BY JOHN K. WILSON

MacMurray College in southern Illinois, which announced yesterday that it will be closing its doors in May after operating for 174 years, was the first college I ever attended. Well, sort of. It was a summer math camp for high school students, with the lure of receiving college credit for attendance. I thought it was all a little dubious to toss out college credit for high-school level math instruction, but even then MacMurray was desperate to recruit students and bring in revenue. Today, with just 524 students and 101 faculty and staff, the college saw no path forward in our viral times.

MacMurray is the first institutional fatality from coronavirus in higher education, and although it was in a precarious financial position before, certainly the uncertainty and costs of the crisis helped push an unstable college over the edge. 

This news will hearten the cheerleaders of higher ed doom on the right, who celebrate the destruction of every college they can. You will have a lot of conservatives excitedly talking about the “bubble” of higher education that has finally burst, a promise they have been repeating for many years now with gleeful anticipation. 

This is nonsense. There is no bubble in higher education. A bubble refers to a dramatic increase in something’s value because of speculation driven by expectations of growing value. A bubble keeps growing because people think it will keep growing, until the mass delusion bursts. Whether it’s tulips in 1637 or housing in 2008, bubbles are fueled by speculation. And that’s why higher education can’t be a bubble: You can’t invest in a hundred college degrees held by other people, and hope to flip them quickly to someone else.

There are, of course, colleges and fields of study that can suffer immensely from changes in the marketplace. And that marketplace is about to change in dramatic ways. Private colleges will suffer from the loss of donations and tuition. Public colleges will face the usual experience of being the first on the chopping block when states revenues wane.

But higher education is a remarkably stable industry, perhaps the most stable industry in the world. Unlike restaurants, which will close in droves as a result of this crisis and the looming recession, colleges survive economic downturns with remarkable ease, even if it is never pleasant. MacMurray College’s closure is a sad day for its students, staff, and alumni. But it is an exceptional case, not the first victim of a virus that will spread across the country with vast destruction. Higher education is strong enough to survive this crisis, even if not all colleges will make it through, and the rest may be substantially changed and challenged by it.