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The market for higher education isn’t failing, but it’s taking an awfully long time to adjust.
Hampshire College, alma mater of filmmaker Ken Burns, announced in April that it will close after the fall semester. Sterling College, a 130-acre working farm in northeastern Vermont, will graduate its final class in May. The Huron Consulting Group projects that 442 private nonprofit colleges enrolling roughly 670,000 students are at risk of closing or merging within a decade. The instinctive response is elegiac: lament the shuttered campus, mourn the futures it might have made, hope for rescue. Mr. Burns called Hampshire’s closing “an extraordinary loss.”
Is it just me, or is this good news for America? Closing these institutions means students are slowly ceasing to overpay for scant added value. If more market correction is to come, that tells us something important—about higher education and about other education sectors we have built to avoid correction altogether. The question isn’t how to save these institutions. It is how to accelerate market forces.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is Professor of Economics at Harvard University, an entrepreneur, and co-founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.