Why YouTube Will Replace College
Since 1997, a college degree has become 346 times more expensive than a TV.
In 1997 Sharp and Sony introduced the first large flat screen TV. They sold for more than $15,000. At the same time a four-year college degree at a public university was also around $15,000. The ratio was one-to-one. Today you can pick up a new 42” full HD TV at Best Buy, Amazon, or Walmart for around $130. On the other hand, a public university four-year degree is now around $45,000. The ratio is now 356 TVs to one degree. A college degree costs 200 percent more while TVs cost 99.1 percent less.
In 2013, Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn predicted that 25 to 50 percent of colleges and universities would disappear or merge in the next 10 to 15 years. According to the National Center for Education Statistics 726 degree-granting institutions closed in the nine years from 2014 to 2023. This represents 15 percent of the 4,724 degree-granting colleges or universities in 2014. It looks like COVID relief money gave many campuses a bit of breathing room, but the demographic decline due to a collapsing fertility rate is on the horizon. (2.97 in 1950 versus 1.65 in 2023).
College debt has peaked at over $1.73 trillion, up from $520 billion in 2006. Colleges are running out of students and students are realizing that the costs may not be worth a lifetime of debt burden.
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Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.