Coronavirus is changing America hugely in the here and now–just look outside.
It’s also true that it will have a lasting impact on the country (and the world), and while prediction is hard, especially about the future, there is one obvious impact that will harm both millions of individual Americans and the long term economic health of the nation.
That would be what’s waiting for students graduating this June into a job market that for all intents and purposes won’t exist–likely for months/years to come.
TL:DR: it’s bad. Really bad. There are serious losses of income and long term wealth that produce knock-on effects on health and social factors in the lives of those who, by no fault or action of their own, happen to come into adulthood at just the wrong moment.
At this moment, we’re diving into what looks like a deep economic disaster that will wreck the dreams of millions of kids just getting started, and we are doing so because the Republican leadership botched both short and long term plans for a predictable event. This is social misery that is about to happen as a direct result of political choices made by Donald Trump and 40 years of decisions by Republican elected officials. We will need to drive that point home, until being a Republican ranks in popular estimation a couple of rungs below refurbished condom retailer.
To our sorrow, there’s a fair amount of research on the natural experiments we’ve already endured that shwo what starting one’s career in such a moment does to both short term and longer prospects. In 2006, a paper looking at Canadian college graduates between 1982 and 1999 showed that recessions have a significant impact on new graduates:
Our main results suggest that the average worker graduating college in a recession faces earnings losses that are very persistent but not permanent. On average, a two standard deviation increase in the unemployment rate (roughly comparing the difference between those exiting college in a bust versus boom) leads to an initial wage gap of about 10 percent. This gap declines relatively slowly, and fades to zero after about the eighth year. Controlling for unemployment rate conditions after the first year of labor market entry, we also conclude that virtually all of the wage deficit can be attributed to the unemployment rate variation in the very first year after leaving school.
Graduating at the wrong time affects the shape of careers; timing matters, in that the newest graduates suffer more than those with a toe-hold in the job market; finally, that average 10% loss masks the differential effects by income level. As usual, the poor suffer more (from the non-technical summary):
…initial random shocks affect the entire career. Graduating in a recession leads workers to start at smaller and lower paying firms, and they catch-up by switching jobs more frequently than those who graduate in better times. Third, some workers are more affected by luck than others. In particular, earnings losses from temporarily high unemployment rates are minimal for workers with two or more years of work experience and are greatest for labor market entrants. Among graduates, those with the lowest predicted earnings suffer significantly larger and much more persistent earnings losses than those at the top.
I’ve seen studies on the impact of the 2007-8 events that report similar patterns, but what really caught my eye was this one, published in January, 2020, by Hannes Schwandt of Northewestern and Till M. von Wachter from UCLA. Here’s the abstract, which captures the scope of its miserable findings:
We find that cohorts coming of age during the deep recession of the early 1980s suffer increases in mortality that appear in their late 30s and further strengthen through age 50. We show these mortality impacts are driven by disease-related causes such as heart disease, lung cancer, and liver disease, as well as drug overdoses. At the same time, unlucky middle-aged labor market entrants earn less and work more while receiving less welfare support. They are also less likely to be married, more likely to be divorced, and experience higher rates of childlessness. Our findings demonstrate that tempo-rary disadvantages in the labor market during young adulthood can have substantial impacts on lifetime outcomes, can affect life and death in middle age, and go beyond the transitory initial career effects typically studied.
Schwandt and von Wachter begin with background capturing how the picture of income and career costs have held up, and in some cases worsened since the earlier research I linked above:
Losses in cumulated lifetime income implied by typical estimates per se could lead to lower wealth accumulation, and there is some evidence of reductions in housing wealth among individuals coming of age in the Great Recession (e.g., Dettling and Hsu, 2014). Several studies have documented lasting changes in occupational choice (Oyer, 2006, 2008; Altonji et al., 2016) and employer characteristics (Oreopoulos et al., 2012), and Kahn (2010) finds that 1982 college graduates may begin to lose ground again around 15 years after job entry.
So yeah: graduating in a recession is not what you want. But here’s the killer, literally:
For cohorts coming of age during the early 1980s recession, a temporarily higher state unemployment rate at the age of labor market entry leads to precisely estimated increases in mortality that appear in the late thirties and increase until age 50. These increases in mortality are driven to an important extent by a rise in both disease-related and “external” causes, including lung cancer, liver disease, and drug poisoning.
Aside from early death, effects of entering the job market in crap times make life suck in many ways:
We also find entering the labor market during a recession has a substantial impact on a broad range of measures of socioeconomic status in middle age, including a decline in marriage rates, a rise in divorce rates, and a decline in family size. We also find that after initial recovery in their mid-thirties, adversely affected entry cohorts suffer a reduction in earnings as they reach their mid-forties.
And there are interesting (if that’s the word) distinctions in outcomes by race that may help explain Trump’s appeal to folks whose interests he assaults:
Finally, while the effects on overall mortality are similar by race, increases in deaths of despair appear to be chiefly concentrated among white, nonHispanic men. White men also tend to experience a decline in earnings in midlife and tend to experience larger reductions in family stability than their non-white counterparts. This is despite the fact that non-whites experience larger short-run effects on earnings and other outcomes…
In sum: the Trump recession/depression that is beginning right now will damage the hopes and prospects of a generation for a generation. It will affect us all, including those of us fortunate enough to start our careers in better times, as millions of Americans will have less of chance to lead the fully productive/creative lives they could–and thus our economy and culture as a whole will lose what could have been.
There are some responses that could mitigate the worst effects, it seems to me, and I’m going to be getting in touch with my legislators to push them. First, the most obvious, is to forgive any tuition debt incurred this year. Second, almost equally obvious, would be to forgive it all, certainly for students currently in college, but better, for everyone, as that would be an instant stimulus/support. If students graduating now or over the next few years didn’t have to pay down a debt that the crappy job market will make yet more intractable, they would have more flexibility, more resilience, and hopefully both a better short term and more healthy and emotionally robust time as the years roll by.
And the other urgency, of course, is to not do what Hoover did, and Trump and McConnell and the rest of the junta are doing now: dither over a response that in its first iterations is clearly inadequate to the task. The best thing to do when facing the prospect of double digit job losses is to throw money at anything that (a) keeps folks alive and (b) offers jobs that pay wages.
It’s really not that complicated: don’t burden the most vulnerable with the hardest road to hoe; give them a leg up in hard times. And drop cash from helicopters.
Over to y’all.
Images: Franz von Felbinger, Poor Children, by 1906.
Edvard Munch, Despair, 1894.
Martin
My son completed his last college course on Thursday. He’s job hunting. He’s getting interest but most of it is ‘hit us up again in a month, we’re not sure what we’re going to need right now’.
He’ll be okay as he has a lot of expertise in niche areas that someone will have a need for, but finding that match could take a while right now. I’m encouraging him to think like an entrepreneur in the meantime. There’s going to be a fucking mountain of opportunity off the back of this.
lamh36
I was already thinking it’s take out 3 weeks before I heard anything about the job I interviewed for, but now with the state lab being bombarded w/Coronovirus testing, I’ll guess it will take much longer
Jim Parish
The paragraph after the first painting seems to be lacking a few words.
NotMax
Repeating from downstairs.
IMPORTANT
Android phone? Beware should it or an offer for it show up on your device.
CovidLock ransomware exploits coronavirus with malicious Android app
Tom Levenson
@Jim Parish: Thanks.
Fix’t, after a fashion.
WereBear
Oh boy! Look what I won! And I get to look at retirement with the new anvil handed to me. Thanks so much Republicans! I just don’t know what to say. Without swearing.
Mnemosyne
Paid internships will probably be canceled as well. Lots of belt-tightening even for people who are able to keep their jobs. I’m very lucky that (a) I have a job I can mostly do from home and (b) I was able to borrow the equipment that I needed from work to do my job. Some of my coworkers are stuck at home with nothing to do, though they’re still being paid for now.
Ksmiami
You all are assuming some kind of normal after all this- nope I see a reorder of the system and the end of America as world power. What comes next is anyone’s bet but I refuse to allow Republicans the right to govern
Martin
Speaking of opportunity, Apple has turned their supply chain talent on sourcing medical supplies. From what I’m hearing they have started donating masks to US and European hospitals and think they can get that into the millions per day range in a week.
Apparently they’re also working on getting respirators made ASAP. I think these too will be donated. Apple probably has the strongest supply chain talent in the world, and they have some unique ways to solve supply chain problems. In order to ensure they could keep phone production on pace, they went multiple layers up the supply chain to prepay for raw aluminum to ensure a shortage of aluminum wouldn’t be a bottleneck. When Microsoft saw that Apple had a contract with an aluminum mine to support their laptop efforts, they realized Apple was playing by a radically different and more aggressive set of rules than everyone else.
Apple will walk in with literal cash in hand and tip up a factory. They don’t wait for the financing layer to do their thing. And they will work every layer of the chain – fabric, rubber, masks, and shipping so there are no surprises.
Mind you, this is what the federal government should be doing…
Elizabelle
I thought I wuz in a Betty Cracker thread.
@Martin:
I am all ears for any suggestions you have on that. (Albeit, not the tech genius your son likely is …)
Elizabelle
@WereBear: I know. Horrible.
Thank goodness for the therapy cats.
Damien
As someone who graduated into the recession of 2008-2009, then was lured into crushing student loan debt by a predatory for-profit college, and was just getting my career going when all this shit hit the fan, I can absolutely believe this whole study.
Of course, I was smart and did the math on having kids way back when I was 11 and decided to say screw that nonsense. My friends with kids are really badly hurting right now, and all I have to worry about is me.
MoCA Ace
My son is graduating in a few weeks. His plan was to move in with his fiance where she will be finishing her last semester of college with her mandated student teaching. They already signed a lease for an apartment. He was going to get work at the local hospital as a CNA while applying to medical school.
Everything has been upended now. His fiance has a genetic respiratory disease so she is high risk for coronavirus. they are home here with us for what is probably the last time they can be together for months… probably longer. He will be heading back too college and she will be quarantining with her mom and sister. We discussed him dropping his plans and staying here but he said “I want to be a doctor I can’t just sit this out. someone needs to help these people” He leaves monday and I can’t imagine how heartbreaking that goodbye will be.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Tim Mak, NPR reporter who I believe broke the non-financial aspect of the Burr story, is also IIRC a volunteer EMT
WereBear
@Elizabelle: They are happy I seem to be hanging around more. I’m sure they think it’s because they are so cute and sweet :)
Those kittens are like pumas: long and lopey with long heads. It’s a new on on me. Then again, they are a rare breed still in process:
Bud and Lou are American Ringtails
which tickles me no end, because I got them at a bargain price: rescued!
Brachiator
Perhaps information like this will help us make adjustments in the future, and provide some assistance where necessary.
ETA: I wonder how those who came of age after the Great Plague of London, in the 1660s, made out later in life.
Tom Levenson
@Elizabelle: I cannot imagine higher praise.
Elizabelle
@Tom Levenson: Tis true.
MoCA Ace
on a more hopeful note, could it turn out like the end of WWII with a booming economy and the middle class buoyed by new SOCIALIST policies?
If we throw enough of those monsters out this fall it might be possible no?
RSA
@MoCA Ace: Thanks for sharing your son’s thoughts. We need stories about heroes these days.
Martin
@Elizabelle: I think a whole range of potential things. You’re going to see some long overdue industry shifts happening – studios that didn’t want to release on digital until their theater run ended, are now desperate to release directly on digital. That could signal the end of widespread movie theaters turning them increasingly into more of an experience. They’ve already done this, but they kept the old largely unprofitable theaters open. I think those are done for. Those aren’t really response industries to this, they’re just collateral damage, killing off the sick and dying businesses a bit faster than they otherwise would have gone from this world.
On the response industry side I think there will be a huge market for minimally invasive monitoring. A thermal camera you can mount at an airport gate with some advanced software to detect who has a fever and then alert the staff. Same with schools and other places that are either distribution points for the virus or contraction points. This is not unlike the responses to 9/11 at airports and such.
Work at home may become a more permanent thing, creating markets for hardware and software to make that better, plus probably less technological products to help people with their work/life balance. Same for online teaching. Sometimes these things are merely catalysts to help society get from one mode to another that looked risky, but actually turns out to be good. So, what kind of in-class instruction can you move to out of class. This is where devices like the Raspberry Pi have made a big impact.
Mnemosyne
@WereBear:
Our cat Charlotte doesn’t have any Siamese/Oriental markings, but her talkativeness and body shape has convinced us that she has some in her. (She’s an alpha, too, which is another indicator.) She can actually “say” words that she’s picked up from us like “no!” and “now!” It’s a little creepy sometimes. ?
Baud
@MoCA Ace:
No one knows nothing.
Cynthia ackerman
I graduated into the Reagan recession. Concur as an anecdata.
On the larger point, I’m now close to retirement and am being recruited for a state House race, as an Independent Party candidate, in a race where the R incumbent is vulnerable because of a R walkout, and the presumptive D nominee is not likely to receive any support from the state DP.
I have a long time to consider.
The one motivation is to run on a pledge to undo the accomplishments of a kakistocracy made up of tools who don’t believe in government.
PS — idea for a political cartoon: DJT as a three-year old in a bathtub, drowning government.
PPS — Tom, I grew up when/where you did, doubt our paths crossed but I sometimes wonder …
Baud
@Cynthia ackerman:
Is it too late to compete in the primary against the D?
debbie
@Mnemosyne:
Heh, reminds me of this story.
Marcopolo
Unless the federal government gets its act together it won’t just be kids having their economic futures delayed, derailed, or destroyed. It will be all the folks who lose their houses cause they have no income & cant pay the mortgage (despite whatever equity they already have—similar to the 2008 financial crisis) plus all the small/medium sized business owners (dining & entertainment) who go bankrupt due to the sudden fall off in demand. I definitely feel for the students but this will be worse than 2008.
Repatriated
@Martin: The problem with work-from-home is that it means the person working from “home” can be from China or India just as easily as Cupertino or Indianapolis.
Doesn’t affect all jobs, but it doesn’t help with wages either
Mary G
Trigger warning – not good news.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne: I know what you mean. Tristan uses emotional tones in his growly Siamese voice, conveying interest, disappointment, worry, and urgency.
He’s been demanding explanations, and I’m not sure. He’s incredibly good with concepts, but this one many humans are having trouble with.
I’m not sure how I can mime “global pandemic.” Charades with cats.
Heads up to all: I have written Working at home, with cats
NotMax
Anyone yet mention this dickwad?
Police: Man arrested after threatening to blow up New Rochelle building where virus testing is coordinated
oldster
Before retirement, I taught in an R1 university, in a Humanities department. In some years, I was the director of graduate studies, and spent most of my time worrying about how to get our newly minted PhDs into faculty jobs.
I see a hell-scape ahead for my successors and their charges. Here’s why.
The closing of the dorms this spring means that thousands of colleges are going to have to write refund checks to parents for room and board. A lot of colleges cannot write those checks. They rely on the dorm and meal-plan money to make ends meet.
Plus, if they are lucky enough to have an endowment, then it has lost a third of its value. They will have to reduce the pay-out next year, perhaps to zero.
In New York State, there are about 800 four-year colleges and universities. This will be an extinction event for over half of them — esp the small private SLACs that are not part of the SUNY system and not mega-wealthy.
And those colleges had the jobs that our graduates used to get. They just disappeared.
But it’s worse than that. Because when those colleges die, they will fire all of their faculty. And those laid-off faculty will be looking for new jobs, and so competing with our new grads.
When the newly minted and the newly fired compete for the few remaining jobs, then sometimes the fresher face will beat the grizzled veteran, and sometimes the proven teacher will beat the untried novice. There’s no hard and fast rule about who will win.
Except, there will be so few jobs that 95% of them, veterans or newbies, will lose and not get a job.
This in turn will lead to a cratering of the graduate programs at the R1 universities, even the ones that are able to weather the economic downturn.
Add to this the fact that higher ed in recent decades has relied on cash from teaching the children of China and Korea. You know how most Americans don’t pay the sticker price of college, after financial aid and special deals? That’s because the Asian kids were paying sticker price.
So when they decide it’s not safe to come back in September (as it probably will not be), then the cash crunch will be even worse.
I gave my life to higher ed in America. Throughout most of my life, American universities were the finest in the world; they were one industry in which we always enjoyed a competitive advantage over other countries.
Now that entire legacy is probably doomed.
And while the Republicans will be happy to shell out billions to save banks, casinos, and hotels, they will never give higher education a cent. In fact, they will relish it’s destruction. Along with the destruction of the unions and the media, it completes their campaign against the enemies of authoritarianism. No longer will they have to worry about free thought or rational enquiry. There will be only Fox news.
So, I am sad. The fact that this is happening in my retirement does not make it sting any less.
Ksmiami
@MoCA Ace: if you meant an earlier date – like throw these mutherfkers out the window in June, I’d agree. November will be too late and most likely we will be experiencing a second virus wave so
Elizabelle
@Mary G: Twitter is not coming up for me, for about 45 minutes now.
What is the gist of the tweet?
Anyone else cannot access the twitter links??
Baud
@Elizabelle:
It works for me.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: I am unable to read what you linked to, and it won’t enlarge.
Starfish
@Mnemosyne: Yes, this is already happening in some places.
What is sad is that this has happened regularly since my first job.
I graduated college as the dot com boom became the dot com bust. We had multiple offers upon graduation to watch people fired every few months in our first jobs.
My younger sister (architect) was unemployed for a year and a half during the housing bust, and her firm immediately cut everyone’s pay in response to this disaster.
Cynthia ackerman
I can’t file D because registered Ind.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
MoCA Ace
I am equal parts proud as hell and terrified.
Mnemosyne
@Starfish:
I can tell that I’m a few years older than you, because I graduated into HW Bush’s recession in 1992, where my college classmates were holding signs saying “will work for food” at graduation since the job market had dried up. Then there was the dot com recession, and then the housing bubble busting all over everyone’s 401(k)s. I’m still underemployed for my level of education, but at least it’s a union job with a pension plan.
Starfish
Starfish
@Mnemosyne: I was a SAHM who left the workforce for 8 years and returned to work in the tech field at the end of October. I am scared.
WaterGirl
@Starfish: Thank you so much!
Elizabelle
@Baud: Turned the laptop off for a while, and it reset. Now to find out what was ominous in that tweet ….
Fair Economist
@Mnemosyne:
Past tense please. My nephew and his girlfriend already lost their internships last week.
Deeply ironically, the girlfriend had an internship at the CDC and it was pulled because they couldn’t get health insurance for interns in the current environment. Just one more of the stupid affects of our health system.
middlelee
This is a completely different way for me to look at the economic disaster we are facing. Living next to two small towns that are mostly small businesses, many of them tourist dependent, I’ve been wondering how the business owners and their employees will survive.
I do have friends with children graduating college this year and next and now I see that the outlook can be bleak for those entering the work force.
We see a little more each day how unprepared we are to meet this crisis and how 40 years of pulling funding from infrastructure, defunding health institutions, destroying the social safety net by the Republicans has created this predicament.
I’m not ready to put on my positivity hat and see the opportunities and I doubt I’ll get over the rage I’m feeling any time soon.
We are getting a tiny preview of what we’ll see in the coming years as climate change worsens and we have many new diseases. more insect and rodent vectors, more crop failures, and way too many guns in the hands of extremely ignorant and even stupid people.
Elizabelle
@WaterGirl: I had to log out of my laptop, turn it off for a while and it reset.
The tweet did come up, but it takes some clicking to get to the text. Which I see someone has provided upthread.
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I have to ask what kind of doctor would prescribe an unproven drug that comes with its own problems (vision, liver) and not so great interactions with a surprisingly long list of other drugs.
Ruff the dog
What are the chances that the millionaire recipients of the tax cuts will form an emergency volunteer barista corps and step up and make a real contribution? Never mind, I think I know.
got a college freshman home for the rest of the semester. High school junior home nominally for two weeks, but for sure the rest of the school year. My federal agency is on telework through May 1 at least. Spouse’s as well. Three cats for four people…
Fair Economist
@MoCA Ace:
In the long term, easily, although even with good governance I expect a couple years to clean up the mess. We are in one of those rare situations where everything is up in the air and huge changes become possible, like the tail end of WWI, where most of the monarchies that had ruled Europe for centuries just evaporated.
MoCA Ace
@Ksmiami:
There is still time for that… after I finish the basement improvements I’m thinking of making pikes as a hobby
And guillotines. gotta supply the pikes
Dan B
@WereBear: We have a cat whose tail he can lay almost flat on his back. He uses it to grab our hand when he wants more petting. My partner thinks it’s called scorpion.
My partner doesn’t like seeing pet butts. He’s creeped out but still loves this wild and crazy kitten.
Suzanne
Krugman had a tweet today about how social distancing is not likely to be sustainable for more than a few weeks. Most people will get interminably bored and will take risks that they shouldn’t when the economy is terrible so that they don’t lose their homes. If our government really wants this to happen, they need to throw resources at it. Yesterday.
Mike in NC
We all need to do our best to ensure that terms like “Trump Recession” and “Trump Virus” become part of the lexicon. Spread the word. He needs to go down in the history books as a foul, malicious being who wreaked havoc on our society and ultimately died in prison.
Kent
My oldest daughter is due to graduate in May with a degree in PR and marketing with an emphasis in travel/leisure. Oops. Totally screwed.
We are actually talking about sending her down to Chile once this pandemic passes. My wife is Chilean and so all our kids are dual citizens so she can work/study in Chile as much as she wants. My wife as all manner of contacts so we will find her some manner of unpaid internships down there so she can do a combination of Spanish language study, getting to know her extended family and friends and second country, and building her portfolio with interesting sounding internships. It is 2020, she can apply for jobs from anywhere.
Not what she had in mind. But maybe better than just living in our basement and waiting tables or whatever while the economy recovers.
WereBear
@Dan B:
Love has a way of leaping all barriers :)
Yutsano
opiejeanne
@Mary G: Yeah, that’s bad.
WA reported 269 new confirmed cases today, up from 148 yesterday, and 4 days ago it was 108. Also, 94 have died in WA, up only 11 today, 15 yesterday.
opiejeanne
@WaterGirl: There’s a button at the top right, well, three buttons. click on one until it displays a block asking if you want to see the thing.
James E Powell
For some reason Democrats never do this in national campaigns. Is it because they are “reaching out” to the <1% of Republican voters who might some day vote for a Democrat? Are they giving fan service to the Villagers? Is it because they agree with Republican ideology?
WereBear
@James E Powell:
I think some of it is learned helplessness. They get beaten brutally by the Press Corpse for any show of spirit.
Kent
@opiejeanne: WA numbers are a total fantasy. Both total cases and total fatalities. My wife says they are now mostly just restricting testing to healthcare workers with symptoms. Not to really gather data, but to make sure that everyone shows up to work unless they test positive. She has had two elderly patients die of respiratory failure in the past 24 hours without actually ever being tested. Their telemedicine lines are getting flooded with people calling in with classic symptoms of coved-19. They just tell them all to self-quarantine and not show up to the hospital unless they are in critical condition.
This is Clark County WA (Vancouver WA and surrounding burbs).
hitchhiker
@Kent:
Do you know of a resource in WA that tracks number of tests given? None of this data is useful without that.
Kent
@hitchhiker: No I don’t. Other than what is out there on the regular tracking web sites.
Martin
@oldster: So, I agree somewhat with your conclusion, but not with how you think it will go down.
I’ve been arguing for a number of years that the US higher education model is unsustainable due to their increasing move toward credentialism and use of capital facilities as a moat around their business. In a period of time where individuals are increasingly armed with portable evidence for their skills, universities have gone the other way, investing in physical infrastructure instead.
I think it’s inevitable that undergraduate education undergoes a shift away from the residential model, which is where a significant part of student debt comes from, to a hybrid online self-paced program connected to apprenticeship/service learning.
The current model is mostly caught up behind an administrative structure built completely around the classroom model, governing instructor workloads/pay mechanisms, and so forth. Existing institutions cannot shift to a more student-friendly approach because they are culturally and organizationally dependent on the existing model, and many faculty are very good at playing the classroom model to minimize their student load. Some universities have recognized this shift and spun off new institutions built directly around student rather than classroom load, removing the barriers to adapt to new educational approaches.
There’s already evidence for this with smaller private universities struggling and failing around the country due to their inability to provide value at a sufficient rate relative to cost, compared to publics or privates with large endowments. But as these new entries get a greater hold in the educational space, they’ll put more and more pressure on the remaining privates and some publics.
Graduate education has long been heading in this direction through online professional programs, slowly squeezing out residential ones. Unfortunately, the result there has been relatively poorly implemented online professional programs that serve as financial subsidies for the conventional ones – with the faculty and administration really missing the point there. They seem to think they’re taking advantage of this cohort of students desperate for a MS/MA/MBA degree to benefit the group of more serious residential students. But the real lesson here is that the market demand has shifted off of residential, and offering then an inferior alternative will work up to the point that someone builds around that model with a quality program and manages to punch through the rankings and get recognized as superior to the professional programs from traditional institutions. That will be the Tesla exceeding the market cap of the big 3 moment, or the Apple outselling Nokia moment. When the traditional institutions recognize the real lesson here, it’ll be too late. It’ll take them a decade to adapt, to find ways to tear their old cultural administration down due to the resistance of faculty that are too wedded to the old model to change, while the new model is accelerating not being tied down with that baggage.
That’s been the last 3 weeks for me – faculty that simply cannot adapt to this new mode of education, and will make a hash of it as a result, and it will be amazingly clear which institutions have a more student friendly model despite not ranking high with US News.
And US News themselves may be in trouble as it’s unclear that a ranking against the backdrop of federal and state restrictions that render virtually all of their bullshit metrics either pointless or unfair. US News has no legitimacy within the educational community but they still have sway with the public. That may be thrown out the window here, and as much as the educational community despises the process and result, they are very, very dependent on them, because reputation is pretty much the only thing they offer the public by way of the quality of the institution.
The threat here isn’t the job market or demand for higher ed in general, you have a year or more of the traditional institutions being forced to invest in the thing they oppose (non-residential instruction), while still being culturally opposed to it because that’s how their entire administration is structured, at a moment when the nation desperately needs non-residential instruction to be good and effective. Those institutions where it is good and effective (eg Open University) have a huge opportunity here.
Personally I put the blame on traditionalist faculty that were unwilling to push their institutions to embrace a more modern iteration of teaching for leaving these institutions so vulnerable. There is no industry that hasn’t been disrupted by software and the internet. Education held on the longest because it has these really massive moats of government support and reputation, but this might just be the thing that breaks them. It’s going to happen eventually.
Ann Marie
I’m a lawyer at a big firm in Philadelphia. Normally each year we get a new group of young lawyers, fresh out of law school. In 2008, my recollection is that we didn’t hire anyone at all. Since then I have met multiple young lawyers from that period who are having difficulty adjusting to law firm work because they couldn’t get a job as a lawyer for the first few years out of school — some got law-adjacent jobs, others completely unrelated work. They are at a significant disadvantage. I’m afraid something similar will happen this year or next.
Fortunately, my firm switched all our lawyers and paralegals to laptops in the last two years and now are supplying secretaries with equipment to work from home also. So most of us can still work.