Welcome Guest! Create an Account login email: password: remember me: BASKETBALLFOOTBALLMESSAGE BOARDCHATLINKS site searchcontact usabout usadvertise with ushelp Message Board BobcatAttack.com Message Board General Ohio University Discussion/Alumni Events Topic:  Many Colleges Closing WSJ Article Topic:  Many Colleges Closing WSJ Article Author Message giacomo General User Member Since: 11/20/2007 Post Count: 2,764 Status: Offline     Many Colleges Closing WSJ Article    Posted: 5/6/2026 5:55:47 PM  Hampshire College, alma mater of filmmaker Ken Burns, announced in April that it will close after the fall semester. Sterling College, a 130-acre working farm in northeastern Vermont, will graduate its final class in May. The Huron Consulting Group projects that 442 private nonprofit colleges enrolling roughly 670,000 students are at risk of closing or merging within a decade. The instinctive response is elegiac: lament the shuttered campus, mourn the futures it might have made, hope for rescue. Mr. Burns called Hampshire’s closing “an extraordinary loss.” Is it just me, or is this good news for America? Closing these institutions means students are slowly ceasing to overpay for scant added value. If more market correction is to come, that tells us something important—about higher education and about other education sectors we have built to avoid correction altogether. The question isn’t how to save these institutions. It is how to accelerate market forces. The private-college sector didn’t rise in a laissez-faire market. It was built by federal loan programs, the postwar college wage premium and decades of expanding demand. In that environment, “more college seats” and “more social value” came to mean the same thing. They weren’t. Tuition and fees have outpaced overall inflation for decades, and the strain is no longer theoretical. Robert Kelchen, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, found in his analysis of college finance data for fiscal 2024 that 31% of private nonprofit institutions posted losses. Moody’s downgraded St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vt., to junk in 2022. This isn’t a story about the demographic cliff. The trouble was here first. The good news is the schools doing the most for upward mobility aren’t the ones closing. A mobility report card study shows that schools such as California State University, Los Angeles and Stony Brook University, on New York’s Long Island, pair relatively high access for low-income students with strong success rates, producing mobility rates—the percentage of students who come from the bottom fifth of the income distribution and end up in the top fifth—of 9.9% and 8.4% respectively. The costs are wildly different: average annual cost on the College Scorecard is $3,967 at Cal State Los Angeles, $18,784 at Stony Brook and $25,239 at St. Michael’s. The point isn’t that every private college underperforms every public college. It is that upward mobility is available, at scale, outside the prestige hierarchy and often at much lower prices. Selectivity predicts selection. It doesn’t reliably predict value for the typical student. The foundational result in this literature is Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger’s 1999 paper, which used a matched-applicant design—comparing students with others who applied to and were admitted by the same set of colleges—and found that the earnings premium from attending a more selective school essentially vanishes. They did find one notable exception: For black, Hispanic and first-generation students from low-income families, selectivity did predict higher earnings. That heterogeneity isn’t what the defenders of small private liberal-arts colleges are arguing about. The schools that move minority and low-income students into the labor-market premium Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger identified are more akin to Princeton and Stanford, not Hampshire and Sterling. A more recent paper by Jack Mountjoy and Brent Hickman, using Texas administrative earnings records, finds the same thing with cleaner data and a more robust identification strategy. That doesn’t mean colleges are interchangeable. It means that when weak private institutions charge high prices while delivering little value, the eventual enrollment loss and closing aren’t a market failure. They are revealed preference doing what it’s supposed to do. Recent analysis of postsecondary enrollment trends finds exactly this: The institutions losing students are concentrated among the lowest-value-add colleges. A common objection is that earnings are too narrow a measure. Many argue that college produces transformation, citizenship, character—things a wage record can’t capture. They’re right that earnings aren’t everything. But they’re wrong that the closing schools have any comparative advantage in producing them. The Gallup-Purdue Index, surveying more than 30,000 graduates on workplace engagement and life satisfaction, finds that institutional type—private vs. public, selective vs. not—explains almost none of the variation. The same is true for civic engagement, marriage and health. Clearinghouse Research Center finds that students who experience a closing are 71% less likely to be enrolled elsewhere after one month and 50% less likely to complete a credential than matched peers who didn’t experience a closing. On the other side of the ledger sits a much larger pool of future students who would otherwise spend tens of thousands of dollars on a low-value education. Keeping these institutions alive isn’t progressive—it’s a transfer from poorly informed future students to incumbent institutions. This correction almost certainly won’t reach the Ivy League. Researchers Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman find that “Ivy Plus” admission has no significant effect on mean income rank at age 33 but raises the probability of reaching the top 1% of earnings by roughly 50%. That is a lottery ticket for which the prize is a 40-year annuity at top-1% income. Discount it at any reasonable rate, and the price of admission looks like a bargain. The interesting question isn’t the top of the distribution. It is the vast tier in between—the schools that are neither dying small private institutions nor lottery-ticket Ivies. Markets deliver competitive outcomes when buyers can see what they are buying, when they can walk away cheaply if they were wrong, and when they update their views in light of new information. The market for higher education is working on all three counts—but slowly. Information is buried, switching is costly, and teenagers don’t automatically keep up on statistics about their own futures. The closings we are witnessing are a decade of accumulated student decisions finally adding up. Last month a first-generation college student from Nebraska pitched me on a startup to fix this. It was the 100th such pitch I’ve heard on the subject in the past couple of years. My answer was the same as the preceding 99: There are already scores of consumer-facing apps in this space and hundreds of digital tools across the broader landscape, and students are still walking into bad enrollment decisions. The information exists. Artificial-intelligence chatbots are doling out advice. What is missing, at scale, is the right kind of conversation. In a field experiment my team and I ran in Houston in 2014, we put graduation rates, postgraduation earnings and full cost in front of high-school seniors at the moment they were choosing where to apply. The numbers alone didn’t move them much. Information-only interventions across the broader literature show the same pattern. The information-only arm of Eric Bettinger’s H&R Block FAFSA experiment and Kelli A. Bird’s 800,000-student text-messaging trial both produced null effects at scale. In contrast, economist Christine Mulhern’s 2023 paper finds that individual high-school counselors have causal effects on educational attainment comparable in magnitude to teachers. We need tools that do what a good counselor does, at the scale a human counselor never could, with the warmth a chatbot can’t yet accomplish. We should do all we can to accelerate market forces in higher education. The real scandal isn’t that hundreds of colleges are in danger of closing—it is that we have designed K-12 so that their equivalents never will. Mr. Fryer, a Journal contributor, is a professor of economics at Harvard, a founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Back to Top rpbobcat General User Member Since: 4/28/2006 Location: Rochelle Park, NJ Post Count: 3,664 Status: Offline     RE: Many Colleges Closing WSJ Article    Posted: 5/7/2026 7:34:18 AM  There was an article in the NYT that , because of job uncertanty,and AI ,young people are lining up for careers in "trades". People like Mike Rowe have been pusing this for years as an alternative to college degrees that cost a lot,but don't help you get a job. 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