There are real questions being raised about the value of being on-site. Online services have boomed in many situations, not just retail. I have purchased a car online, although I had to do the paperwork in person. I have never met my financial advisor in real life. Remote work has been an ongoing debate for some time in an office setting, and now the questions are being extended to higher education (and lower education, for that matter). It is no secret that, along with health care and housing, higher education is the main source of whatever inflation we experience. The costs of college have grown enormously faster than other sectors of the economy and have well outpaced wages, in no small part this has been fueled by student loans.
It's also not just tuition. The cost of dormitory housing is also soaring. Yelling at clouds: Back in my day, the dorm cafeteria was a slightly larger version of a high school cafeteria with gruff lunch ladies and industrial quality foodstuff which was most effective as a projectile. Here is the website for University of Michigan dining halls. For a sample, here's the description of the South Quad dining hall:
Enjoy a tapas style meal at South Quad, where ten mini restaurants are serving up a wide variety of cuisines. Make your own burrito bowl at Sabroso, grab some stir-fry at Two Oceans, or pick up some Mediterranean from Olive Branch - this is just a small fraction of what's available. Look out for the halal dining station as well!Again, that's the cafeteria in an undergraduate dormitory. And we all know about the horrendous, scandalous racket that is the college textbook market. Acknowledging that higher education is a bubble has become old hat.
So how does remote work affect that? Well, can you charge the same tuition for a remote class that you can for a real one? Some colleges will be trying. Others are going back to real life classes and rolling the dice that there won't be a terrible outbreak. From a strictly educational point of view, some have pointed out that for the price of a high end undergraduate program, you could hire adjuncts as tutors and get individual attention rather than be a lost face in a 200-student lecture hall for about the same price. One thing we will probably discover is how much of the value of college comes from direct access to teachers, peer networking, the overall college atmosphere (not just partying, but building social skills), status and credentialing, etc.
Still the overall question is Are we nearing the bursting of the higher ed bubble? The follow up question is, How will all this affect me?
You could argue the bubble has already burst. Many small colleges -- mostly liberal arts schools -- are in danger or have already given up the ghost. This informative Twitter thread gives a good, pessimistic, summary of how badly snookered universities are financially. I'm going to have to assume the golden age of cash-flooded universities is over.
As for how all this affects me, well, the University of Michigan has a bit of a buffer due to it's huge position in medical research. I don't see that cash flow dropping too much. But for all my adult life I have benefitted from something like 100,000 mostly upper middle class kids invading my city for 8 months out of the year and dropping a ton of their parents money, with an added bonus of another, oh, 50,000 or so on 7 or 8 football Saturdays in the fall. It's unclear how much of that will dry up.
It's possible that other industries will pick up the slack, but that too is dicey. Ann Arbor industries are heavily skewed to engineering and white-collar professions, that means they will be increasingly decentralized and, in fact, having a corporate office in a city may do little or nothing for the local economy.
If things do go bad, where it will hit me is in my house. I bought my house primarily as an investment. It's certainly increased in value, although not so much as I had hoped. But were push come to shove and I to sell it today, I might make a bit of money on even considering interest payments over the years. I suspect my return would keep me up with inflation. I had hoped to keep it another 5 years before I downsize. Through that time, if it acts as a store of value, if not profit, I will declare success. (Note that by store of value I mean the cash I get back covers everything I paid in over the course of 15 years -- mostly principal and interest -- and keeps up with inflation, which has been for the duration of my ownership. Effectively that means I had zero housing costs for 15 years.) A big dip in housing prices would kill that. Not the end of the world. It's not like my house will be worthless, but it would be a hit.
I may be rationalizing, but I don't yet think it's time to head for the hills. Ann Arbor is pretty resilient and in fact, a couple of zero growth years or even some downsizing wouldn't be the end of the world. It may perhaps be long run positive. Ann Arbor has weathered bad years in the past, before the university boom times of the last thirty years, better than most of the rest of the country. So I think I'll hold on for now. Still, I remain less comfortable than I was.
