The higher education business model is changing

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

News, Business

4.6 • 5.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2023

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we’re talking about the economics of higher education in the United States.

Though the average cost of going to college nearly tripled from 1980 to 2021, the net cost of attending both public and private institutions has started to come down. Martin Kurzweil, vice president of educational transformation at the nonprofit Ithaka S+R, traces that back to a decline in enrollment.

“Demographers will tell us that the generations of young people coming through after the baby boom, the cohort sizes, have decreased over time, and higher education is looking at what’s come to be known as a demographic cliff,” Kurzweil said.

On the show today: Kurzweil explains how college became unaffordable for many Americans, why costs have started to come down, and how a shrinking population of typical college-age students will transform higher education in the U.S.

Then, we’ll get into the repercussions of the Great Recession on the retirement wealth of younger baby boomers. And, are credit rating firms underestimating the climate crisis?

Later, listeners share how they deal with news fatigue. Plus, one listener explains what she got wrong about getting a college degree.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

- “College prices aren’t skyrocketing—but they’re still too high for some” from The Brookings Institution

- “Forget that $90,000 sticker price: College costs are actually going down” from The Hill

- “Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2022” (PDF) from College Board

- “A Sign That Tuition Is Too High: Some Colleges Are Slashing It in Half” from The New York Times

- “The incredible shrinking future of college” from Vox

- “Ratings Firms Struggle With Climate Risk in $133 Trillion Market” from Bloomberg

- “Yellen Says Extreme Weather Exposes Gaps in Insurance Protection” from Insurance Journal

- “What Happened to Late Boomers’ Retirement Wealth?” from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College

We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question. You can reach us at [email protected] or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Did you know the video game industry is worth more than $300 billion dollars a year,
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0:10.5	explores what this booming industry can teach us about the economy and jobs,
0:15.2	listen to skin in the game, and more from Marketplace Morning Report wherever you get your podcasts.
0:23.2	This episode is brought to you by Shopify.
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0:45.2	To sign up, visit shopify.co.uk slash podcast23 or lowercase.
0:55.2	Hey everybody, I'm Kyle at RISDOT. Welcome back to Make Me Smart,
1:02.0	where none of us is as smart as all of us. It is August 1st.
1:07.2	And I'm Kimberly Adams. Thank you for joining us on our weekly deep dive. Today we're
1:11.7	going to talk about the economics of higher education in this country because there's a lot more
1:17.6	to it than the ultra-high sticker prices of some of the private schools that our headlines
1:23.2	tend to focus on. So we want to talk about what it actually costs to go to college these days,
1:29.0	what demographics mean for the changing cost of college, and who goes to college,
1:33.0	and what higher education actually means in this economy. Here to make a smart about all this
1:37.2	stuff is Martin Kurzweil. He's the vice president of Educational Transformation in a job title.
1:43.1	This is a whole lot. Educational Transformation at the Education Nonprofit, Ithaca SNR,
1:47.2	Martin Walkman in the show. Thank you so much for having me.
1:51.0	Well, let me get right to this Educational Transformation thing. So in your day job,
	...

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