Interviewed on Unsupervised Learning
Nothing's going to happen to the Harvard, Princeton, Yales of the world. Okay. They are immune from any of these things. But the rest of the higher educational establishment is not. These are underway. They're going to accelerate. And at some point... Maybe the private sector will realize the degree to which the only thing that they care about with the college degree is its value as a signal. And insofar as the signal has gotten really noisy, the fact that you hold a BA in history from a good school no longer tells you very much about that person of That signal has gotten so noisy that it may be that employers in the private sector are going to say, what we really need is a good measure of general intelligence and a good measure of conscientiousness and openness. And if I know those things about an applicant, if I'm not talking about STEM, basically, that's all I need. The college degree no longer is telling me much of anything. That kind of change is going to undercut an awful lot of what's driven college enrollment figures for the last several years.
I worry about the fine smaller schools, often religious schools who are hoping that the alligator eats them last.
If small schools go under it's going to be far more likely their student population dries up due to lack of interest than businesses no longer use a BA/BS as an employment filter. (That might be a distinction without a difference but I think it matters to how schools react.) Even with the enormous encouragement to get post-secondary degrees only a bit more than a third of the population has them now. That's an enormous jump relative to about 5 percent before WWII and the GI Bill but given the number of times you see that masters (MBA) and even doctorates are considered requirements to advance I think the horse is largely out of the barn on how useful a BA is as an indicator of ability. Also, there's still plenty of non-STEM degrees that do require specialized training that is usefully offloaded to post-secondary schools.
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