As an industry, we have not done anything like this before. Our goal is simply to increase public understanding of the broad role that higher education has played in the past and must continue to play in the future.
For most colleges and universities, tuition is the largest share of revenue. If you're getting 80 percent of your revenue from tuition and you lose half your students, you're facing enormous difficulties.
This is the mother of all unfunded mandates.
But on balance, one comes to the conclusion that this is a sad step in the history of the student loan program.
We fear that the FCC order will make every college and university replace every router and every switch in their systems. The cost of doing that is substantial.
We fear that doing what they want will require every router and every switch in an IT system to be replaced.
The federal government will spend $12.7 billion less on student loans in the next five years than they would otherwise have done. It will be felt.
I think it's unlikely that most of these schools in New Orleans will open before January -- if then.
Essentially, they're going to reinvent Tulane. The kinds of changes they are likely to make would be the most significant restructuring of any American college or university in the last century.
You don't want to say the news is all bad. It's a decidedly mixed bag.
