Today, the idea is that thousands of colleges will suffocate due to demographic trends and a loss of faith in “the return on investment.” Whatever the proffered cause, the zombie is the same – colleges cannot compete, and they are dropping like flies. Oh, the horror. I used “waves” above because that’s how the industry outlet Inside Higher Education described the situation in a recent article about a supposed decline in the higher education ecosystem. Their headline said the “Higher Ed Sector Shrank by 2 Percent” and their first five words of the story are, “amid waves of college closures.” As I have chronicled several times, there is very little evidence to support the idea that colleges are closing at any scale whatsoever. What data does exist to support this kind of institutional retraction is heavily concentrated in the dubious and atypical for-profit sector, which is neither surprising nor a fitting proxy for the “higher ed sector” overall.
