Plundering of the Pandemic - Part 2: "You can take the kid out of college but..."

       A particular institution long thought to be immune to pandemic like forces is that of education, given the endurance through wars, recessions, and other 'vicissitudes' (!) This includes public and private education, from college on down to preschool/day care (the latter an increasing trend the last two decades). However, we have already seen this is far from true, given the number of colleges that have closed their doors permanently due to the financial impact of COVID. On the college front in particular, smaller liberal arts colleges and state schools appear more susceptible, while the demand for more local, community colleges (offering similar core classes at a fraction of the tuition) is at least temporarily on the increase. This vulnerability extends to many preschools and day care centers as well, of course. But once again, these institutions (like those mentioned in Part 1), especially public higher education, were experiencing a shaking of their foundation long before the current pandemic. Beginning with the advent of home schooling, progressing through voucher systems in parts of the country, charter schools, and the more recent surge of Online offerings (as long as one has access to the internet, not a given), public education has experienced an onslaught of outside challenges and competition. As one columnist recently opined, "If public education doesn't realize it's in business, it will soon be out of business". School superintendents, college presidents, and boards of regents may finally be getting the message that they can't take the tax paying and otherwise tuition paying public for granted. We'll see if it's not too late.

       Tempering the foregoing negative forces are some strong and enduring psychological forces embedded in such institutions, that would behoove administrators to exploit. While not as visually compelling as the 'bricks and ivy', these forces are reflected by the phrase "You can take the collegiate off campus, but the collegiate spirit endures". Surveys of people over 30, for example, repeatedly show that college is a stage of life they would most like to have stayed put, especially if they went off to campus. This is in turn due to not only the value they placed on the educational curriculum, but also the culture of college, such as the range of people they got to know, represented more intimately in a face-to-face setting (something college admissions and marketing departments recognized long ago). As Rodney Dangerfield put it in his commencement speech in "Back to School"-- "My advice is don't go, it's rough out there!"

You Can Go Home: It's called HOMECOMING! Whether you go home to stay with your parents for a while (another part of Rodney's advice: "go live with your parents, make them pay for it!") or you have actually stayed on campus to attend grad school, 'coming back' in the form of Homecoming has been a staple of college life since the 19th century (usually involving a football game). Then, of course, there's the time tested and increasingly popular tailgate (the origins of which date back as early as the civil war). It's now an institution in its own right and not dependent on the presence of a college, or even a football game (college officers beware, Walmart and Amazon are onto this!). 

The collegiate spirit endures: Finally, there's the 'College of Lifelong Learning'. As Wiki traced its history, a Lifelong Learning Institute is an organized group of people over 50 who meet frequently for college level study and intellectual engagement, which have been formally offered by various organizations since the early 1960's. Colleges and universities have more intentionally incorporated these types of opportunities as well as a vast array of free courses to both alumni and the general public, which apparently reflects their own accumulated wisdom of what people of all ages are attracted to (i.e., intellectual and social stimulation), which may in turn translate into encouraging their children to enroll in the respective college, even their willingness to pay some tuition.

       The current London Bridge, which opened to traffic in 1973, is a box girder bridge built from concrete and steel. It replaced a 19th century stone bridge, which in turn replaced a 600 year-old medieval structure built of stone. So, while it has been replaced and rebuilt for almost a millennium, London Bridge has certainly withstood the 'ravages of  time'. How higher education and other institutions we value are transformed by the current pandemic and other forces unforeseen is admittedly hard to predict, even for a sage like Dangerfield (who apparently anticipated the recent sociological trend of post grads living with their parents in unprecedented numbers). In the meantime, I offer you one of my favorite salutations: See Ya Round Campus!