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Each day, I start my morning by reading the GSVN2K Daily Newsletter. The headline that caught my eye this morning was “‘25% of Colleges Could Go Out of Business’: Chegg CEO Says the Pandemic is Speeding Up Higher Education's Reckoning.”
The Fortune article is behind a paywall if you've reached your free allotment. An earlier Aug. 21, 2020, piece in Yahoo Finance titled "25% of colleges likely to go out of business: Chegg CEO" should be available for you to read.
The key quote in the Yahoo article is Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig arguing that:
… the coronavirus pandemic is likely to eliminate 25% of all universities in the U.S., as cash-strapped colleges struggle to adapt to a changing education environment.
"Seventy-eight percent of all students say they go to college for the sole purpose of getting a better job. If the schools don't make it cheaper, don't go online, and don't expand their curriculum to be, in addition to what they have, skills-related, and they don't make it more convenient for the student base, they will go out of business," he said.
Here it is worth pausing, I think, to recognize the place where ed-tech executives like Rosensweig and academics (like me -- maybe you) often find ourselves talking past one another.
When I read Chegg's CEO predicting that 25 percent of colleges may close, I have two reactions:
Reaction No. 1: How come ed-tech executives never seem to talk about public disinvestment as one of the leading causes of postsecondary institutional fragility?
In my home state of New Hampshire, the governor is proposing to merge the public higher education system and in the process reduce state support from $151.7 million in 2020 to $138 million in 2023, a decline of 9 percent. This is in an environment where the state of New Hampshire already provides one of the lowest levels of state funding for higher education.
To my ears -- and I realize that this is my bias -- Rosensweig's prediction sounds like piling on. Instead of arguing for more generous support of the higher education sector, ed-tech executives seem to think that colleges and universities can innovate their way out of a funding crisis. There is no doubt room for postsecondary innovation. However, this objective of encouraging institutional innovation should be contextualized within the broader policy environment that has created endemic scarcities across the postsecondary sector.
Reaction No. 2: Colleges and universities are mission-driven, and the sorts of innovations that ed-tech executives proselytize may not align with an institution's core values.
The solutions to the funding, demographic and cost challenges colleges and universities face are often framed by ed tech around agility and adaptability. If schools could just make their offerings less expensive and more job-focused, then everything would be OK.
While there is undoubtedly merit in critical analysis of how colleges and universities are structured, this analysis should be tempered by a recognition that nonprofit postsecondary institutions do not operate as businesses. These are mission-driven organizations devoted to providing both educational opportunities and to expanding knowledge.
It would be (relatively) easy for most schools to redesign their offerings to benefit those students with the greatest access to resources. Goals around equity and access, however, are privileged over objectives related to efficiency. An institutional innovation may benefit some students -- and perhaps help a school's bottom line -- but it may also leave behind many of the students that the school currently serves.
None of this is to say that ed-tech executives like Dan Rosensweig should not be taking a critical stance on our higher education system. They should be speaking out. We need to be talking about the roles that all of us can play in supporting the most fragile of colleges and universities.
I am saying that we need to find a way where we are not talking past one another. This different sort of conversation can start with an appreciation of how academics understand the role of their institutions and recognize the external challenges of funding and demographics that almost every school now faces.
For ed-tech executives, a better stance may be to position themselves as students of higher education rather than experts with the answers to all of higher ed's problems.
As the saying goes, "Less certainty. More inquiry."
