The Exported Classroom | Beyond the College Brochure

This is Gary Stocker with College Viability. Let's go beyond the college brochure. For nearly a decade, the American university had a secret weapon. Whenever the local economy soured or the birth rate in the Midwest or anywhere else dipped, the deans didn't panic. They didn't tighten their belts or lower their costs. No, no, they simply looked east. As in over the ocean east, they looked toward the rising middle classes in Mumbai and Beijing and Seoul. They saw a golden ticket that worked both ways: a prestigious American degree for the student and a full-price, non-discounted tuition check for the college. It was the global life raft that kept that ivy floating. But lately that raft has developed a very loud, very expensive leak. If you look at the glossy brochures today, they still talk about global diversity. They still celebrate the international campus, but behind the double doors of the admissions office, the atmosphere is anything but celebratory. Mark Sclero, who for 30 years was the CEO of the Independent Educational Consultants Association, has been looking at the data, and he's found that the flood of international talent has turned into a trickle. The students in the graduate seminars, the ones the schools counted on to pay the bills that the local students couldn't cover or wouldn't cover, are starting to sit empty. We were told the world would always be the path to our door. We assumed that the American brand was bulletproof, but the brand has a new reality. Between the skyrocketing costs of living in college towns, the shifting visa headaches, and a world that is finally building its own world-class labs, the international student is doing something the American university never expected. They're staying home, or they're going to Canada or Australia or anywhere that doesn't require a mountain of debt for a prestige name that's losing or has lost its luster. For years, our schools use these international checks to avoid making the hard choices. They use them to fund the grand ambition trap and to keep and to keep the administration growing while domestic interest faded. They bet the farm on that global market. We call it higher education. We think of it as a domestic industry, as stable as the soil it's built on. But Marx Thoreau's numbers show us the truth. Many of our most prestigious institutions didn't really have a sustainable business model. What they had, what they had was an international subsidy, and now that subsidy is vanishing. The lights are dimming in those big research halls too, because the world has realized that an American degree isn't isn't the only ticket in town, and the American university is realizing it has no Plan B. And now we've gone beyond the college brochure. I'm Gary Stocker with College Viability.