The Decline of the Academic Elite

Relative to the post earlier today "The Impending Collapse of the Student Loan Program" as college cost increase at some point prospective students will refuse to take on debt that cannot be recovered by higher income. Maybe this isn't understood by parents and politicians yet but James D. Miller writing in Inside Higher Education does understand.

Tenure won’t save us from a higher education collapse. Start making alternative career contingency plans now because this collapse could be sudden and catastrophic.Among middle- and upper-class Americans, almost every intelligent, hard-working person attends college. Knowing this, many employers use college as a cheap and efficient sorting device and consider only college graduates when hiring for professional positions.Not having a college degree sends a negative signal to employers. Unfortunately for professors, this signal could dissipate. To see why, consider an extreme example in which students go to college only because of signaling concerns. If something happened to cause fewer highly capable high school graduates to attend college, the stigma of not attending college would slightly decrease. But as this stigma fell, fewer people would pay for college, which would cause the stigma of not going to college to fall further, which in turn would reduce the percentage of highly capable people who went to college which would…. In a world in which college functioned purely as a signal of quality of the graduate, the percentage of people who attend college could quickly plunge.

He then goes on and explains Peter Thiel's experiment where the technology developer is searching for bright young people under age 20 to pay them to drop out of school . Lest you think Thiel got lucky once and made a fortune consider he was a major financial backer of both FaceBook and LinkedIn. He then goes on to explain Moore's law which says in effect that the amount of computing power you can buy per dollar approximately doubles every year. So what will online classes look like in the future? How will brick and mortar institutions look in the future for that matter. Miller points out that Republican frequently consider higher education to be a tool of the left so many Republican governors would gladly replace high paid faculty members with cheap online classes especially if facing a tight budget. Private colleges with big endowments won't stand in the way of progress either. Miller notes;

If you have tenure and therefore think that your college would never get rid of you, consider what would happen if most of your school’s peer institutions replaced expensive tenured faculty with cheap online courses and used the savings to cut tuition by 50 percent. Even if your school has a healthy endowment, many members of your Board of Trustees or Regents probably have business backgrounds and would consider it financial malfeasance for the school to bear costs that the majority of its competitors had shed.

Miller is writing to professors and predicting their decline. The article is a warning to them to consider other employment options. Either by the collapse of the student loan program as I examined in my post or through the implementation of computer technology into education in Miller's article, higher education will change and that change is apt to be quick and dramatic.