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Covid = End of College 'As We Know It' = End of Byu?


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Here's an interesting analysis of law schools that the author anticipates will fail in the near future:

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Will My Law School Perish?

Higher education is facing an economically challenging time due to lost revenues brought upon by the COVID-19 pandemic. And as we saw with the closure of Concordia Law School this summer, law schools are no exception. NYU advertising professor Scott Galloway has crunched the numbers for “the immunities and comorbidities of 436 universities included in US News and World Report’s Top National College Rankings.” And he predicts about 20% of these institutions entered the pandemic on such shaky ground that COVID-19 will be the death blow to them. In short, one in five of these universities or colleges will perish.

To calculate this, he looked at a series of variables to create the following scores:

  • Credential score (US News ranking, undergrad admit rate, average monthly Google search volume)
  • Experience score (student life grade and score)
  • Education score (various return on investment measures)
  • Average undergrad tuition & fees score
  • Value-to-cost ratio
  • Vulnerability score (endowment per full time student and percentage of international students)

From these he created two main measures: Value and Vulnerability. And based on whether one was high or low on these measures, he created four quadrants of schools: Thrive, Survive, Struggle, or Perish. Thus, a university with low value and high vulnerability falls into the perish quadrant, whereas a university with high value and low vulnerability falls in the thrive quadrant. The data can be found here.

I took these institutional assessments and matched them up with the U.S. News Law School Rankings (see below). Based on Professor Galloway’s predictions, 18 law schools will perish in the near future (because their university will perish). That is 1 school in the top 50, 5 in the 51-100, 5 in the 101-147, and 7 in the unranked law schools. I have listed them below in order of ranking:

  • 27 Fordham
  • 53 Cardozo (Yeshiva)
  • 62 Seton Hall
  • 70 Loyola (Chicago)
  • 83 Chicago-Kent
  • 93 Drexel
  • 102 Hofstra
  • 111 Chapman
  • 118 DePaul
  • 136 Pace
  • 141 Willamette
  • 148-194 Campbell
  • 148-194 Elon
  • 148-194 New England
  • 148-194 Nova Southeastern
  • 148-194 Detroit Mercy
  • 148-194 Massachusetts-Dartmouth
  • 148-194 Pacific

Another 28 schools are predicted to struggle:

  • 50 Baylor
  • 93 Lewis & Clark
  • 105 Drake
  • 111 Catholic
  • 111 Tulsa
  • 118 U. St. Thomas (MN)
  • 122 Quinnipiac
  • 122 Maine
  • 122 Montana
  • 126 Loyola-New Orleans
  • 126 Mercer
  • 129 Belmont 
  • 129 Seattle
  • 141 Dayton

The post goes on to suggest which law schools will "thrive" and which ones will merely "survive."  Here are the total predictions:

Quote
  • Thrive - 46
  • Survive - 65
  • Struggle - 23
  • Perish - 18
  • N/A - 44

BYU is listed as one that will "thrive."

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited by smac97
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The state college I teach at has record enrollment numbers this Fall. The classes will be in person (though the semester will end before Thanksgiving, allowing a shortened term before Christmas, potentially as a mitigation for pandemic disruptions to the Fall semester).
Other institutions in the state are not doing as well though. I think there is a non-trivial population which wants the in-person instruction and were rather frustrated with the distance or blended scenarios.

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The world as we knew it 7 months ago will mostly return when a vaccine is widely available.  The so called "new normal" is only temporary.  Not many people want to be wearing masks for the rest of their lives.  As for college, the social interaction is just as important as the classes themselves.  Perhaps more online classes will be offered but I don't seem massive changes except it might be harder to colleges to justify their tuition costs when many courses are online.  There might actually be more teaching substance and less indoctrination in leftist views in colleges.  That would be a good thing.

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9 minutes ago, carbon dioxide said:

The world as we knew it 7 months ago will mostly return when a vaccine is widely available.  The so called "new normal" is only temporary.  Not many people want to be wearing masks for the rest of their lives.  As for college, the social interaction is just as important as the classes themselves.  Perhaps more online classes will be offered but I don't seem massive changes except it might be harder to colleges to justify their tuition costs when many courses are online.  There might actually be more teaching substance and less indoctrination in leftist views in colleges.  That would be a good thing.

Prophecy or a guess? You seem certain of the results so prophecy?

The eviction incidents are already starting. We have a ways to go still. There is a strong thirst not to go back to the old way as it got us here.

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33 minutes ago, carbon dioxide said:

The world as we knew it 7 months ago will mostly return when a vaccine is widely available.  The so called "new normal" is only temporary.  Not many people want to be wearing masks for the rest of their lives.  As for college, the social interaction is just as important as the classes themselves.  Perhaps more online classes will be offered but I don't seem massive changes except it might be harder to colleges to justify their tuition costs when many courses are online.  There might actually be more teaching substance and less indoctrination in leftist views in colleges.  That would be a good thing.

The new normal after this new normal will likely be more like this new normal than the old way of doing things, and I think it will mostly be an improvement over the old way.

For example, I prefer working from home and am told I will likely be able to continue to work from home for as long as I want.  I do have some work that I need to do in my office because I can't do it from home, including checking my physical mailbox to see if I have received any physical check payments, so I have been going into my office one day each week and working from home the other 4 days. I think many other businesses and government offices will likely continue to offer the same option for employees who have shown they can work from home with employer support.  All employees where I work wear a mask when we go into our office and are told we need to wear them at all times except when we are at our own desk.  And not all employees go in on the same day, if they go in at all.  When I go in usually only about 15-20% of all employees on that floor are there.

I also like how there is less traffic in my area than there once was, and fewer people in stores.  

I suspect more people will be able to go to college now too, with colleges now making it easier to take online courses.  A person can now work for money and take college courses while staying at home, not needing to go anywhere else.

With Amazon and other online retailers, we can all stay in our own homes and still have access to most things we need.

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20 minutes ago, Ahab said:

I also like how there is less traffic in my area than there once was, and fewer people in stores.  

I suspect more people will be able to go to college now too, with colleges now making it easier to take online courses.  A person can now work for money and take college courses while staying at home, not needing to go anywhere else.

With Amazon and other online retailers, we can all stay in our own homes and still have access to most things we need.

I suspect much of that has to do with people either not having jobs or being too scared to go out.  I myself have reduced my travels not because i think things are better but to avoid getting sick.  Some things will change but most stuff will return. 

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On 7/23/2020 at 1:19 PM, smac97 said:

What about BYU, BYU-I, BYU-H, and Ensign College?  They aren't "{t}op schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford" that are "disruption proof."

Good riddance to all the colleges that fail and close.

Ditto for journalism which died decades prior.

As the economy becomes even more digital, the majors and certs BYU offers that actually help people get jobs will continue to get enrollment.

As for those social science students, grads, (like me) and profs - better learn to code.

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On 7/23/2020 at 10:19 AM, smac97 said:

So this is an interesting article recently published by Forbes: Why College Is Never Coming Back

My question is whether it will have an effect on BYU and the Church's other institutions of higher learning.

Some excerpts from the article:

I was fortunate to graduate with my bachelor's degree with no debt (same with my wife).  I incurred some debt for my law degree, but not nearly in the amounts most others did.

My three older kids are college-aged.  They are keenly aware of the exploding costs of education.

This is a really intriguing argument.  Time will tell if it holds up.  

We've seen a number of "disruptive innovations" in the last several years.  Consider PCs.  Smart phones.  Streaming media.  Democratized news / information / reference services.  P2P commerce.  Web-facilitated learning / communicating / working / shopping / playing.  Retail medical clinics.  

Are colleges and universities on the chopping block?  Will they be displaced by (far cheaper) online learning?  Will employers start looking for alternative means (besides a college degree, that is) of discerning an prospective employee's competence?  How much of higher education costs are wrapped up in "the college experience," and in propping up tenured faculties, massive layers of administrative/bureucratic bloat, and so on?

How many people are now working remotely?  How many employers are moving to make these arrangements permanent?  If employees can work remotely, and save substantial costs to themselves and their employers in the process, can the same thing happen with students seeking a higher education?  If so, why pay tens of thousands of dollars to, as noted above, "watch college lecture videos on the internet?"

I think this fellow may be on to something.

Yep.

Think of higher education as sort of like the journalism industry.  Journalism is presently a shadow of its former self.  There are a variety of reasons for this, one of which is that news outlets no longer have a geography-based monopoly or quasi-monopoly.  Growing up in Utah, my parents had subscriptions to the Deseret News and, sometimes, the Salt Lake Tribune.  They also watched KSL News.  One generation later, I look at these three news outlets as teeny tiny slices of the overall "pie" from which I obtain news and information.

Journalism has been decimated by news going online.  Can the same be said for higher education?

I think he may be right.

What about BYU, BYU-I, BYU-H, and Ensign College?  They aren't "{t}op schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford" that are "disruption proof."  But I'm also not sure they can be easily categorized in with "the thousands of schools that sell 'standard issue' degrees."  Kids go to these schools because they A) get a good education, B) that is generously subsidized, and C) to hobnob with fellow Latter-day Saints.  Will this anticipated "disruptive innovation" in higher education affect the Church's schools?

Thanks,

-Smac

The thought of those hundreds of thousands of pre-adults living in their parents’ basements and continuing to exist only in their virtual world strikes terror into my heart. 

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On 7/23/2020 at 10:32 PM, Scott Lloyd said:

 

And with the nation’s universities being so thoroughly infested with Marxists, I don’t know that the nation wouldn’t be the better off for it. 

This is not true. If universities were infested with Marxists, we would be seeing different demonstrations than what we see today. Perhaps we can say that universities have more than enough progressives. But not Marxists. If I were to ask the demonstrators what kind of society they wish to see, they would not give revolutionary answers because they lack a revolutionary consciousness. They would speak platitudes but not ideology. And I see no red flags among the demonstrators. Also, the Establishment do not see the protestors as a threat to their power base. If so, the demonstrations would be crushed.

However, students need face to face contact in the classroom and among their peers. Ideas need to be discussed, debated and deliberated upon face to face. And ideas need to be evaluated through analysis and interpretation in the classroom and not through machines where we are just another face that has been zoomed.

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On 8/2/2020 at 6:50 AM, Bernard Gui said:

The thought of those hundreds of thousands of pre-adults living in their parents’ basements and continuing to exist only in their virtual world strikes terror into my heart. 

And it should. It is also a means of control. And social intelligence would take a huge hit. It would further isolation and spontaneous protests where people get together as a community 'celebration'. And then upon graduation, they enter a workforce working from home. It is a 'marvelous' way of controlling people and furthering their isolation from humanity.

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On 8/2/2020 at 6:23 AM, nuclearfuels said:

Good riddance to all the colleges that fail and close.

Ditto for journalism which died decades prior.

As the economy becomes even more digital, the majors and certs BYU offers that actually help people get jobs will continue to get enrollment.

As for those social science students, grads, (like me) and profs - better learn to code.

The only problem  I see in your post is the need for social science students. One way to control a populations is to make the 'social' courses obsolete. In the past we needed sociologists and other social scientists because they told us through research why people were experiencing poverty, social dislocation, increase of crime or domestic violence, marginalization, alienation, drug addiction etc. They pinpointed trends in how a society is developing. And perhaps gave answers to better the situations. Not to mention social workers who handled the people who were not quite making it in a capitalist world. Negate the 'social' and what do we have? Digital ants? All college courses should have at least an introduction course in sociology or in the humanities. The 'social' students are being made obsolete because the social and economic system that is in place and the Establishment who controls it, have chosen to do so. And why did they do so?

Edited by why me
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On 7/31/2020 at 3:58 PM, carbon dioxide said:

I suspect much of that has to do with people either not having jobs or being too scared to go out.  I myself have reduced my travels not because i think things are better but to avoid getting sick.  Some things will change but most stuff will return. 

Not going out is not proof of "being too scared". Right now it is prudence. If we showed a little more prudence early on the complaints about "how Europeans are generally opening their school so we should too" would sound less like a child whimpering about the easily forseeable consequences of not eating their vegetables.

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8 hours ago, why me said:

The only problem  I see in your post is the need for social science students. One way to control a populations is to make the 'social' courses obsolete. In the past we needed sociologists and other social scientists because they told us through research why people were experiencing poverty, social dislocation, increase of crime or domestic violence, marginalization, alienation, drug addiction etc. They pinpointed trends in how a society is developing. And perhaps gave answers to better the situations. Not to mention social workers who handled the people who were not quite making it in a capitalist world. Negate the 'social' and what do we have? Digital ants? All college courses should have at least an introduction course in sociology or in the humanities. The 'social' students are being made obsolete because the social and economic system that is in place and the Establishment who controls it, have chosen to do so. And why did they do so?

Exiting the social sciences was truly liberating for me. 

Imagine being able to process the world according to facts and data instead of feelings.

If the 08-09 and COVID Recessions taught me anything, it's that I should not tell anyone anywhere ever that I have a social science degree or dare I say degrees. Shhhh......

Facts vs. Feels

Reals vs. Feels

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