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[quote=Anonymous]I always try and buck the trends and I'm right a lot. Doesn't mean always, but here is what I think:

Flagships are oversubscribed and overpriced. They're also subject to the whims of state and federal (less fed) funding. We've already seen schools like WVU slash programs,  and others are following suit. Schools everywhere are trying to pivot right now into pre professional laboratories for engineers and computer scientists, but along the way many seem to be forgetting we might also need actual scientists as well as people who can speak other languages and people who know what happened ten years ago, or ten thousand.

It's kind of the worst kind of brain drain: bright kids aren't leaving their communities to go someplace else, they're just all majoring in the exact same thing. This never ends well, but we don't have enough economics or history majors left who to remind them.

I don't think it's sustainable.

Smaller private colleges are getting slammed demographically, but that's where my optimism lies. I think a lot of them have already adjusted tuition pricing, either by actually cutting it in half, or by offering nearly every student merit to make the same outcome. They also don't have the same bloated levels of administration to deal with. (Mostly.) I see the tuition adjustments continuing to filter up, until the highest-ranked slacs adjust as well. I see a lot of belt-tightening, and fewer capital improvements, but let's get real: SLACs all went through a recent phase where they were throwing too much into capital improvements.

I see some slacs failing and closing, but not always the ones you'd think.

A lot of the reason I don't think the small liberal arts model is going anywhere is because of how socially stratified we are. State schools were designed for the Everyman, whereas a lot of smaller schools began as incubators for the ruling class--and that's what they will still be. Despite what the good people of dcurbanmom think, you can't build a society with just computer programmers and the people who do their laundry.  You need managers, doctors, writers, entertainment, etc.

Not all social change is a progression or an evolution, much as we'd like to think otherwise. There are certain movements in American thought that run counter to the standard Enlightenment deal, and as we become a more polarized and stratified society, that can be quite dangerous and destabilizing. Not sure how it will play out.

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