"Higher Education" is a Dying Industry

Tons of stuff is written about "higher education." I put the term in quotes because what it actually refers to is quite imprecise. Changes are killing institutions. Why so many are closing and/or contracting can be explained somewhat by demographics and but even more by economics.

Most days, an article is published in a conservative source blaming the problem higher ed is having on "woke." This is the myth that liberals run universities and their goal is to convert students to be liberals in social and economic policies. Since parents and their children are not attending university as much as they did in the past. The example cited often is a recent article about Syracuse University which, while well known, is struggling to survive. 

The conservative link should be versed in a conservative understanding of reality. That reality is the marketplace. Buyers of higher ed want the best deal they can find. Sellers of higher ed want to maximize their profit, both the profit of the institution and the salaries inside the universities. This is true in both private places like Syracuse University and public universities. 

From the buyer's point of view, parents who pay and students who end up with college debts, the market is quite simple. It is how they can pay and recover their costs. I think most parents and students understand higher ed is not just like a trade school where one learns to do a job but a place where there is at least some broader education about society at large. Even with the latter, however, price matters. Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree has to generate, for most people, some kind of appropriate return.

Universities are too complex to explain here but we can say they have several income streams. Besides tuition and student fees there are donors, research revenue, patients, licenses, sports and for some state and federal government money. The pay inside universities is somewhat based on maximizing one or all of these. I don't see how "woke" has much influence over the economics of universities. 

There are four years universities which do not have research or sports revenues. Their tuition is much lower. Three of our granddaughters went to these schools. These kind of schools have much better cost/benefit ratios and seem like the kind that will survive.