More Unintended Consequences From COVID Social Engineering

I posted on Saturday about one unintended consequence of COVID social engineering, which is a labor shortage. It seems to me that conditions imposed by the government forbidding people to earn a living or perform other routine functions must inevitably have unintended consequences that are yet to be fully recognized. For instance, the lockdowns closed schools longer than they closed workplaces. The effects of this are only beginning to be felt.

So I saw in yesterday's Washington Examiner:

The pandemic has taken a significant toll on the desire for high school students to pursue higher education, a new study shows.

Less than 50% of high school students are interested in four-year colleges, a decrease of over 20% from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, a new survey reported.

. . . Though 86% of students reported feeling pressured to attend university , most expressed concern about the cost. Six out of 10 respondents worried about how they would pay for college, and 65% said student loans are an important factor in their future education.

The subtext of every economics course I took in high school and college was that consumers are intelligent and able to make effective choices. But these choices aren't restricted to the price of bread. If the government says you must eat cake instead, your range of options isn't limited to what you're allowed to see on the supermarket shelf. Over the past two years, education producers modifed their product to provide largely remote learning in response to government action. How have consumers responded?

The effect of the revised higher education product was to keep students at home instead of on campus. This attentuated the product on one hand, removing in-person contact with instructors and fellow students, as well as athletics and other on-campus resources. But for this period, the price remained effectively the same. Even if the question didn't formally arise for all consumers, this must inevitably have focused their minds on the actual value of the product.

In addition, the product wasn't just attentuated, it was trivialized. Households kept paying bills in the mid five figures for one or more kids to sit home and still get college credit for courses that were reduced to webinars, Zoom meetings, and take-home exams. On the othner hand, this was a college experience that, while it lacked the depth of campus life, it actually had the advantage of coming without the parties, DUIs, date rapes, demonstrations, and drugs. Consumers appear to have factored this in as well. If the whole exercise can be replaced with webinars and take home exams, what's the point?

Thus we have the polling results given in the story above. Exactly how this will be reflected in coming years' actual enrollments remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it can't be encouraging to see what appears to be a decline in public perception of college education's value. Recognize that for the parents of the baby boom generation, the introduction of SATs and selective admissions created the impression that college education was a meritocracy and allowed the producers steadily to increase the real price of the product for well over half a century.

I can't avoid thinking this presages a major shift in social preference, which had already been promoted by the popular television figure Mike Rowe, who for some years has been stressing that people can find rewarding careers outside the college-educated bourgeoisie.

This trend comes at the expense of major administrative state clients, university faculties and administrators. But another unintended consequence of the lockdowns has been to hasten public dissatsfaction with K-12 education as well. If parents have been able to sit in on their kids' elementary school classes via the web, they get a clearer picture of what is and isn't being taught. This can only have been an important factor in the recent reassertion of parental control over local school boards, which hurts another client of the administrative state, the teachers' unions.

I'm sure we're only beginning to see the unintended consequences of COVID social engineering.