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Part Broken

This Atlantic essay warning us about the end of college as we know it, touches on a lot of reasons why this is imminent but does not spend enough time discussing the culpability of the institutions themselves in their potential upending

The college experience could very soon be one that bears little semblance to the classic picture. Your kid could end up on a campus with reduced student services and activities, aging rec centers, shrunken-down humanities departments, less prestigious faculty, and a class cohort that has been stripped of foreign students, and also thinned of anyone who happens not to be well-off. It could be a dreary and degraded version of the life at school that you may have once enjoyed yourself.

That process was well on its way before any of the recent developments the essay cites. The ROI of college education has been questioned for the longest time - it is hardly affordable and many may argue better options should exist for students who do not want to go the college route or wish to defer to a later date. 

Elsewhere in the world, colleges are not defined as mediators between childhood and adulthood. They may not be specific places where a student “goes” (as in the common formulation “I went to college”) but rather sets of nondescript buildings interwoven with cities. Only in America could “college” refer to the amalgamation of a coming-of-age experience and a credentialing service, based in a planned community that was mainly built to facilitate scientific research but also provides diversion, dining, and professional-quality sporting events.

That was the college experience generations of immigrant students coming to America to go to college have craved for. This was not something they could have in their home country. While it is indeed special and wonderful, the cost to deliver it to one and all has been unbearably high. Maybe the time has been ripe to rethink how some version of that unique experience can still be delivered in an affordable way and while not requiring every high school senior to participate in this coming of age experience to be successful in the world. 

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