EDUCATION Coronavirus Pushes Colleges to the Breaking Point, Forcing ‘Hard Choices’ about Education "MacMurray College survived the Civil War, the Great Depression and two world wars, but not the coronavirus pandemic. The private liberal-arts school in central Illinois announced recently it will shut its doors for good in May, after 174 years. Like many small schools, it faced declining enrollment and financial shortfalls. To lure prospective students, it was using steep discounts to its $30,000 listed tuition. Then the global health crisis brought unexpected costs for shifting classes online and partially reimbursing room and board for students forced to finish out the spring term at home. The loss of a $3-million-plus bridge loan was the final straw. The pandemic “squeezed out the last rays of hope,” said President Beverly Rodgers. From schools already on the brink to the loftiest institutions, the pandemic is changing higher education in America with stunning speed." Colleges and universities face such a large number of problems it would take a book even to begin to address the problems. A few of the larger problems include the fact that the model is old and was designed to create factory floor managers, corporate managers, scientists, engineers, economics, and other similar areas and a small number of professionals who would need further education to polish their skills and basic knowledge. In the olden days, this was limited to the top 30% or so of the graduating high school class, and even this was stretching the matrix to its limits. Today we try to send 70% of our high school class to college in the failed understanding that if the top 30% could use college education to achieve success, so could the middle 40%. The problem is adding these people caused the IQ of the matriculating class of colleges and universities to decline severely. As a result, the rigor of college had to be reduced to allow these students to graduate. Businesses quickly found that they were not very interested in these lower quality college degree holders. Colleges also had to find areas of study which had much lower rigor since colleges like science, engineering, mathematics, economics, and other core STEM areas were unwilling to dumb down their curriculum. The result was the creation of a large number of degrees that have no natural work markets for degree holders. As a result, colleges, universities, governmental agencies have been fabricating "jobs" to provide these degree holders with work. This has only driven up costs in education, government, and anywhere these useless jobs appear. The result of all of this has been the ghettoization of the academe between the higher IQ individuals in the STEM fields and the lower IQ individuals outside of those degrees. The costs of a college education have also risen due to the 7-times increase in administrative college and university payrolls while the professoriate has shrunk in many ways. These costs added to the costs created when the now wealthy Boomers returned to college with their children and demanded the facilities be upgraded, food service be upscaled, and recreational opportunities be maximized. The Boomers were wealthier the less cost-conscious but still did not have the money to pay full tuition, books, room, and board, so the children had to take out loans. Over the decades, the dumbing down of the curriculum, the focus on improved facilities and easy grading all came from a new mantra the student is the customer, and the customer is always right. The result was rapidly declining rigor, minimal homework, lavish facilities, and a shift in focus from education to the feelings of the young dilettantes attending college. The recipe was a recipe for disaster. The colleges have sown the wind and are now beginning to reap the whirlwind. Like nearly every other area of human endeavor, we seem to be at the end of the current model. The old factory floor education model is dead. There are no factories, at least not with workers in need of managing. It seems odd, but we continue to manufacture about 30% of the World's manufactured goods on a value-added basis, but few still have factory jobs. This decline will continue just as it has with agriculture jobs since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The cure for our problems with colleges and universities cannot happen until we allow the new socio-economic-political-work-employment models to emerge. This is because the education model must be crafted to create graduates who can fulfill the needs of these models. Reforming education before we know the new models will not work since it is unlikely to meet the needs of the new employers.
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