The Economist |The World in 2021| International|pp72 “Bad Dreams” “A golden age for universities comes to an end” “Some Universities will disappear altogether”
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Since 2002 International students, a student-group that pays universities well, have increased nearly 2X in Britain and American, more than 3X in Australia and 4X in Canada but the pandemic has dealt a blow cutting enrollment in Australia from 144,000 in July 2019 to 40,000 in July 2020. In rebounding from the pandemic universities may find themselves down-the-priority list for government and non-government funding behind more pressing needs. Beyond that while higher education has grown in past decades there is now ideologically less support as “The expansion of higher educations has coincided with poor productivity growth in much of the rich world, undermining faith in universities’ ability to boost growth. Political disputes are increasingly divided along educational lines: between the have-degrees and the have-nots.”
The immediate fallout will be scaling back building plans and a college workforce “that has shrunk by 7%” in America and worse in Australia since the pandemic. Edmit, “a college-planning outfit, estimates that a third of American private colleges are on course to run out of money within six years.” The adage “when the going gets tough the tough get going” comes to mind as universities must adapt to survive. They “must find new ways to make money.” This may be distance-learning and may involve focusing some curriculum that are “short practical courses to the temporary jobless.” As time goes on and by “the end of 2021 things may start to improve.” Indeed, the university is a great destination for the young when the economy is down-a place to pause the career while gaining and honing skills and there “may even be pent-up demand among international students who have put off studying for a year.”