This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 10th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As colleges and universities have effectively

transitioned to online education, does the long-term value proposition

for higher ed change?

Does the stigma associated with online institutions simply go away?

Cato's Neil McCluskey discusses what this pandemic has meant and may yet mean for

higher ed. There are a lot of things changing at once that have a pretty

significant impact on higher ed right now that is there are a lot of people out of work and people often need to retool and gain new skills when they're out of work but also universities for the most part are effectively shut down.

What do we know right now about how universities are dealing with these sort of twin problems?

Well, universities are kind of doing what elementary and secondary schools have done, which is they have tried to move as much instruction as possible online.

So it's certainly harder in some fields in higher ed

than you see in K through 12 to move online.

You can't really replicate a lot of the lab work that chemistry majors or you know engineers may be doing but a lot of us certainly liberal arts kind of work and things like that. Law schools, they have moved their instruction online.

So we see a lot of use of Zoom,

just like we see in K through 12,

just like we see in businesses.

We see professors recording lectures

for people to view any time they want.

Not every professor is comfortable with doing sort of real-time lecturing so that

recording works out for them. But certainly the universities are in a state of

flux and the biggest problems that they've had

...