The Coming Zombie Apocalypse University! By James Reed

     This is an article which uses metaphors for the modern university that I have used in the past, that of the zombie, the walking dead, so my heart rejoices:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/nyu-prof-hundreds-if-not-thousands-universities-will-soon-be-walking-dead
  https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=15129

“As colleges attempt to recover from the pandemic and prepare for future semesters, a New York University professor estimates that the next 5-10 years will see one to two thousand schools going out of business. Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business told Hari Sreenivasan on PBS’ “Amanpour and Co.” that many colleges are likely to suffer to the point of eventual extinction as a result of the coronavirus. He sets up a selection of tier-two universities as those most likely not to walk away from the shutdown unscathed. During the pandemic, wealthy companies have not struggled to survive. Similarly, he says, “there is no luxury brand like higher education,” and the top names will emerge from coronavirus without difficulty. “Regardless of enrollments in the fall, with endowments of $4 billion or more, Brown and NYU will be fine,” Galloway wrote in a blog post. “However, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of universities with a sodium pentathol cocktail of big tuition and small endowments that will begin their death march this fall.” “You’re gonna see an incredible destruction among companies that have the following factors: a tier-two brand; expensive tuition, and low endowments,” he said on “Amanpour and Co.,” because “there’s going to be demand destruction because more people are gonna take gap years, and you’re going to see increased pressure to lower costs.” Approximating that a thousand to two thousand of the country's 4,500 universities could go out of business in the next 5-10 years, Galloway concludes, “what department stores were to retail, tier-two higher tuition universities are about to become to education and that is they are soon going to become the walking dead.” Another critical issue underlying the financial difficulties families and universities both face is the possibility that the quality of higher education has decreased. Galloway argues that an education in the U.S. is observably unsatisfactory for the amount that it costs, given that if you “walk into a class, it doesn’t look, smell or feel much different than it did 40 years ago, except tuition’s up 1,400 percent,” he said during an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta. And the pandemic, according to Galloway, has served to expose the quality of higher education. “Students I think across America along with their families listening in on these Zoom classes are all beginning to wonder what kind of value, or lack thereof, they’re getting for their tuition dollars,” he said.”

     If we turn to the Australian situation, I note two articles from the Australian Financial Review, which first reports on the three South Australian universities considering a merger into a new super university: August 11, 2020, p. 8. The second article, August 6, 2020, p. 10, reports on a Melbourne universality facing a $ 1 billion hit to revenue, that may require staff cuts of 450 academic and professional staff. I am happy to hear all of this and wish all universities ill and great misfortune. Needless to say, I have no sympathy for them, for reasons given in dozens of postings.