By Derek Newton
Reposted from Forbes, with permission
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman popularized the concept of zombie ideas – constructs that are not really alive, but somehow simply will not die. He literally wrote a book on the topic.
The hallmark of zombie ideas is that they lack evidence, or that the available evidence disproves their thesis. Yet, they persist and, even worse, are often accepted as obvious, even self-evident.
We are currently, I believe, watching the creation of an education zombie idea – the idea that we are facing “waves of college closures”. The idea has been around at least a decade, since wild predictions were made that more than half of all colleges would fail. Then, the reason was the rise of for-profit schools and online education. They were going to crush the old, big schools that could not innovate.
Today, the idea is that thousands of colleges will suffocate due to demographic trends and a loss of faith in “the return on investment.”
Whatever the proffered cause, the zombie is the same – colleges cannot compete, and they are dropping like flies. Oh, the horror.
I used “waves” above because that’s how the industry outlet Inside Higher Education described the situation in a recent article about a supposed decline in the higher education ecosystem. Their headline said the “Higher Ed Sector Shrank by 2 Percent” and their first five words of the story are, “amid waves of college closures.”
As I have chronicled several times, there is very little evidence to support the idea that colleges are closing at any scale whatsoever. What data does exist to support this kind of institutional retraction is heavily concentrated in the dubious and atypical for-profit sector, which is neither surprising nor a fitting proxy for the “higher ed sector” overall.
In the case of the most recent data, the information Inside Higher Ed used to say that the entire higher sector contracted by two percent, the topline number is 99 institutions – 99 fewer schools were eligible to award federal financial aid in 2022-23 than were able to do so in 2023-24. But when you dig into the data, of those 99, more than half (55%) were for-profit schools.
That’s pretty shocking when you consider that only about 5% of college students go to for-profit schools. Nonetheless, given how different for-profit schools are from public and non-profit schools, when more than half your data is from the anomaly pool, describing the results as “the higher ed sector” is reckless.
A bigger error in using this data to support the zombie idea of massive college closures is that the data is not about college closures at all. The data is about the number of schools that may award federal financial aid, and the report says, “The net change indicated in this table is the result of changes to Title IV status.” That’s the ability to receive and award federal funds. The report continues, “An institution may be classified as changing Title IV status because it closed, it no longer provides federally funded financial assistance, it lost Title IV eligibility, it combined or merged with another institution,” and so on.
In other words, being on this list – being part of those 99 schools – may mean that the school closed. Or it may not mean that. It could be that a school simply decided that the oversight that comes with being able to process federal student grants and loans was not worth the money. Or that it merged with another school. Or that it is in compliance trouble and had its ability to take federal funds put on hold. In any number of such cases, the school can remain open.
But the most glaring error in the press coverage feeding this new zombie idea is that counting the number of institutions is a terrible way to calculate whether or not “higher ed” is growing or shrinking because not all schools are the same size. If one school with an enrollment of 200 students closes, while the University of Florida adds 1,500 students, did the higher ed sector shrink? Of course not.
While schools across the country are reporting record-breaking growth, and undergraduate enrollment actually went up in the last report, the press still reports on a shrinking sector and quotes people who are “alarmed.”
This is the education equivalent of noting the launch of three massive cruise ships and increased cruise bookings but somehow being able to write that the cruise industry is in trouble because there were 38 fewer sailboats registered in Baltimore.
It’s not too terribly hard to see how zombie ideas are born. They make surface sense. Many colleges are struggling financially and the slow ebbs and flows and demographics are not helping. And some colleges have indeed closed, and with very big headlines – accidentally reinforcing the idea of a pattern or ongoing condition. Worst of all, media often report the data wrong, leaning into the easy, convenient and sensational narrative that an end-of-college apocalypse is upon us.
In this case, the apocalypse is real. And it’s even a zombie apocalypse. Just not the kind you think. The real danger from these zombies is in continuing to repeat and believe ideas that lack foundation, basing decisions on them.
The more we believe that schools are closing in waves, the more misinformed we are. The more we try to force change to meet a problem that may not really be there, the more actual monsters we will create.
