half-dozen schools, you may well end up doing the night shift at a convenience store. Yet here is South Dakota, actively recruiting new lawyers to settle in the more rural parts of that rural state. Rural Attorney Recruitment Program Do you really want to be a lawyer? Would you like a career that can end up offering a pretty comfortable lifestyle? Then maybe you need to "get out of Dodge." Good luck, though. I've been preaching this gospel for some years now. Apparently human life is impossible except in close proximity to a big city.
