1/ If you want to understand the growing conflict between students and colleges over pandemic-era tuition, this quote from University System of Maryland chancellor Jay Perman is a good place to start. washingtonpost.com/local/educatio… 
2/ Perman is offering an economic view of higher education from inside the industry. He understands that colleges get tuition and public subsidies for one overwhelming reason: only colleges can grant degrees that lead to good jobs.
3/ But boiling it down to interchangeable credits and credentials has the effect of commodifying the process. And selling commodities is a high-stress, low-margin business that colleges don’t want to be in.
4/ So they tell their customers a different story, about family and community and experience. It’s all kind of ineffable and thus subject to a much wider range of possible prices.
5/ People believe the story, and pay for it, in part because the story can be true, but also because believing it is an act of building social capital with value beyond what you learn in class, whether or not the story is true.
6/ The pandemic is stripping the story away. It’s not that classes are happening on Zoom--it’s that classes are all that’s happening. Which makes it harder not to notice what college is, and what it isn’t, and how much it ought to cost.
7/ That’s why the vibrations of panic seem to be coming strongest from high-status institutions that objectively ought to have the most resources to ride this out. They’re losing control of the story, and the story is almost everything.
