In Your favorite cruise ship may never come back: 23 classic vessels that could be laid-up, sold or scrapped, Gene Sloan (aka @ThePointsGuy) named the Carnival Fantasy as one those that might be headed for the heap. Now, sure enough, there it is, in the midst of being torn to bits (HT 7News, above) in Aliağa, Turkey. Other stories in the same vein are here, here, here, here, here and here.
I been on a number of cruises (here’s one) in the course of my work as a journalist, and I’ve enjoyed them all. I’ve also hung out at a similar number of colleges and universities, and have long found myself wondering how well the former might be a good metaphor for the latter. Both are expensive, well-branded and self-contained structures with a lot of specialized staff and overhead. Both are also vulnerable to pandemics, and in doomed cases their physical components turn out to be worth more than their institutional ones. John Naughton also notes the resemblance. But it’s Scott Galloway who runs all the way with it; first with Higher Ed: Enough Already, and then with a long and research-filled post titled USS University, featuring this title graphic:
Those three schools are adrift across a 2×2 with low value<—>high value on the X axis and high vulnerability<—>low vulnerability on the Y axis. At the lower left are the low-value/high vulnerability schools in a quadrant Scott calls “challenged,” meaning “high admit rates, high tuition, low endowments, dependence on international students, and weak brand equity.” Among those are—
- Adelphi
- Brandeis
- Bard
- Dickenson
- Dennison
- Hofstra
- Kent State
- Kenyon
- LIU
- Mt. Holyoke
- Old Dominion
- Pace
- Pacific
- Robert Morris
- Sarah Lawrence
- Seton Hall
- Skidmore
- Smith
- St. John’s (Maryland & New Mexico)
- The New School
- Union
- UC Santa Cruz
- U Mass Dartmouth
- Valparaiso
- Wittenberg
— plus a plethora of mostly state-run “directional” schools (e.g. University of Somewhere at Somewhere).
The Hmm here is, How many have more value as real estate than as what they are today?
I started wondering in the same direction in May, when I posted Figuring the Future and Choose One. Both pivoted off this 2×2 by Arnold Kling—
On Arnold’s rectangle, D (Fragile/Inessential) is Scott’s “challenged” quadrant. What I’m wondering, now that school is in session and at least some results should be coming in (or at least trending in a direction), if any colleges or universities in that group (or in the other quadrants) are headed already toward their own Aliağa.
Thoughts? If so, let me know on Twitter (where I am @dsearls), Facebook (here) or by email (doc at searls dot com). I hope to have comments working again here soon, but for now they don’t, alas.
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