
Coronavirus will end the golden age for college towns - walterbell
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/opinion/coronavirus-will-end-golden-age-college-towns
======
StillBored
I think both Austin and Raleigh have grown large enough that the "college
town" effect is in the noise. In both cases the underlying economy is doing
more to drive itself than the college is at this point. In those cases 40
years ago it would have made a big difference, but today better examples would
have been places like College Station TX, or Gainsville FL, where the college
remains the primary employer. UT Austin is the 10th largest employer in a town
with a pretty self reinforcing tech economy, and a very long tail of national
brand SMBs.

[https://www.austinchamber.com/economic-development/austin-
pr...](https://www.austinchamber.com/economic-development/austin-
profile/major-employers)

~~~
eggsnbacon1
In both of those cities the colleges have become feeder schools to the tech
industry. And they're both desirable places to live on their own.

Austin is gorgeous. Semi-arid but the big river gorge running through it means
downtown is lush. Big hills/mountains a mile west. Tons of nature, water.
Colorful history. Great downtown thats a regional vacation destination. Within
3 hours of Houston, Dallas, the ocean, and only 45 mins from San Antonio. That
means 50 million people within a few hours, densest area you can find besides
east and west coast. And of course the capital, which means a lot more in
Texas than elsewhere due to secessional tendencies (ex the TX state capitol is
taller than US capitol)

Tech triangle is again in a gorgeous area. A few hours from NC coast and Blue
Ridge mountains. Weather is an interesting hybrid between cold-winter
northeast and humid deep south. It doesn't get very hot or cold. Probably the
closest you can get to west coast weather in the east, and the nearby coast
and mountains heighten the illusion. Nicely positioned for business, Miami and
NYC are less than 2 hours by plane.

They're both safe with great weather and a low cost of living (for tech
hotspots). I have deeply considered living in both.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Austin is not semi arid. Salt Lake City and maybe Denver are semi arid, but
Austin is humid in the summer and almost swampy in overall climate. You aren’t
going to see a hint of beige until you get way into west Texas.

~~~
eggsnbacon1
It's definitely not swampy, its quite dry. I looked up rainfall levels and its
also not an arid climate like I thought. Much of the rainfall is concentrated
in large storms, it doesn't rain very often. Much of the local vegetation is
drought tolerant, succulent and cactus.

Houston is swampy because of the coast. Austin is dry and not very humid, like
Dallas. The wind often comes from the deserts out west.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Austin isn't dry...from wiki
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin,_Texas#Climate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin,_Texas#Climate)):

> Austin is located within the middle of a unique, narrow transitional zone
> between the dry deserts of the American Southwest and the lush, green, more
> humid regions of the American Southeast. Its climate, topography, and
> vegetation share characteristics of both. Officially, Austin has a humid
> subtropical climate under the Köppen climate classification. This climate is
> typified by very long and hot summers; short, mild winters; and pleasantly
> warm spring and fall seasons in-between.

> An uncommon characteristic of Austin's climate is its highly variable
> humidity, which fluctuates frequently depending on the shifting patterns of
> air flow and wind direction. It is common for a lengthy series of warm, dry,
> low-humidity days to be occasionally interrupted by very warm and humid
> days, and vice versa. Humidity rises with winds from the east or southeast,
> when the air drifts inland from the Gulf of Mexico, but decreases
> significantly with winds from the west or southwest, bringing air flowing
> from Chihuahuan Desert areas of West Texas or northern Mexico.[76]

I never saw a cactus in Austin before...at least one that wasn't being
cultivated in someone's yard. I do remember my time there for one hot and very
humid summer...it made Mississippi feel nice in comparison, it definitely
wasn't like Salt Lake City in climate.

~~~
StillBored
Prickly pear
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opuntia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opuntia)
is a very common sight in the few remaining wild/unkept parts of Austin and
surrounding country given that Austin is part of its native range. As cactus
goes, it is definitely one of the friendlier ones.

------
tnecniv
The graduate student analysis doesn't seem right. I don't think the article
understands the incentives of graduate students. Yes, there are lots of
foreign graduate students, especially masters students. One big motivator for
them studying in the US is that they want to work for a US company and / or
immigrate. Moreover, the ones that want to pursue a PhD often choose
institutions based on potential advisors. It seems very unlikely that these
things are going to change in the next year or so. Schools might miss out on
prospective students with a time table, but I'd be surprised if the situation
in 2025 is significantly different from today.

I do see academic towns really hurting from the lack of undergrads. That's a
big decrease in population, and even if most businesses are allowed to open in
the fall, lots of universities will take conservative measures and not let
undergrads back on campus --- dorms etc. being an ideal transmission
environment.

~~~
addicted
Those things have already changed though.

Students graduating this year will not be able to remain and work in the US
because the US has stopped processing work visas and are explicitly preventing
immigrants from getting new jobs.

This is in addition to the fact that international student numbers had already
dropped over the past couple of years thanks to US hostility towards
immigrants.

~~~
unishark
> Students graduating this year will not be able to remain and work in the US
> because the US has stopped processing work visas and are explicitly
> preventing immigrants from getting new jobs.

What story are you referring to? I've seen stories around the edges of this
kind of thing for H1B's, but nothing so definite.

A student graduating now wouldn't need one yet anyone because they get two
years of OPT if they were in STEM.

~~~
scott_s
> A student graduating now wouldn't need one yet anyone because they get two
> years of OPT if they were in STEM.

Yes, but it's also possible to use some (or all) of that OPT time on
internships in industry. I have colleagues who were in that situation, and had
to spend a few months back in their native country after graduation, while
their visa was being processed because they had no OPT left.

~~~
unishark
They also get something like 6 months of CPT for internships.

------
tech-historian
According to the chart in the article, >75% of grad students in EE and
computer science at American colleges are international students.

That is a shocking number to me. Entire grad programs are in serious jeopardy
if the worst case scenario plays out.

~~~
norswap
It's funny to me how wrong all of the answers of this thread are: These
programs are too broad. / The talent is abroad. / This is a ticket for a Visa.

Those may all be more or less true, but the broader issue of why these
programs are mostly populated by foreigners is that they're too expensive (for
master degrees) and vastly underpaid compared to market rates for PhD degrees.
(Consider the strike at UC Santa Cruz by PhD students for a wage that would
allow them to cover their living expenses without having to commute hours to
campus.)

US students, which most likely have already contracted debt to finance their
undergraduate degree will simply go get a job that both pays better and may
boost their carreers more, and may come with more social status, given the
current wave of anti-academic sentiment.

~~~
chias
Having gone through a PhD program myself, this smacks of truth.

In the PhD program I went through, it was predominantly populated by foreign
students and Americans whose parents paid for their undergrad (like me).
Unlike in the United States, foreign college graduates typically don't have a
massive amount of debt to pay off. When you graduate college and owe $35-120k
in student loans, deciding between "lets get a job with actual pay" versus
"lets make essentially no money for another 4-8 years" is a very easy question
to answer, and it doesn't favor going to grad school.

If you're American, your options are (1) very cheap undergrad, which makes it
more difficult to go to grad school, (2) large amounts of debt, which makes it
infeasible to go to grad school, or (3) have had your undergrad paid for,
which is inaccessible to most.

------
Simulacra
It always bugged me that both universities I graduated from took in large
numbers of high paying international students, in order to prop up huge
salaries for administrators.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
There's like five comments with this "huge salaries for administrators" theme.
Is that some political party's talking point? Did it feature in some Netflix
hit?

Because I can't quite see how it's an actual factor? If we're talking deans
and university presidents, the numbers are just too low to make a difference
for universities with tens of thousands of students. Plus, obviously, some
Dean of Harvard Law might be earning millions but would still be underpaid
relative to what they could command in the private sector.

If it's "administrators" as in "lowly" bureaucrats, how do they have the power
to be given salaries beyond what's needed to attract them in the marketplace?
If we compare their relative level of education with your average San
Francisco Javascript coder, are their salaries still too high?

Speaking of COBOL: University IT staff, which would seem to be among the
categories of "administration", is almost stereotypically underpaid compared
to the private sector. Staying within the PhD comics universe, graduate
students, postdocs, and other non-tenured faculty often have to fudge the
numbers to delude themselves into believing they make more than minimum wage.
This would also seem to disprove any theory that universities are particularly
generous or incompetent when it comes to labor exploitation.

Beyond that, it seems strange how you are linking these two issues, of
administrative salaries and foreign students. There is absolutely no reason to
believe that money coming in via these students is different in any way to,
say, grants or patent royalties or donations from alumni or really any source
of income.

Foreign students pay more than their relative share of costs. Thus, they lower
costs for everyone else. They take nobody's spot, but allow for more
(subsidised) US students to attend.

This holds as long as an additional $1,000 made from foreign students does
not, on average, result in admin salaries rising >$1,000. That would seem to
be a pretty safe assumption, and I doubt anyone can come up with a plausible
mechanism for why it should not be the case.

It really seems to me like you have two rather specific grievances, the choice
of which I can't really explain except that I have a tingling sense they might
have distant roots within the same corner of the ideological spectrum. And
because these are your associations when the topic of universities comes up,
or because you believe it helps to validate each, you've drawn some connection
between the two.

But since neither is particularly well-tethered in reality, they really don't
have much support to offer each other.

~~~
woofie11
Both are well-grounded in reality.

Admin salaries aren't enough to raise tuition much for everyone. If a
university president makes a megabuck, and the school has 5000 students,
that's $200/student. If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the
president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per
student.

But that's not the point. Megabuck salaries draw in the wrong people for the
wrong reasons. That dean of HLS you talk about: Should it be someone who
retired from a high-profile law firm or government job and took a pay cut to
help make sure a new generation of lawyers get mentored RIGHT? Plenty of
people would do that. Or should it be someone looking to maximize quarterly
KPIs and find ways to leverage that position for personal
political/career/financial growth? That's the change which happened in elite
academia in the past 25 years, with megabuck salaries.

And yes, universities do try to attract foreign students, especially into
Master's programs, as cash cows. I'm not sure what's wrong with that -- people
need educations, immigrants of this type grow economies, and universities need
money. It seems like a win-win-win all around.

But there does get to be a problem when that money is managed by admins of the
type described in the previous paragraph. More money doesn't make for better
schools if it goes into spending hundreds of millions on fancy buildings,
faculty clubs, and similar. General funds don't come with even the minimal
financial controls of grants and donations.

~~~
ghaff
>If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few
megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student.

Without having studied any university financial reports in detail lately,
anecdotally one of the issues isn't so much megabuck salaries at the
individual level but general administrative sprawl--which there have been
complaints about for decades.

Some of this is just Parkinson's Law stuff. (As he originally wrote about the
British Admiralty.) Bureaucracies tend to grow.

It's perhaps also the case the today universities need more administration to
handle increased compliance and other requirements.

------
sneeuwpopsneeuw
Side Note: Can we all appreciated that this website requires 112 of its 349
requests to load javascript from 47 different domains.

~~~
dkryptr
I'm not familiar with website development to know whether you're being
sarcastic or not. Is it actually a good thing?

~~~
stjo
Not at all. You can design a beautiful “modern” site with orders of magnitude
less resource requirements with ease.

------
MattGaiser
The STEM grad student numbers are both astonishing and not when you remember
how little they are paid.

------
bayesian_horse
Even if remote learning MAY (it may not) become the norm for higher education,
parents who can afford it will still send their children someplace where
children who engage in higher educationing congegrate. Probably college towns.

------
gerland
This is a very hard situation for the affected, but I cannot look at it any
other way than a positive change. My own opinion is that modern universities
are a mix of ponzi scheme with stockholm syndrom. It's a bubble that should
have burst a long time ago. From institutions of education and widening of
perspecitve they morphed into thought-culling money making machines. I think
we underestiumate just how many things changed for the better thanks to the
virus.

~~~
drunkpotato
> From institutions of education and widening of perspecitve (sic) they
> morphed into thought-culling money making machines.

How did you come to that conclusion? I would agree on the money-making machine
part, but I had rather a different and mostly positive college experience on
the education side, both in undergrad and graduate school.

------
MattGaiser
> It will be impossible for engineering departments to replace many of these
> lost researchers. That in turn will force many labs to shutter or scale
> back, making college towns a less attractive investment destination for
> private companies.

This part made me curious. Is grad school not all that competitive to get
into?

~~~
d-sc
Well, it’s hard to find capable people for grad school. It’s not just a
selection to pick some form of the best. To succeed as a grad school you need
people that can make discoveries and play the academic game.

------
alpineidyll3
These articles claiming new normal ignore the fact that having a pandemic per
century is normal. America of four months ago is an America after many
pandemics, and that includes college towns.

Journalists just want things to say they think people might read.

------
jerrya
> The highly successful model of using tax and tuition dollars to subsidize
> and plant the seeds for thriving local economies is getting hit from all
> directions at once.

Maybe schools can pay competitive wages to their researchers while state
schools focus admissions on state students?

~~~
MattGaiser
That would mean a decline in revenues and an increase in costs. Where does the
money come from?

~~~
michaelbrave
Football coaches have a rather large salary.

~~~
exclusiv
For many schools, football subsidizes all sports, even after paying the
coaches and staff. And for a lot of schools, football pays for scholastics.
You'd be hard pressed to find a school that pays a coach out of line
financially.

~~~
take_a_breath
I keep reading these same talking points without any data to support it. Can
you provide any details on “many schools” or “a lot of schools”?

My alma mater, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, pays their coach $533k/year.
That is half-a-million dollars for a mid-tier team in a mid-tier conference.
They also built a $13 million indoor sports practice facility a few years ago.
[https://miamiredhawks.com/sports/2018/6/7/facilities-
indoor-...](https://miamiredhawks.com/sports/2018/6/7/facilities-indoor-
sports-center-15-html.aspx)

~~~
exclusiv
Miami of Ohio isn't a football school as you know, although it seems they want
to try and capture more of the football pie. The school has 36M in annual
sports revenue [1], a good chunk of that football. From a source that had 28M
in total sports revenue, it stated over 6M in football [2]

As the coach of a multi-million dollar business, 533k is justified. Especially
since the talent is currently not compensated. If you want to compete you have
to spend a decent amount. You're right that Miami of Ohio is mid-tier but the
533k is a mid-tier salary these days (#112 in rankings). There are 6 other MAC
schools with higher coach salaries than your school. [2]

Also, from your own article "The 91,000-square-foot facility was built
completely with donor contributions and is used by student-athletes,
intramural and club sports participants and youth athletic tournaments."

Donor contributions.... And used by everyone for various sports including
youth... So I'm not sure why you are so upset.

Aside from that - there are 108 schools with athletic revenue of 30+M. [1]

And, "The average college football team makes more money than the next 35
college sports combined" [3].

[1]
[https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/](https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/)

[2]
[https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/](https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/)

[3] [https://www.businessinsider.com/college-sports-football-
reve...](https://www.businessinsider.com/college-sports-football-
revenue-2017-10)

[4] [https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/miami-university-
oxf...](https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/miami-university-
oxford/student-life/sports/)

------
EGreg
People are thinking about this the wrong way.

Masks reduce R0 so much that in Austria the infection rate plummeted after Apr
6 when masks were required.

The lockdowns are a last resort, the result of a public policy failure to
contain the virus.

The entire US establishment including the CDC, Fauci even Mike Pence said
until mid March not to wear or buy masks. Mind you, not even the cheap
surgical ones that are 50 in a box.

I have pamphlets in NYC written by the city’s health agency Feb 26th that
insist there are no confirmed cases in NYC and the risk to new yorkers remains
low.

NO ONE was willing to get ahead of this thing and look silly requiring masks
when there was no emergency.

So the outbreaks were swift and led to exactly the lockdowns we were in now.

We will face this situation again as we emerge from the lockdowns.

We can’t rely on government to create a clear framework for businesses to
follow. We need businesses to step up and sell a standardized solution.

At Qbix we are doing our part. Contact me if you want to help in your
community.

Even the most staunch libertarian can’t say no when a private building
enforces a mask policy in their lobby and in public areas like elevators. No
amount of social distancing will help in elevators - only masks can.

But the stupid attitude is “a mask can’t protect me, so why bother?” No!! The
masks are to prevent everyone from spewing virus particulates into the air.

Seriously this is the 21st century and several months after China got the
epidemic, the richest countries in the world are still complaining about not
enough masks.

Meanwhile in Taiwan the buildings are handing them out and you can drop them
off. That’s how it should be.

~~~
gruez
>NO ONE was willing to get ahead of this thing and look silly requiring masks
when there was no emergency.

AFAIK it was because there was a mask shortage and giving masks to healthcare
workers provided greater utility than giving them to everyone else.

------
throwaway713
> Even before coronavirus, President Donald Trump's administration had been
> working to decrease the inflow of students from overseas

Sometimes I wonder if the U.S. is purposefully trying to move down in world
rankings... I'm not sure why anyone would think it's a good idea to
intentionally limit the opportunities to the best and hardest working people
in the world; those opportunities will just spring up elsewhere instead. I
have a theory that a society cannot maintain leading world standings without
also leading in science and technology, and it's not long before the U.S.
loses this (if it hasn't already). Most of the greatest recent technological
advances are already driven by people born outside the U.S. that work within
the country; it wouldn't surprise me if they decide that coming to the U.S. is
just no longer worth the hassle.

~~~
ralph84
> the best and hardest working people in the world

That's not the majority of international students in the US. It's those whose
parents can afford to pay for them to study abroad.

~~~
solveit
But a good proportion of the best and hardest working people in the world are
international students in the US.

------
rvz
The generation from the swine flu pandemic of 2009 would like to have a word
with this author.

~~~
buf
Zoom and YouTube weren't as big, mate.

------
thrower123
It's really just accelerating what was going to happen in a decade or so
anyway when the demographic bulge passed. Colleges are to some extent wildly
overprovisioned, as well as overextended, and many were starting to fail
before SHTF.

------
jakeogh
Risk of coronavirus spreading in schools is 'extremely low' study finds:
[https://www.yahoo.com/news/risk-coronavirus-spreading-
school...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/risk-coronavirus-spreading-schools-
extremely-194143983.html)

~~~
trianglem
That makes no sense. All the kids are in very close proximity.

~~~
jansan
Close proximity does not have to the the only factor, although all the world
ist currently fixed on social distancing. How about children being less
contagious? After all they are developing no symptoms at all in most cases.

~~~
maccam94
You can still be contagious without obvious symptoms. And allergy season could
help spread the particles even if the virus isn't triggering coughs/sneezes
itself.

