I once read something about their Lacrosse team - as I recall some of the boys on the team were contributing to a young lady's college fund...

> Looks like the 2024 list of "omg these colleges closed" were all predatory, barely-accredited for-profit crap that never should have existed to begin with.

Nope. Lots of [1] long-established, non-profit, brick and mortar schools [hechingerreport.org] like Birmingham-Southern, the College of St. Rose, Lincoln Christian, Goddard College, and on and on. Some have religious origins, some were founded by philanthropists, some are the results of the mergers of earlier colleges, but they all have one thing in common: they're small. They simply don't have the resources to compete in an age of declining demographics, especially with younger men choosing to abandon college altogether, and supe

[1] https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-are-now-closing-at-a-pace-of-one-a-week-what-happens-to-the-students/

> Nobody is putting Duke at that level, just look at the admission rates.

I detest rating school by their acceptance rate (or "selectivity").

The way for a school to increase their "selectivity" score is to encourage unqualified people to apply, students who have no chance of being accepted. This wastes everybody's time (and money), but ratchets the school up in those all-important "Best Universities in the US" lists.

Stop doing this.

And if you want to know why schools are closing, just look at the population growth rate. Peak of the baby-boom, growth was 1.92% per year. Current, 0

I'm just saying, the costs of the tangibles should be lower. So the "intangibles" must be costing so much more. "Ruinously expensive intangibles" is the entire recipe for shenanigans.

> Ivy-plus institutions like University of Chicago ("where fun goes to die"), MIT, or Stanford offer tremendous educational opportunities to students. But yes, they also open doors to new graduates that wouldn't necessarily be equally open to graduates of less prestigious schools who maybe got just as much out of their programs, but I wouldn't consider that a *lifetime* of unearned privilege.

I would. The doors that are opened at the beginning of your career lay the foundation for the rest of your career. Get a better job at the beginning, and you end up saving more every year from them on, and when you invest those savings, they grow. The end result is being able to buy a home sooner while prices are lower, which results in saving even more money compared with someone who bought in later, which means you can retire earlier and have more money to spend in retirement.

Small differences in the i

> How many of those 'close to failing' colleges will be kept operating when 'asylum seekers' start taking state and federal grant (not loan) money and start enrolling in them?

Zero, because that's not a thing. It's super hard for US citizen students to get grants (way too easy to get loans, as you mention), and virtually impossible for international students to do so. Source: just sent two US kids to college, and work at a university so I actually get to see what really happens.

be careful, just because there's an orange guy out there that will say any version of the madlibs "migrants {get|do|cause} {thing}" doesn't make it even remotely true. It's literally just madlibs to fil

Yep. A lot of people have lofty ideals about education for education's sake, but realistically liberal arts degrees are a luxury of the rich. We need a very small number of them to serve as teachers for the subjects, but for most people college is a matter of making yourself a potentially more valuable employee and contributing member of society. Obviously STEM is good, but outside of that we also need people with degrees in business, law, finance, etc.

If you want to study something obscure for self-enri

I think the French disagree with the idea that "French Literature is bad for everyone involved..."

The alternative to our current system is a European system which, while students generally attend for free, you have to test your way in and you have very limited choice in what to study. Pursuit of happiness is the hallmark of liberty in the U.S., and if someone wants to, with consent and full awareness of what it means for their future life, invest six figures in studying the writings of dead French authors,

The schools that got shut down were straight-up scams (and in most cases, it was just federal student loan funding that was cut off- the government didn't say they couldn't operate on their own dime). Welding schools are all well and good if they actually teach welding... but there were scammers who would market a welding school, take student loans, and then not actually teach (or not teach enough for anybody to actually get a job doing it).

The schools that really suffer from job placement and loan delinque

it's just that public schools don't have any trouble meeting them, even for their liberal arts majors.

The government didn't shut down any trade schools that could place kids in jobs. They shut down crap like ITT tech and the "University" of Phoenix.

Go look up public University's "Degrees Awarded By Major". It's public info and carefully tracked. 80% of the degrees are law, STEM & medical. Another 18% or so are for public school teachers. There's a tiny, *tiny* number of degrees in stuff like wom

It's going to be a demographic collapse *on top of* the thing things that were causing institutions to fail while the size of the market was *increasing*.