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Higher Education

Few industries sit closer to the ground zero of Covid acceleration than higher education. Even before the pandemic, the $700 billion business (and, to be clear, this is a business) was ripe for disruption. For decades, higher education has been sticking its chin farther and farther out. Covid-19 will be the fist that meets it. The virus has been especially hard on industries whose customers consume the product sitting shoulder to shoulder, like sports, airlines, restaurants, events—and despite their noble mission, universities.

Ripe for Disruption

The disruptability index for higher education is off the charts. In the past 40 years, college tuition has increased 1,400%. In the 1980s and early ’90s, I attended five years of undergrad at UCLA and two years of business school at UC Berkeley for a grand total of $10,000 in tuition—all seven years. Fast forward to present day, that won’t cover two classes at NYU Stern ($14,000).

Compared to this, even healthcare seems like a bargain. Healthcare spending has “only” increased 600% in the same period.1 What has the education industry done with this extraordinary transfer of wealth? Not much. We rightly complain about healthcare costs increasing, but if you go to a hospital today, the technology, procedures, and medications are substantially different than in 1980. Our nearly $4-trillion-a-year healthcare industry provides cutting-edge training and technology. Have outcomes kept pace with price increases? No. But there has been substantial innovation.

Our $600-billion higher education industry, in contrast, offers a product so old it’s comforting. Venture into a university class today. The fashion is different, there’s PowerPoint vs. transparencies, and the kids have laptops and Diet Cokes vs. legal pads and Tab. But that’s about it.

I teach brand strategy at NYU’s Stern School of Business. This fall, on Zoom, the class is almost twice the usual size at 280 kids (what I affectionately call students). They are paying $7,000 each. That’s $1.96 million for the semester. Conservatively, the gross margins on this course are 90+ points. Name another business, at this price point, that registers 90% gross margins. Few if any have been able to achieve these economics. Not Hermès, not Ferrari, not Apple.

I’m decent at what I do, sometimes even good. Once or twice a semester I deliver a session online—so I can travel, but also to explore the online medium. I do what I can to keep students engaged, from impersonating rock stars to sending intemperate emails to rude students.2 But underneath the Adele wig,3 my class is not much different from the brand strategy class I took from David Aaker at Berkeley Haas 28 years ago. I stand at the front of the room, I dispense my wisdom for three hours, and NYU collects a check. Not in that order.

SCARCITY

How has my industry raised prices at this rate without improving the product? At a few elite institutions, including NYU, we’ve leveraged scarcity. More than a business strategy, it’s become a fetish—believing you are a luxury brand instead of a public servant. Ivy Leagues have acceptance rates of 4–10%. A university president bragging about rejecting 90% of applicants is tantamount to a homeless shelter taking pride in turning away 90% of the needy that arrive each night. And this is not about standards or brand dilution. In an essay explaining his decision to stop conducting application interviews for his alma mater, Princeton, journalist Bryan Walsh observed, “The secret of elite college admissions is that far more students deserve to attend these colleges than are admitted, and there is virtually no discernible difference between those who make it and the many more who just miss out.” In support, he offered this statement from Princeton’s own dean of admissions: “We could have admitted five or six classes to Princeton from the [applicant] pool.”4

So, with a $26 billion endowment, the question becomes, Why wouldn’t you?

The excess demand feeds into the cartel of higher ed. Hundreds of private, liberal arts colleges that offer a facsimile of the Harvard aesthetic have drafted off the price increases of the elites (and the 95% of families rejected), giving millions of middle-class families the opportunity to purchase a Hyundai for the price of a Mercedes. Much of this is financed with easy-to-obtain credit, exploiting a uniquely held American belief that has morphed into scripture: You’ve sinned as a parent unless you get your kid through college … at any cost.

Meanwhile, at the hundreds of public institutions around the country that educate two thirds of our college graduates, tuition increases have been fueled by a reduction in state and federal funding. Though it varies from state to state, on average, public funding per student is lower today than it was in 1980. The 2008 recession in particular triggered deep cuts: between 2008 and 2013, public funding had been cut by 22%—and tuition was up 27%. Some of this is our own fault. Colleges have embraced people who do not look like us, but are increasingly intolerant of people who don’t think like us. Only 1.5% of Harvard faculty identify as conservative.5 The result is that about 50% of elected officials are disinclined to fund a progressive orthodoxy.

The pain of budget cuts is not evenly distributed. Alabama, for example, slashed funding for its university system by nearly 40% during the recession and has never restored that funding.6 The system has had to make up the difference in tuition increases, and by heavily recruiting out-of-state and international students—profoundly altering the nature of the institution and its role in the community it is supposed to serve.

ABUNDANCE

All these price increases have been enabled by the heroin of federally subsidized student loans. Student loan debt now totals $1.6 trillion, far more than credit-card debt or auto loans. The average graduate will carry nearly $30,000 in debt away from their virtual graduation.

The cheap credit has enriched some institutions, permitted states to cut support for others, and loaded rising generations with grotesque amounts of debt. It’s a program that belongs in the Hall of Fame for good intentions and bad outcomes: debt-fueled increases in tuition and the rise of predatory for-profit colleges, with little appreciable increase in the quality of the product. Crucially, it has failed in its core mission—the expansion of college education to people of lesser means. In fact, the burden of debt has fallen most harshly on the lower economic strata, who default at far higher rates than wealthier students.7

IVY-COVERED CASTE SYSTEM

We like to position education as the great leveler. But in fact it has become a caste system, a means of passing privilege on to the next generation. Sure, we let in a few freakishly remarkable kids from the masses so we can pretend to be a meritocracy, but between legacy admissions, high school inequality, and straight up pay-to-play arrangements, the wealthy are wildly overrepresented in our colleges. Wealthy kids today are over twice as likely to go to college as poor kids, and over five times as likely to attend an elite school.8 At 38 of the top 100 colleges in America, including 5 of the Ivies, there are more students from the top 1% of income than there are from the bottom 60%.9 You could argue that at this point, the Ivy League undergraduate programs are not colleges, but hedge funds that educate the children of their investors.

Even for those privileged few, college is still a great investment. Top college graduates are launched into an entirely different career and income trajectory than the rest of America. The most sought-after employers recruit them; their career counseling departments get their phone calls returned, and once in jobs, college friends and alumni networks stock senior management.

DISRUPTIVE FORCES

Just below the surface of the most disruptable industry, several trends have been accelerating. Technological improvements have brought distance learning to the threshold of market acceptance. An early 2000s burst of interest in MOOCs (massive, open, online courses) proved premature, but there are plenty of other sharks bumping the prey. The best brands in the industry—Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT—have been steadily expanding their online offerings. At Harvard, David Malan has made the school’s renowned introductory computer science course into an international phenomenon, taking it online and tuition-free. In 2018, 1,200 students enrolled in Yale professor Lauri Santos’s course “Psychology and the Good Life,” making it the most popular in the school’s 300-year history. But when Santos and Yale put the course online, for free, over one million people enrolled.10 Coming from another direction, MasterClass has brought the power of celebrity and Hollywood production to online education. I don’t think their model works—Anna Wintour vomiting platitudes is not education—but the production values have inspired an increase in quality across online learning.

Meanwhile, the student debt crisis has spurred a widespread rethinking of the traditional college value proposition. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren put free college at the center of their platforms. As bad an idea as this would be—another transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, as college attendees skew wealthy—it’s a recognition that we need to make college more affordable.

Demographics are destiny, and higher education’s demographic picture is ugly. Beginning in 2026, the number of graduating high school seniors is projected to decline by 9%.11 Change is coming. In 2013, renowned Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen predicted that online education would disrupt traditional higher education just as steam power had put sailing ships out of business. Over the next ten to fifteen years, he wrote, 25% of colleges and universities would go out of business.12 By 2018, he’d upped his prediction to 50%.13 And that was before anyone had heard of Covid-19.

Higher education has resisted change. Its hold on our imagination is strong—the vision of young people strolling in leafy quads, minds on fire from challenging academic inspiration. Its brand strength is extraordinary. No one gives $100 million to put their name on the side of a building on Google’s campus. Nearly every politician, donor, and thought leader holds fond memories of years spent at one or more of these institutions, and plans for their offspring to enjoy the same benefits. And for all the promise of technology and the risks of elitism, the traditional model of higher education is not easily replicated.

And then the pandemic hit. Almost overnight, American colleges emptied out, and millions of hours of classroom experience shifted abruptly online. Lecture halls were left for childhood bedrooms, leafy quads deserted for suburban backyards and socially distanced walks. Hardly anyone was ready for this, and our first pass at online learning was a buggy, Zoom-bombed, dreary mess. A nation of parents saw their $40,000-per-year education put its worst foot forward and were underwhelmed. Students lost one of “the best years of their lives.” After a spring semester of upheaval and ad hoc Zoom classes, 75% of college students were unhappy with e-learning,14 and 1 in 6 high school seniors were considering deferring college for a semester or a year.15

The Crisis Is Upon Us

For much of the spring and early summer 2020, we heard a lot of happy talk from university leadership claiming campus life would return to near-normal in the fall. It was never going to happen. In late July, the dominos started to fall, as school after school announced that they would begin the 2020–21 academic year online—for most schools, a reversal of their springtime optimism. From large state universities including UC Berkeley, to small private colleges like Smith College, to research institutions like Johns Hopkins, and the wealthiest elite schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, schools of all stripes accepted the inevitable and announced they would hold no in-person courses in late August and offer severely limited on-campus housing. As this book goes to press in late September, the College Crisis Initiative reports that 1,302 of the 2,958 schools that it tracks plan on a fully or primarily online Fall 2020 (up from 835 just a month earlier).16 Only 114 schools plan a fully on-campus program. We are in for at least a year of radically transformed higher education, and much of the change will be permanent.

Understanding the pandemic effect on higher education requires understanding higher education’s value proposition. In exchange for time and tuition, college offers three components of value: a credential, an education, and an experience.

C = Credential (the lane you are put in post-graduation based on the brand/school you attended)

E = Education (learning and stuff)

Ex = Experience (fall leaves, football games, falling in love)

FISCAL SHOCK

The pandemic will accelerate change in higher education in two waves. In the first, which hit the industry in late summer 2020, many institutions experienced fiscal shock. Even Harvard, with its 4.6% admission rate and its $40 billion endowment, is projecting a $750 million revenue shortfall for fiscal year 2020 and is asking employees to consider early retirement or reduced schedules.17 That said, elite institutions have substantial shock absorbers: waitlist and multibillion-dollar endowments. For every student who takes a gap year or transfers to be closer to home, there are ten more who want the seat. The elite universities will weather the storm and emerge stronger.

But when the top schools fill their pandemic revenue hole by going deep into their waitlist, that will exacerbate the problem for less prestigious schools, who incur a double whammy of decreasing yield (percentage of student admittees who enroll) as some applicants get off the waiting list of a more prestigious school while others decide to defer. The effect will ripple down the rankings, until it hits schools that don’t have a waitlist. Schools that already admit 60 or 80% of their applicants have no reserve, and they are going to go into Fall 2020 and future semesters with a fatal number of empty seats. Moreover, schools with low yields face an additional challenge. Their admissions decisions are reliant on complex predictive models regarding which students will actually attend, and it is critical they accurately calibrate how many of those students will require financial aid. As Kevin Carey of New America put it, “The financial solvency of many private colleges now rests on a latticework of probability.”18 A sea change in the nature of their student body renders these models useless and puts schools at risk of trying to provide services to an incoming class that can’t afford to pay for them.

In short, schools that offer an exceptional credential will be fine. Schools that offer a solid education at a great price are also well positioned. The Cal State system, which many would argue is the real jewel of California, announced they will be online only. This frees them to focus on the tech and formats to deliver a better online experience. Cal State, which will graduate eight times more students than the entire Ivy League this year, accelerates through Covid, as the experience was never a big part of the equation. Most students commute to school, and the denominator is much lower ($6,000 in-state tuition). So, their value ratio, in a time of corona, leapfrogs expensive liberal arts, campus-based universities.

The schools facing an existential threat are colleges that rely largely on the experience aspect of the value proposition. Similar to movie theaters and cruise ships, which take your money to put you in small, enclosed spaces with strangers, colleges that have invested in nice ships/buildings and depend on kids rejected from better brands are in trouble. Schools that offer an elite-like experience, with elite pricing, but without the credential, are about to experience a reckoning.

DELUSIONAL

The first half of 2020 saw schools trying to fend off the inevitable by insisting they would continue with on-campus education. They redesigned classrooms, housing, and dining halls to permit social distancing, reconfigured their schedules, and established on-campus protocols—no doubt at great cost and effort. Purdue, for example, has reported buying more than a mile of plexiglass to set up barriers all over campus. Outside observers watched all this, incredulous at the notion of keeping thousands of twenty-year-olds socially distanced from one another (if that were possible, the species would have petered out long ago). A psychology professor writing in The New York Times called the reopening plans “so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional.”19

Defenders of the return to campus claim that the virus poses little threat to young people. Even if this were true (and it’s not), asymptomatic transmission is one of this virus’s weapons, and young people—active, mobile, vocal—make for outstanding super-spreaders. Bringing them back to campus puts college towns at risk. Many are not prepared for a surge of infections. Some have permanent populations with high numbers of retirees attracted by the cultural benefits of a nearby college.20 Other at-risk cohorts include cafeteria workers, maintenance crews, security guards, librarians, bartenders, cabdrivers, their spouses and family members, and anyone else unfortunate enough to have made the once reasonable decision to live in a college town. And if (when) there is an outbreak, the healthcare infrastructure of these university towns could be overrun in a matter of weeks, if not days.

DESPERATE

Why would college presidents put their students, employees, and neighbors at risk like this? The ugly truth is that many believe they have no choice. College is an expensive operation with a relatively inflexible cost structure. Tenure and union contracts render the largest cost (faculty and administrator salaries) near-immovable objects. The bulk of the teaching is done by adjuncts and assistants, who receive anemic compensation (and grad students, who work for nearly nothing), while the aristocracy of higher ed, the full professors, have their high salaries protected by tenure. In addition, universities have let their non-teaching staff costs bloat obscenely—growing head count is always easier than shrinking it. After working in higher ed for two decades, I believe nearly every decision is made with one goal in mind: how to increase the compensation and decrease the accountability of tenured faculty and administrators.

Government support for education has also been on the decline for generations. The result is that while some universities enjoy revenue streams from technology transfer, hospitals, returns on multibillion-dollar endowments, and public funding, the bulk of colleges have become tuition dependent. If students don’t return in any given semester, many colleges will have to take drastic action that could have serious long-term impacts on their ability to fulfill their missions.

So rather than spend the summer of 2020 focused on dramatically improving the online education experience (an investment that would provide returns for decades), university leadership and faculty have spent millions of hours and dollars pursuing a consensual hallucination that they could properly protect their campuses. As Covid infections escalated through the summer—and once schools cashed tuition checks—reality set in, and schools began sobering up.

It may never have been up to them. Many students already decided that the necessary changes to campus life rendered the on-campus experience not worth pursuing and not worth the premium some schools charge for it. In August 2020, one third of college students said they were not planning on going back to campus, and Harvard reported that 20% of its freshmen had asked to defer.

The most consequential absences will be international students—the cash cows of high-tuition universities. We claim we let them in for diversity. True, but that’s not the primary motivation for a steady increase in kids from abroad. Two thirds of international students finance their education with money sourced abroad. In aggregate, international students contribute nearly $40 billion annually to the U.S. economy.21

At NYU, they constitute 27% of our student body and an outsized portion of our cash flow. A pandemic coupled with a Trump administration committed to the demonization of foreigners, including severely limiting the work prospects of highly skilled grad students, may dramatically impact the number of international students applying in future years. This means the whales may just not show up this fall, leaving us with otters and penguins—an enormous fiscal hole.

DOOMED

The result? We will see a culling among universities. Just as retail closures are accelerating from 9,500 stores in 201922 to 25,000+ in 2020,23 we’re going to see hundreds of universities begin a death march. In academia, we have been preying on the hopes and dreams of the middle class, offering parents the chance to check an instinctive box—giving their kids a better life by sending them to college. We also encouraged them to borrow against their 401(k)s and take out mortgages to underwrite our shape-shifting from public servants to luxury brands. No more.

That’s the short-term effect. How serious it will be depends on how long it takes to develop and distribute a vaccine. A semester of online education and reduced attendance will kill hundreds of schools. A year without the in-person experience, and the pricing power it brings, could drive 10–30% of universities out of existence.

The Road Ahead

The long-term effect will be a profound change in the way higher education is delivered in this country. If handled well, it will include a radical opening of the pathways to career success that are currently limited. If handled poorly, it could lead to the transfer of more wealth from the young and working class into the coffers of big tech, and the continued reduction of economic mobility.

The heart of the coming transformation of higher education is technology. As in so many other areas, the pandemic has forced the industry to adopt distance tech that faculty and administrators have resisted. The experience we gain during this period will accelerate adoption.

To be sure, the early phases have not been pretty. Simply taking a college lecture course and putting it on Zoom is not e-learning in any but the most rudimentary sense, and students are predictably dissatisfied. That will change. Schools are putting their faculty through training programs, teaching them how to use the available tools, how to restructure their classes, how to migrate online.

There are some simple things that I’ve learned are essential. Without the power of physical presence, you have to be much more animated, waving your arms and raising your voice, changing your tone and pace. You have to be in the students’ faces, requiring they keep their cameras on. Constantly call on them and seize the opportunity to get better guest speakers, as it’s a much easier lift (Zoom vs. commute). Breaking up the monotony of a talking head is essential—learn how to use the screen-sharing function and prepare charts and illustrations that express information in new ways and keep students engaged. A good role model is Rep. Katie Porter’s use of small white boards in her congressional hearings.

Online programs offer opportunities beyond the lecture itself. Asynchronous communications using message boards and group documents provide students (and instructors) schedule flexibility that in-person teaching lacks. In-person discussions are a minefield of inequality (research routinely shows that men dominate classroom discussions and that instructors are complicit in the problem). Moving the discussion online is not a panacea (high-speed internet, a laptop, and a quiet place to work are not givens), but it does open up the possibility of engaging students in ways that may be more effective than traditional classroom discussion. New technology that realizes the potential of online instruction while mitigating its downsides is a major opportunity for entrepreneurs. Early in the pandemic, seemingly everyone in America learned about Zoom in the same few days. Going forward, look for companies like Blackboard and Canvas to massively innovate or be replaced. There will be an explosion in new tools and technology hitting the market in the first quarter of 2021 as the tsunami of venture capital being deployed into higher ed takes root.

The crisis has led to an adoption of tech among my colleagues in the last 12 weeks that dwarfs the last 20 years. As former NYU associate dean Anastasia Crosswhite put it, “The median faculty member went from ‘online education over my dead body,’ to ‘I’m not stepping foot in a classroom until there’s a vaccine,’ within two weeks.” And when we finally make it online, we will find our students waiting for us, wondering what took so long. The rising generation has grown up on screens, and is comfortable with online interactions to a degree my generation cannot comprehend.

SCALE

Schools and professors that take this new medium seriously will garner huge advantage over the next few years, and their stakeholders will benefit. This is not only because online instruction can provide learning opportunities that classrooms don’t, but because online education does something else. It scales. Technology puts a stake in the heart of the friction and barriers administrators have erected to support their premium pricing: distance. A rare holdout, higher ed’s late embrace of technology could change society.

Scale will allow individual institutions—and individual professors—to exponentially expand their reach. This provides the potential to correct one of the great inequities of the last half century—the artificial scarcity of elite education. For the past ten years, my fall class has been 160 students because that’s the capacity of room 2-60 in the Kaufman Management Center. This fall, unbound from the physical constraints of room 2-60, my class enrollment stands at 280. The incremental cost of almost doubling the class? I’d estimate $2,000–$3,000 (an additional graduate student instructor to handle grading).

Even as the population of qualified high school graduates has expanded, the handful of schools that hold the keys to entry into the highest-paid, most influential jobs in business, culture, and government have made the same number of keys every year. Complementing the ivory tower with an online offering allows for the mass production of those keys. And online learning, because of its flexibility, increases both the educational and profit potential of mid-career education. No sensible person would design an industry that sells its product only to eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds when older people are looking to spend on “experiences” and to keep their skills relevant. Lifetime learning, a recurring revenue model, presents an enormous opportunity for universities to take a page from the private sector (Amazon Prime, Netflix) and evolve to a superior business model. Tech creates scale, and scale increases both access (social good) and revenue (necessary fuel).

BAIT

Scale is also bait. It will lure the biggest predators in the jungle to an industry that has largely escaped their notice—big tech. Big tech needs to find billions of dollars in top-line revenue growth every year, and partnering with educational institutions is an obvious expansion. This will further accelerate the gap between the haves and have-nots as the elite institutions have the brand strength to attract big tech’s investment in the requisite intellectual capital and technical infrastructure.

Education start-ups will attract cheap capital and seize the opportunity the pandemic has accelerated and expanded. What SARS was to ecommerce in Asia (Alibaba broke into the consumer space), Covid-19 could be to higher ed in the United States.

The rookie move is to believe that MOOCs or stand-alone education start-ups will be the big winners. (Searches for “MasterClass” have eclipsed “business school.”) They won’t. Why won’t MasterClass be a disruptor long-term? Because MasterClass sucks. Young people don’t gain value learning from celebrities, but from teachers, who can give them the skills to become celebrities.

At each university, there are 6 to 12 “ringers,” great teachers who are worth it. Ringers, unbounded by the geographic constraints of their campus and parent brand, will see their compensation rise 3 to 10 times over the next decade. Administrators at the top 10 universities who have the skills to become product managers will see their comp increase. Most everyone else in traditional academia will make less.

The second-greatest accretion of stakeholder value in business, behind Amazon’s entry into healthcare, will be big (and some small) tech firms partnering with world-class universities to offer 80% of a traditional four-year degree for 50% of the price. This is the gangster cocktail of the fastest-growing analog consumer brands in history (Southwest Airlines, Old Navy, etc.).

MIT and Google could jointly craft two-year degrees in STEM. The myth/magic of campuses and geography is no longer a constraining factor—most programs will be hybrid soon, dramatically increasing enrollments among the best brands. MIT/Google could enroll a hundred thousand students at $25,000 per year in tuition (a bargain), yielding $5 billion for a two-year program that would have margins rivaling … MIT and Google. Bocconi/Apple, Carnegie Mellon/Amazon, UCLA/Netflix, University of Washington/Microsoft … you get the idea.

University brands are the premier luxury brands globally, built over centuries, with margins and the illusion of scarcity that renders Hermès vulgar. If you don’t own the mine (MIT), you want to sell the picks or staple tent denim to create durable pants for miners. Universities will dramatically increase their spend on technology and, in many cases, outsource entire programs (for example Duke’s continuing ed). There will be enormous opportunity to substantially upgrade SaaS teaching tools, as anybody who has used Blackboard can attest.

For now, the pandemic has cleared the competitive field for virtual learning. Our current optimism notwithstanding, it will likely take longer than initially hoped before it’s safe for hundreds of people to gather in crowded lecture halls, to cheer on the school basketball team, or to swarm around one another in dorm rooms and fraternity basements. In the interim, the college experience is going to be a shadow of its former self, with masks, distancing, grab-and-go food, daily temperature checks, and few of the traditional rituals and rites of passage that other generations experienced.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY HIGHER ED

When we can let all this restart, and give the on-campus experience a chance to compete with the virtual, a generation that comes of age in the pandemic may not perceive the same value in the proximity my generation cherished. By the time the virus is contained, we may have raised a micro-generation of innate distancers. Even post corona, and a return to proximity, the temporary elimination of the college experience will have catalyzed a question American households were afraid to ask: Is it worth it? After a month taking classes at home, most students were likely desperate to get back to campus. After a year without the “traditional” college experience, plenty of people will begin to wonder how much they miss it, and what it’s really worth.

Moreover, the need to rethink how campuses are utilized, and the injection of online tools into the college toolbox, is going to expand the notion of the college experience. For many students, it already looks nothing like the brochures. Around 20% of college students live with their parents, and over half don’t live in college housing. Twenty-seven percent of full-time students work at least 20 hours per week. In the near future, schools looking to reduce density on campus are likely to move toward rotating schedules (such as 4-to-6-week modules rather than 4-month semesters). Schools could encourage or even require students to spend a year or more away from campus, or invest in satellite campuses, as my school, NYU, has done in Dubai and Shanghai.

Finally, we cannot overlook that even for those participating in the “traditional” college experience of lecture halls and discussion sections, dorms and dining halls, there have long been inequalities and inefficiencies. Disruption is an opportunity to better serve the broader community. Women, people of color, gay and transgender students have had to fight, and still have to fight, for an equal place on our campuses. So we shouldn’t be surprised that women are 50% more likely than men to say they would choose an online college option, or that Blacks are 50% more likely than whites to say they are confident in the quality of online coursework.24 Simply put, they have less to lose, as the status quo was different for them, and as a result they stand to benefit the most from a rethinking of higher ed.

Recommendations

What needs to happen:

One thing we should not do? Free college. That’s a populist slogan and a bad idea. It’s a further transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Only 32% of Americans go to college, and cost is not what keeps the most exceptional kids of any income level from getting to college. Improve K–12 education, strengthen two-year programs, expand the seats at the best universities, and college becomes an engine of upward mobility—without leaving behind the two thirds of people whom (better) high school serves well. College needs to be more affordable, but we don’t need to subsidize the wealthiest households in America, who send 88% of their children to college.