1. You suggest that tuition will stop going up so much, because otherwise people who aren’t extremely wealthy won’t be able to afford it. However, only the extremely wealthy pay full tuition now. I expect the sliding scale on which currently the most selective schools operate to spread to less selective schools, as they raise their tuition and give more financial aid.

2. I don’t think there’s any reason to think that they equity premium has gone away, nor that colleges will stop having a long time horizon in which to invest. Further, the stock market has barely out-performed inflation over the past 10 years, a period in which there has been major growth, as you say.

3. In what sense are rich people (the people who donate large sums to endowments) tapped out? There has been a massive transfer of wealth *to* rich people over the last 10 years, and there don’t seem to be signs of the stopping.

4. Finally, the US is growing significantly and is quite rich. Further, the number of people going to college keeps going up. Education is one thing that well-off people spend their money on, and I don’t see any reason for that to change. If the US averages 2.5% growth for the next 10 years, then there will be more than $4 trillion more money available to buy things with in 2018. That pays for a lot of professors.

One thing that I think could change is the way that graduate education in the humanities and social sciences is organized. These are prestige activities that — as long as the students are being funded — are both time and expense intensive. That is, we may see more grad programs falling into heavy teaching loads, being supplemented by tuition-based programs, or just being downsized/phased out of existence.

I also think that a positive result would be more targeted institutions, that try to do fewer things well.

We are also likely to see a push-back (even more!) against research support in the humanities and social sciences, with an emphasis on higher teaching loads.

And as in other facets of American life, the gap between the haves and have-nots of higher ed will widen.

Was it really the DofEd that got the accreditation ball rolling?

Oooh – I just visited the Middle States website. They began as a group of college presidents organizing to protest the taxation of college property! Standards came after assuring property. Interesting origin.

The genesis of the Association can be traced to a meeting of activist college presidents in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in February 1887. The meeting was held to protest a proposed tax on college properties and concluded with the consensus that education from early age through the university was in chaos. The presidents chartered themselves as the College Association of Pennsylvania, soon thereafter renamed the Association of the Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Middle States and Maryland.

I agree that at my institution the assumption of growth Tim identifies in point 7 informs most decisions. Sometimes it turns out to be a rhetoric of growth, when administrators announce that some positions are newly tenure track, skating quickly past the fact that someone has always been teaching these courses, whether that someone was a by-the-semester adjunct or an ongoing non-tenureable appointment. Perhaps that’s ‘plenitude,’ the feeling that the institution has enough money to regularize positions.