"Academics and administrators at the top universities have decided over the last 30 years that we’re no longer public servants; we’re luxury goods. We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, 'This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,' and there’s a huge round of applause. That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. We as academics and administrators have lost the script.... But the ultimate vehicle for a luxury item is to massively and almost artificially constrain supply. Birkin bags are $12,000 because they create the illusion of scarcity. I’ll have 170 kids in my brand-strategy class in the fall. We charge them $7,000 per student. That’s $1.2 million that we get for 12 nights of me in a classroom. $100,000 a night. The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points. There is no other product in the world that’s been able to sustain 90-plus points of margin for this long at this high of a price point. Ferrari can’t do it. Hermès can’t do it. Apple can’t do it. Apple’s gross margins are 38 points. Hermès and luxury goods are somewhere between 50 and 60 points. There has never been a luxury item that’s been able to garner the type of gross margins as university education."
That's from "The Coming Disruption Scott Galloway predicts a handful of elite cyborg universities will soon monopolize higher education" (New York Magazine).
And, yeah, I saw it: "garner."
May 11, 2020
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53 comments:
Stanford getting a little uppity there.
Cambridge feels slighted.
Rejecting everyone but well-connected elite democrat power families and celebrities--
That's our elite college system.
And they are still morons. See Cuomo family.
Did anyone watch the show about death on PBS last night?
At one point some guy was in charge of freezing people / saving people in chambers for a better distant future where technology can resurrect them.
What if our advancement has peaked? What if that advanced eternal life-code-cracking future never arrives?
Look around. In the free-est land on the planet we are raising and educating materialistic cry babies who whine about every perceived grievance and are taught to do so. Where are the math and science wiz-kids? Are there any? No way I'm going in that chamber.
Bury me in a box. Thank you.
These colleges are financing themselves with the gigantic slush fund of the guaranteed student loan programs.
Zero market restraints. Just charge whatever you want, dump the debt on the kids and ultimately saddle the taxpayers with the defaults.
A mammoth Ponzi scheme.
The ultimate statement of this Ponzi scheme was the NYU prof who did an interpretive dance to mock her students who had to continue to take on the debt burden even after the school shut down.
The brutal arrogance on full display.
In most of the humanities, there is absolutely no reason for a Residential model. Especially the way most kids view their experiences, it's a lot of money to pay for four years of extended summer camp and cash-strapped families are getting wise to subsidizing it.
That's because the government provides free loans, distorting the prices for the consumer goods.
You might guess that Galloway teaches at Stanford, but, no, he's at NYU. At the business school.
Colleges are most definitely in the branding business. And, yes, the gross margins are very, very high. The high gross margins for the basic service explains why there are diversity officers and other such nonsense administrative jobs at colleges.
Every Spring the Omaha World-Herald prints a special supplement of all the topic high school students in Nebraska and Western Iowa. For the very top kids, they write a profile and list were they are going to college. Harvard, Yale, MIT and Stanford were their choices. Not a single one picked Nebraska or Creighton although they all would have received a free ride.
The so-called lower level schools need to attack the Ivies on price.
He may be right. Those few elite universities may be the only ones that can withstand the demise of our economy. Not only are the classrooms empty. But more students are now considering passing up their next move into college now, and considering other paths. Especially now that their parents are out of work, and have seen their savings drying up.
The audience for Stanford and a few others are a minuscule slice of the world. They come from all over, with those from foreign countries willing to pay more to get a slot in Palo Alto. And with the Harvards and Stanfords of the world sitting on piles of money in their own endowments, they can last longer than, say, University of Michigan, which is dependent on tuition and monies from the state- a state hurting now as well.
Glenn Reynolds has written extensively on the state of education moving forward. Online education which was already growing rapidly as an alternative to overpriced on campus education, is going to only get larger now that money is in shorter supply and people are getting used to classes online. People are simply going to have to think twice about the value of paying $60,000-$70,000 per year to get a degree in something like Gender Studies from any university. Universities will have to start operating as a business, and cutting unnecessary departments and employees. Degrees in Gender Studies will be shown to be of zero value. Positions such as Director of Diversity will be a fight to the death for universities to keep, though they are non-essential to learning.
It’s really a sick cultural mindset, no? Selling empty prestige…
Nice, though, that he left off Harvard, arguably the strongest brand in the world even though it has been riding off past accomplishments for 50 years.
A good market correction is long overdue for higher ed.
Elite colleges are asshole.
No mention of CalTech whose brand is know only to those serious about science.
$7,000 per student... for 12 nights of ... a classroom.
There are 170 suckers born every minute.
"the type of gross margins as university education"
Well, gross margins on the instructor's labor. Once the cost of fancy facilities and diversity deans has been deducted, margins are near zero, no?
The top Jesuit schools in America provide a great and personal education at a much lower price than the Ivies, Stanford and MIT. And the best of them is, of course, Creighton University in Omaha; especially for health care. Creighton now has a beautiful campus and an excellent basketball team.
I was friends with Fr. John P. Schlegel, S.J. who was president at Creighton and the University of San Francisco. He complained to me about adding overhead with non-teaching staff jobs and he wasn't one to complain at all. The Jesuits run a tight financial ship and keep their schools in the black. They have to!
Since the notion of “higher education” has been destroyed, all that is left to sell the unassuming Generation Z is the snake oil of a false elite status. It’s like watching Atlas Shrugged come to life…
You would think that someone who was willing to buy that overpriced product would be rejected for being a dummy.
It's a kind of pyramid scheme that just hasn't collapsed yet. It works like Amway. Everybody knows the product is over-priced, but if you can get in and then get someone else in behind you, everybody makes out by screwing over those who give up or don't go on to become part of the pyramid (faculty and administration).
Galloway is wrong. An undergrad student in the sciences can't do labs on-line. Dental and medical students can't do their work on-line either.
And where are the frat and sorority parties.
A stupid article.
The kids are getting wise to this. My daughter said no to debt and has been living at home going to community college that costs $800 a semester. Meanwhile she has saved up $17k working part time. Major: business. That's how you do it...
Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on this subject
The elite unis better garner while the garnering is good.
The rejection rate is a false statistic bolstered by game-playing. When we were looking at schools, my son and I attended a free panel in Harrisburg, Pa. (well, outside Harrisburg at a nice hotel). Reps from Stanford, Georgetown, Yale, and Harvard, encouraging us to apply. Free tuition for students! Great education! Apply today!
Because my son did insanely well on the SATs and the ACT, we were swarmed with come-ons from the major universities, all of them offering the same hooks.
Because of The College App, an online program that makes applying for college easy, we could apply to a dozen schools for free, whereas in the past it might have been only three or four (with a fee for each).
Result: Insanely high number of applications versus a low number of acceptances* = impression of exclusivity, which U.S. News takes into account in its rankings.
* Which is even smaller than you think. There was a book by a Washington Post reporter a few years back -- "Crazy U" I think -- in which he talked to a Harvard admissions counselor. He was told that 1/3 of the class was made up of legacies; 1/3 from overseas (paying full tuition); and 1/3 from the application pool.
I like MIT myself, but it has enrolled the same 1,000-student freshman class for more than a century, even as the American population burgeoned and even after opening itself up to women, minorities and international students.
If MIT wanted to expand its influence in the world, it would have graduated many, many, many more students who would be leading industry and nations. But it didn't want that. It wanted to grant ever-more exclusive exclusivity to its elite alumni in-club.
Colleges like MIT, the Ivies and (haha) Stanford never had any other interest.
Land-grant colleges are what made America great.
A stupid article.
Yes it was, but I guess when one teaches brand-strategy, whatever that is, everything looks like a brand.
BTW, I reject 100% of Birkin bags, whatever they are.
An article for people who don't read Glenn Reynolds?
Difference is, the author(s) are basically okay with the elite moving farther away and everyone else falling through the widening cracks. He's not treating that as an unacceptable problem with modern life.
Also, the author(s) aren't dealing with the fact that credentials are limited. They are worth so much precisely because they are rare. Once Harvard starts giving away ten times as many credentials, the value is going to drop a lot - there just aren't that many top tier jobs.
The administrators and professors that are tasked and paid to educate the younger generations, applaud at the massive debts strapped to their customers. They criticize through their altruistic communist culture the evil associated with profits and capitalism, but manage to grift everyone that walks on campus. What type of person wants to be a part of that parade?
Did anyone watch the show about death on PBS last night?
I read this as "the death of PBS..." It seemed related to left-wing institutions catering to a narrow elite.
I’ll have 170 kids in my brand-strategy class in the fall. We charge them $7,000 per student. That’s $1.2 million that we get for 12 nights of me in a classroom. $100,000 a night. The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points. There is no other product in the world that’s been able to sustain 90-plus points of margin for this long at this high of a price point. Ferrari can’t do it. Hermès can’t do it. Apple can’t do it. Apple’s gross margins are 38 points. Hermès and luxury goods are somewhere between 50 and 60 points. There has never been a luxury item that’s been able to garner the type of gross margins as university education.
Galloway sounds like a massive dick.
I took nothing away from the accounting and statistics and finance courses I barely passed, but I did enjoy marketing. The main lesson seemed to be that companies that thought they had the world on a string quickly came a cropper, leading to lost jobs, bankruptcy and many messy mixed metaphors.
Very provocative excerpt.
I've been reading for a long time about the coming burst of the higher-ed bubble and a market correction. I'll believe it when I see it.
Another thing Galloway missed is that students want to play sports; intramural and inter-collegiate. Before Ben Sasse was a US Senator, he ran the very small Midland College in Fremont. He expanded sports and gave partial athletic scholarships. Big increase in students.
College is about way more than classes. Colleges are also key for selecting a mate. The famed "Mrs" degree.
Addendum to Crazy Jane. Land grant universities and Jesuit universities made America great.
Yeah it's really a shame that a mighty does not offer course lectures online
https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
My son is a mechanical engineering professor and he was able to finish out this last semester online for lectures and lab work as well. I think chem lab would be hard though and geology field trips would be difficult.
Well, gross margins on the instructor's labor. Once the cost of fancy facilities and diversity deans has been deducted, margins are near zero, no?
They're not for profit. So, they HAVE to spend all that potential profit on stuff.
Like Lurker21, few of the courses I had in business school had much in the way of useful content, but one I did like was called "Pricing Strategies". This is the art of extracting the maximum revenue from the rubes (customers) consistent with not sacrificing market share to competitors.
One way of course is to position the product as a prestige good. We see this frequently in the auto industry, where most of the mass-market brands (Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Ford) have corresponding luxury brands (Lexus, Infinity, Acura, Lincoln) are basically the same platform tarted up a bit with a better grade of plastic interior and another squirt of sound-deadening compound inside the doors.
Another way is through product variations. I have taken apart many consumer electronics devices and seen empty IC positions and tracking on the circuit boards where a few pennies worth of parts can be dropped in to add some gimcrack feature that justifies charging a couple of hundred dollars more for the product.
Students at prestige universities who find themselves in a lecture hall with 50 or 100 other freshman and sophomores, being lectured by a TA, may wonder if perhaps a terrible mistake has been made.
Finance guy I know has worked with a certain numbers of entrepreneurs who needed help because their companies were growing faster than their working capital lines. The typical case is a flat-out hustler with good instincts and an unquenchable work ethic.
One thing my friend has observed is that these entrepreneurs seem to believe they have made it when they release that, "Gee, I could hire a Harvard graduate." The problem is that the Harvard people got where they were by staying on the sidewalk from kindergarten on. They're smart, yes, and you can take one of them anywhere, which is worth something in bragging rights.
But creative thinkers? People who never, ever give up? Not so much. The cultural fit can be awkward.
Students at prestige universities who find themselves in a lecture hall with 50 or 100 other freshman and sophomores, being lectured by a TA, may wonder if perhaps a terrible mistake has been made.
Reminds me of my Introduction to Engineering and Political Science classes in lecture halls built for 400 students (at least taught by a full professor). Both classes were intentional weed out courses, where they told you to look left and right and recognize that only 1 of you would pass the class. It was intimidating then. Now, I think about how much students were paying the university only to be told at the start that they wouldn't be getting an education rather than being evaluated. It was a major reason why my children were not "legacies" to the same university.
And while these schools are charging such ridiculous margins they are trying to get government to boot the bill directly so people don't have to worry about repaying loans. The most pampered class in the history of the world is seeking to expand itself even further.
A certain narrative of the middle ages asserts the aristocracy and church were free riders on the backs of the peasants, claiming a life of ease as the taxpayers worked themselves to death to supply it. Meet college administrators and faculty: the new aristocracy.
Revealingly those who push this narrative most strongly are those working hardest to recreate it.
@CrazyJane: MIT was a land-grant college.
I was once a product manager for an old product line at an industrial control company. Basically I had a spare parts business. Our gross margins were always above 90%, most above 95%. I'm not impressed with his metric.
Shouting Thomas said...
These colleges are financing themselves with the gigantic slush fund of the guaranteed student loan programs.
While this is true every Dem wants more government directed funding, including many who want it entirely taxpayer funded. So the outrageous current circumstance is not nearly enough for the most pampered people on the planet.
Howard said,
"Yeah it's really a shame that a mighty does not offer course lectures online
https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm"
What's missing at MIT is the testing, the certification, to demonstrate that someone has learned something.
Lectures and, for that matter, books are basically available for free. In most subjects you can go online and find a YouTube video of someone teaching something and that person is better at it than the college professor you will probably find if you attend a nearby university.
And although students complain about the cost of textbooks, the textbooks themselves cost a tiny fraction of what it costs to take an academic course.
Although it's great that MIT offers lectures for free, still this is less of a big deal than it seems because much of this was already freely, or close to freely, available.
What is holding back students who know how to use the online material is the lack of certification. There is no evidence usually that they can point to, to show that they have mastered something.
And although this might seem like a different subject, this is related to the fact that many people that the universities have certified as having learning something have not in fact mastered or even understood their subject. It's entirely possible to find people today who have college degrees but still have never really learned how to read! (as in they will repeatedly fail reading comprehension tests).
college sports will keep a select group of schools relevant
Much as I think that the university system is largely a scam, I don't understand how students of the applied sciences (e.g. engineering) can be decently prepared without any lab work.
Where are they supposed to learn how to work an oscilloscope, a spectrum analyzer, a logic state analyzer, or even what they are or are used for?
We were always used to fresh-out engineers as being a bit spastic with the practical end of things but one never had the impression they'd never had their hands on the tools of the trade before.
All of those instruments are far too expensive the students to purchase, or even rent, for their own use.
Douglas: Thank you. I did not know that.
"Garner" might actually be correct here - these universities gather or collect huge margins, but they certainly do not "earn" them.
The Michigans and Wisconsins are no different, more interested in impressing each other than in serving their intended audiences.
"...The strongest brands in the World....MIT, Oxford, Stanford...?" LOL! I guess he had to justify his article with a catchy headline. But since AA, puts this garbage article on her site let's play the game. First of all, since most of the population in the World [ 7 billion +] don't go to College his argument is propoganda. Secondarily, anecdotal evidence, from myself, over 50 years, have been on every Continent and visited well over 100 countries, in the hinterlands too, and have always had a "Coke" available. 99% of the people I ran into, never heard of MIT, Stanford, Oxford (a bit better) and I dealt with educated people. End of Story!
I have always had it explained to me that going to an elite university wasn't about what you learned, but who you met.
Contacts for the elite jobs of the future.
The better solution is to abolish the Dept. Of Education, eliminate the Student Loan Program and abolish the tax and charitable exempt status for colleges and universities that have less than 80% enrollment of US citizens and legal aliens. Once student loans become privatized again and lenders have skin in the game not only will prices come down but a lot of majors won't be eligible for loans. $1.5 trillion in student loan debt is insane. The principal beneficiary of the education is the graduate along with the college and not the taxpayers.
Students at prestige universities who find themselves in a lecture hall with 50 or 100 other freshman and sophomores, being lectured by a TA, may wonder if perhaps a terrible mistake has been made.
But it's not a mistake. The value of a degree from a prestige university has nothing to do with anything you learn there or networking. It's all signaling. As Galloway says, college admissions officers do screening that would be illegal if done by an employer, at least since Griggs v Duke Power. Employers use that screening to make hiring decisions, and unless you think the employers are all very stupid, there is great value in that screening.
What I wonder is if there is a way for some entity not subject to U.S. law to do that screening at a lower cost but still sell the screening service here. That, or overturning Griggs and its progeny, is the only real hope of reducing the premium price selective universities can charge.
He wants to greatly increase enrollment, transition to online courses, and maintain brand identity as well as gross margins? Good luck with that. There's a reason Birkin bags aren't sold at Walmart.
The thing you're getting from a top university isn't instruction, or even networking. It's socialization. You're learning exactly what it takes to be part of that crowd, where you stand in the hierarchy, and what you have to do to move up.
When I was working in a lab in grad school, one of the support staff told me how hard she had found herself working since joining the lab. Her job didn't require her to stay late or work weekends, but she was around so many people who were doing that that she found herself hanging around the office much more than before. Her job hadn't changed, but her peer group had.
Online courses don't give you a peer group.
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