It can’t last, I heard a fellow middle-school father say at a crock-pot dinner one fall day, back when buffet-style made any kind of sense. He was an Aussie, and he was talking about the pronounced American phenomenon of plunging into debt for the sake of outlandish college tuition. Micro-learning, he said, or something like it — concentrated, focused bursts of instruction at a fraction of the cost — was coming.
That sounds about right. At least for my youngest daughter, the middle schooler, who seems interested in baking or cooking or life as some kind of food biz entrepreneur.
Of course, what would be lost is the campus experience, that first taste of freedom, the perfect environment for a first serious romance, those weirdly satisfying trips with quarters to the basement laundry room, the black coffee-fueled all-nighters followed by the pleasure of a bleary morning trip to the mess hall to look in awe on the piles of home fries, the vast trays of scrambled eggs from a mix. “What can I getcha?” the work-study football dude would ask, spatula in hand, and no happier words exist in the English language.
On the other hand, Scott Galloway, the N.Y.U. marketing prof, is really good — more like heartbreaking — on this subject, as he details the scandalous transfer of wealth upward from struggling middle-class parents, who feel they have no choice in the matter, to rich, powerful, exclusionary institutions and faculty.
Any parent reading this should get on the WNYC Studios website and listen to his Aug. 28 “On the Media” interview with Brooke Gladstone about the new college climate, in which the most elite universities, Stanford, Brown, M.I.T., are enthusiastically doubling down on their luxury branding and exclusivity — “They’re essentially hedge funds educating very wealthy kids” — while the rest are caught in a cycle of raising prices dizzyingly faster than inflation “without any underlying increase in quality or innovation. . . . Less for more, is the way you would describe education over the last 40 years.”
Families’ captive straits paired with their desperate hopes for their children had him comparing the cost of college to Big Pharma’s gouging of the ill.
Naturally I’m interested in this because my oldest daughter has recently finished slogging through the application process. And speaking only for my half of the parental unit, I’ve been at a bit of a loss. Just one example of the reckoning: Late one night at the computer I was interested to see that Ithaca College, in addition to the neat small city and nearby Finger Lakes, had remarkably creative course offerings. The next week I read in The Times how the administration was pushing through the elimination of 130 full-time faculty positions. And off the list it went.
There are data out there about declining enrollment, generally and in light of Covid, and I’ve tried asking around if kids are rushing to take a year off, but the only answer I’ve heard is Galloway’s: “It’s a great year to take a gap year.” He was talking about the fall of 2020, but is the coming fall any different?
Everyone seems to be forging ahead with college plans as if everything were normal, blinders on. And now I’m wearing them too.