(05-18-2020 09:12 AM)quo vadis Wrote: (05-18-2020 08:04 AM)ken d Wrote: Higher education in America was already on the brink of a major restructuring even before COVID-19. Closings, mergers and reduced course/degree offerings were going to escalate sharply over the next decade or so. This pandemic has only accelerated the timetable for this trend. Ironically, it also gives schools and states political cover to do what they knew they needed to anyway.
I'm not so sure about that. I think the main impact might be technological. The ZOOM eruption, along with faculty being forced to teach online this spring and summer (at least) might be a game-changer in terms of a lot of schools that had resisted putting programs online now doing so.
It's kind of like my shopping habits - for years, I've browsed through stores like Walmart and Target, but the past two months I've been using the "pickup" service. I now see that as a permanent thing for me even when CV19 ends and I never would have tried it had I not been forced to.
Sure, there are going to be closures and shutdowns but I expect more of this at the private level than public level. I think the same political pressures that have stopped public restructuring in the past at the *system* level will likely still be in effect.
We shall see.
I can see what ken D is saying where, for several years before the pandemic, you were seeing a "high/low" bifurcation in higher education where the top private universities and public flagship/flagship-equivalent universities were still gaining or at least retaining enrollment on the high end and low cost MOOCs have been growing rapidly on the low end. Meanwhile, the middle-to-lower tier private schools and directional public schools have been getting hammered for the past several years. The pandemic didn't start that process, but it's definitely accelerating it where schools that might have held on despite declining enrollments for another 10 or 20 years could get eliminated immediately.
You could apply this to plenty of industries. Retail is a perfect example. The pandemic didn't start the collapse of many in-person retail stores, but it might very well accelerate and finish what Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart started several years ago.
On a tangent, where I do think the pandemic may start a fundamental shift in the economy that we didn't really see before this happened is with commercial real estate. It's ironic that many of the companies that were actually the *least* open to remote working prior to the pandemic were the top Silicon Valley tech companies that actually make remote working possible, such as Google and Apple. Their company cultures were very wedded to the idea of "accidental creative encounters" that occur in face-to-face interactions at physical office spaces (almost always with a huge open floor plan). For the past few years, those tech companies have been fueling commercial real estate expansions across the county *outside* of the Bay Area - Manhattan, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Nashville, Austin, Northern Virginia, Pittsburgh, etc.
The pandemic completely forced all of those companies to work remotely... and they realized that it didn't impact productivity (and in many ways made their employees happier and more productive). Workplaces that were even more wedded to the concept of in-person face time at the office, such as investment banks and law firms, have had to adapt, as well, and realized that it didn't change their productivity, either. If anything, the willingness to work more hours is increased if employees aren't adding a commute on top of it.
Financial companies and law firms take up big chunks of commercial real estate in virtually every major city, while tech companies have been fueling real estate expansion in many markets. All of those companies are looking at their bottom lines and are almost universally asking, "Why am I paying for all of this expensive real estate when our employees are working from home, they actually like it, AND it's cheaper for us for them to just stay there?" With revenue and profits down for virtually all but a handful of companies in society right now, committing a ton of fixed expenses to commercial real estate that they've found isn't really necessary is going to be as attractive in the minds of corporate America as it was just 3 months ago.
That's not to say that companies don't need headquarters and other office spaces. However, the idea that *everyone* needs to physically come to the office every single day is something that this pandemic definitely has totally upended. So, I do believe that how and where we work is going to be fundamentally changed going forward.