The coming melt-down in higher education

On Seth's point 2, "This leads to a crop of potential college students that can (and will) no longer just blindly go to the 'best' school they get in to," the counterargument is that students who can afford to go to the best school they can get into, in part because their families are willing to subsidize their studies, may as well continue to make that choice. They will make that choice to signal that they are from prosperous families (that has job market value, especially in occupations such as law) and that they were able to get into that 'best' school. To assert that college is becoming less and less affordable is not to prove that the most desired colleges will become less desirable.

Moreover, Godin ignores the issue that many of the most desired colleges in the United States admit many students who are paying far less than full list price, as those students are given financial aid/scholarships (= discounts on list price for price-sensitive students desired by the college).

1. "Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is?"

I can tell which math department is Harvard's if I see a list of the course offerings. Only Harvard has a course quite like Math 55 for first-year students.

http://www.math.harvard.edu/courses/index.html

(A friend of my son's is off to Harvard in the fall, and he is expecting to take Math 55. I know alumni of that class in the last few years.)

Here is a FAQ I post elsewhere in cyberspace when young people ask if the most highly desired colleges in the United States will become less competitive to get into in the next few years, now that high-school-age age cohorts are declining in size in the United States:

DEMOGRAPHICS

Population trends in the United States are not the only issue influencing the competitiveness of college admission here. The children already born show us what the expected number of high school students are in various years, but the number of high school students in the United States, which is expected to begin declining in a few years, isn't the whole story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/ed...nted=2&_r=1&h...

First of all, if more students who begin high school go on to college, there will be more applicants to college even with a declining number of high school students. And that is the trend in the United States and worldwide.

Second, colleges in the United States accept applications from all over the world, so it is quite possible that demographic trends in the United States will not be the main influence on how many students apply to college. The cohorts of high-school-age students are still increasing in size in some countries (NOT most of Europe).

Third, even if the number of applicants to colleges overall stays the same, or even declines, the number of applicants to the most competitive colleges may still increase. The trend around the world is a "flight to quality" of students trying to get into the best college they can in increasing numbers, and increasing their consensus about which colleges to put at the top of their application lists. I do not expect college admission to be any easier for my youngest child than for my oldest child, even though she is part of a smaller birth cohort in the United States.

And now I would add to this that at the very most selective colleges that are maintaining generous financial aid plans even after a financial crisis and a recession, next year's (and the following year's) crush of applicants will be larger than ever. When colleges that are already acknowledged to be great colleges start reducing their net cost down to what the majority of families in the United States can afford, those colleges will receive more applications from all parts of the United States, and very likely from all over the world.