Geoff Baird and Robert Zempsky
Subject: Closing Small Colleges
Bio: Geoff: Consultant Working With Higher Ed Institutions, Robert: Professor of Education at UPenn and The Chief Planning Officer
Transcript:
Closing Small Colleges
What Happens Next in 6 Minutes - 04.21.2026
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is Closing Small Colleges.
Our first speaker is Geoff Baird who is a very close family friend. Geoff recently co-wrote a book entitled The Signal Solution: How Smart Colleges Stop Chasing Applications and Start Converting Students.
Geoff is a consultant working with higher ed institutions to help them persuade accepted student applicants to attend their school. Geoff is particularly excited about using AI to figure out who the admissions committee should focus on in their marketing efforts.
Our second speaker is Bob Zemsky who is a Professor of Education at UPenn and the university’s chief planning officer. He is also the Co-Founder of College-in3- Exchange and is the author of 14 books including The College Stress Test.
In the past couple of weeks, Hampshire College and the Chicago Theological Seminary announced that they are closing. This is part of an ongoing trend that small colleges fail to attract enough students to survive. Bob will discuss what these schools need to do turn things around including experimenting with new programs like a 3-year degree.
Let’s start with Geoff Baird, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Geoff Baird:
In the book, The Signal Solution that I wrote with Teege Mettille starts with higher education is struggling and in a state of disruption. The reasons are changes in demographics and pressures on delivering ROI and outcomes. What do we do about this? How do institutions change their enrollment? The environment in which higher education operates has fundamentally and permanently changed.
If we agree that it’s fundamentally changed, why would we expect our enrollment playbooks built for a previous era to work the same way? The signals on enrollment decisions, forecasts and investments that we spent a decade building up are not delivering the level of predictability that they did in the past. An enrollment environment where there are no longer pools of students and untapped pools of scholarships. In a world where there are fewer students, fewer dollars, competition is rising, what does higher ed do?
What do they do with enrollment? The answer is to shift strategies from the top of the funnel focus, which is where the playbooks have been centered. Estimations are that higher education spends between $10 and $15 billion acquiring students. That is a lot of money not going to the education of students. And so, institutions must change the way they are thinking about enrollment.
They have to shift from the top of the funnel to the movable middle, those students that are interested, but not all the way in. Institutions have got to compete harder for that smaller group of students. This is the big transformation particularly for the thousands of institutions that are not in the top hundred that do not have endowments to fall back on, where every student enrolled matters to the future of the institution.
The yield is the percent of admitted students that choose to enroll. For highly selective institutions the yield rate might be 50%. But for an average college in the United States that number might be 15%.
Of those 85 who were accepted, if you can get three more to say yes, you’ve grown your enrollment by 20%. For most institutions in America, that is a grand slam home run. That might be the difference between sustainability and survivability.
Larry Bernstein:
For every hundred kids the college accepts into the school, only 15 enroll. Most of those kids are excited to attend that college. They’ve done the work, they thought it through, it makes economic sense, they’re signed up. And those 85, some of them are on the edge and some of them are going to better schools or not going to school at all. If you can convince three more students who were accepted to enroll people, you go from 15 to 18, it’s a 20% increase. Tell me about these edge cases and how you can use tools to ascertain who those edge cases are so that you can provide resources to persuade them to join your student body.
Geoff Baird:
The analytics of enrollment are very complex regression models. They factor in geography, distance from the institution, other demographic and profile characteristics, and essentially students are put into groups.
When there were plenty of students that worked, and we were able to identify students by geography, by grades, by all sorts of things. And then when they visit their probability rises. Enrollment is now incremental. It is on the fringes.
What it requires is that we shift from looking at students who were admitted to now looking at them individually. The problem was we physically could not do that because there were so many applicants and data that all we could do was group them to make it manageable. That’s where AI opened up the door to change how we operate and how we think about the enrollment funnel because we now have the raw compute power of machine learning and AI, to look at every single student individually and to look at their deeper behavioral patterns that signal intent.
It is so easy to apply to college now that you can press a button and apply to 20 schools. The problem is for the institution whether this student is serious or not. They have checked all the boxes. They’ve come on a tour. They’ve done the traditional metrics measure, but someone is 22nd on that list of schools and someone is first. The signals that we’ve relied on have been diluted.
Larry Bernstein:
Applying to college for my children was a family project. It wasn’t like we let them go off half-cocked. We worked with them for years to make sure that they had the preparatory knowledge and capability to do well on the exams and get the grades. We tried to make it look like the decision was the child’s, but it was in combination with the parents. When you say that the school hadn’t contacted the child, it also means probably the school hasn’t contacted the parent either. There are lots of touch points. There’s the high school counselor, there’s the student, there’s the parents. Is there a coordinated attack plan?
When I worked at Salomon Brothers and there was a big deal, we wanted to get the business. There were many touchpoints at the company level where we spoke to the treasurer, the CFO, and the CEO. There were lots of different touchpoints to encourage them to give us the business. How can colleges get the business?
Geoff Baird:
When you are talking about a college decision, which is one of the big three decisions in someone’s life: buying a house, picking a spouse, and college. For parents that’s been a real focus. Where it becomes a challenge is there are big swaths of students in America that do not have that parental support.
We still have a problem of volume and scale. And when there are 10,000, because it is so easy to apply, you can’t talk to all of them. But the bigger challenge has been resource and prioritization. And the result of that is genericized messaging. And we are at a point now where students growing up in the Netflix - TikTok world, their expectation is that the system understands them. I am presented with the options on what I like to listen to or watch on my feed. It knows me. We hear our own kids saying that this is the world they expect and yet Higher Ed still lives in a world of simple communication.
Larry Bernstein:
What I noticed in my college visits with my children is that the schools were using one size fits all strategies. After my daughter was accepted to Northwestern, we went to their college visiting weekend, and it opened with a talk from the Vice Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences who gave a lovely speech to several hundred kids. We went to a lunch and sat next to a young girl who had just been accepted to Holy Cross. She was going in a completely different path than my daughter, yet they were lumped into the same pool.
As I was walking around campus, I got lost and I asked for help. It happened to be the head of the theater department and my daughter wanted to be a theater major. He asked her, “Tell me where else you’ve been accepted.” And she said, “Penn.” And he said, “Well, if you’re really interested in theater, Northwestern is far superior. Penn may have two shows a year. We have two shows a week. We have tons of different content and relationships with local theaters. This really isn’t comparable.”
That’s what you want. You want an individualized discussion between the student and the greater university.
It seems like universities have decided to engage using almost exclusively the admissions office as their center for marketing. They are not using their full tool set, and as a result, they miss students who are on the edge of accepting but need a push. These are the most important students to touch, and yet to your point, they are not talking to them and they’re leaving it to chance or worse, they’re leaving it to other universities to recognize that they’re also an edge case and then can close the deal.
Geoff Baird:
That is a great example of the challenge and the opportunity. In one of our partner institutions that we have done some AI work with we found the following statistics. The group of students who visited campus enrolled as a group at a 755% greater rate than those who did not. So, the natural conclusion is we need to get students on campus to visit. And when they visit, we’ve got to focus on those students because it’s such a tell.
But here’s what’s interesting. When we peeled back the onion, the percent of students who visit who enrolled from the same institution was only 30%. So, the ability to predict who will enroll based upon the visit alone was worse than a coin flip. And here’s where it became even more interesting. We started building more complex AI models to predict enrollment based on the last three years of data and our models we’re predicting at 94% accuracy. We cracked open the models to ask them, “What are you looking at to predict?” You know where the campus visit was? The college visit was 170th best indicator.
This is mind blowing. What it’s really saying in plain English is it’s not that the visit isn’t important, it’s that the visit is not the same for everyone. Your daughter might visit because she is in serious consideration of Northwestern and it is one of our top choices. I might be visiting because my parents are making me. And historically, we have treated both of those as the same. The mission has always been to try and connect individually. It’s just we haven’t been able to because there’s been too much data and too much time that it requires. But what AI has opened the ability to look at each student individually based upon the entirety of their behavioral pattern.
Larry Bernstein:
Morty Schapiro is the former President of Northwestern University, and he had been a senior administrator at Williams and Penn. And I had him speak on my podcast and my book club, and he said a couple things I want you to comment about. Making a campus visit is a tell. When Northwestern thinks about their financial aid package, they offer more financial aid to those that don’t come for a campus visit than those that do, because he knows that if they go for the campus visit, they want this extra financial aid package can kick someone who didn’t bother to visit because maybe cash will talk.
When I attended Penn as a student, it was not anyone’s first choice to attend. Schapiro realized that if we want to get better candidates, we had to change the incentive structure. He was an early adopter of we will give legacies and others an edge but only in the early admission process. That forced people to say, “I’m going to use this silver bullet to apply to Penn, and I won’t do my Hail Mary for Harvard or Stanford.” It dramatically changed the entire dynamics of the admission process for highly selective schools. Each school doesn’t act in a vacuum. It’s a competitive environment for those marginal cases, and you’re competing in an ever more complicated, more aggressive situation. When the game is changing, what can these colleges do?
Geoff Baird:
It was game changing for the highly selective colleges. I have a story of an institution that was not highly selective that tried to replicate that because this worked at Penn. What the data concluded was that for their institution they were losing students by forcing that early admissions decision. Even though the faculty and the administration said, “We want to be this.” That was not the dynamic of their students. And so, it is a challenge to be able to find the right model for your institution. Someone says this worked but in this case, we could show statistically that it backfired and they lost students trying to replicate this.
The top large institutions, the flagship state systems, they are going to survive, but hundreds of other institutions will not. When an institution closes, it is catastrophic for the student body. Half of those students never complete their degree. So now you have got student debt and years lost and no degree to help you.
Larry Bernstein:
I applied to Stanford four times and was rejected four times. I applied to undergrad, PhD, and MBA twice, zero for four. I hosted an event at Stanford, and one of the speakers was the former president of the school, John Hennessy. And I said to him, “Who got fired over that? “ He said, “What are you talking about? “ I said, “Well, in any business, you should evaluate your decisions and you can look and say, Oh, it’s so interesting. The top 10 kids at Penn and top 10 kids at Princeton or Williams, they were all rejected by Stanford. They would have been great contributions to the school. What did we get wrong? And we can see those people who made those decisions, and we can say those people should be let go.”
He said, “That’s not how it works around here. Nobody got fired because we didn’t let you in.”
I said, “Why not? “
“Well, you don’t understand what we’re trying to accomplish. We are not looking for the smartest kids. We’re looking for a diversified pool. We have an orchestra. We need a French horn player, maybe the tuba. You don’t play the tuba. We have to consider that. We’ve got all these different majors. We got to fill needs across gender, interests, sports, the whole thing. It’s complicated to put together a university and no one is going to evaluate the fact that we missed the valedictorian at the Wharton Business School. That is not even a consideration. We wish you luck. We hope you do, but no, we don’t care.”
I noticed in your conversation, when you are trying to get from 15 to 18, you did not consider Hennessy’s objectives of creating a diversified class.
You are looking for bodies. Maybe you are trying to get the gender ratio close to 55/45 girls to boys. But away from that, I’ll take them. Describe the difference in the admissions process as it relates from a non-selective versus selective school and their desire to have a diversified class.
Geoff Baird:
They’re not mutually exclusive. Even the smallest, most niche institutions, ones that maybe fighting for survival every day, and I’ve sat in those rooms, the makeup of the class, and it’s referred to as the shaping of the class, is still paramount. There are institutions out there that have the luxury of saying we have so much demand that we can make these decisions focused on shaping the perfect class, but that is not the reality for a majority of colleges out there.
Larry Bernstein:
Going back to college visits, when my child and I, visited the college, what they showed us was bizarre. We saw a typical room. the cafeteria, and sporting facilities. What they didn’t talk about was median income after graduation. They didn’t highlight the rankings of biology versus computer science. They didn’t compare the economic decisions of attending Northwestern versus Holy Cross.
When you go to buy a car, they break down decisions. This car, you can lease it for three years for $450 a month. You can put it back. The residual values for these automobiles are pretty good. You should see the seats and the pickup. Would you like to go for a ride? There’s none of that.
It’s peculiar how they sell the school. We hear more about the economic consequences of these degrees and the importance of choice of major (see podcast Does Your College Major Matter), why is the selling points relevant for students?
Geoff Baird:
All institutions are going to be pivoting towards outcomes. Why come here? Because this is what you’ll get. Why isn’t it there now? We send out surveys and ask, “What are you interested in? “ And they say, “Tell me about the dorms or the recreational facilities. Do you have a climbing wall?” And that led to the facilities arms race that took place. That’s not to say campus and facilities aren’t important. It just consumed a lot of capital.
Larry Bernstein:
When I was 17, I decided to apply to the University of Illinois. I grew up in Glencoe, Illinois. I went to New Trier High School and 100 of the 1056 graduates from New Trier attended the University of Illinois campus at Urbana. My mother was making dinner and I was filling out the application. And as I was reading the materials, I said to my mom, “Ma, I made a decision not to apply to the University of Illinois.” And she said, “Larry, what are you talking about? “ I said, “Do you remember a few weeks ago we went to Highland Park to that Greek restaurant and I ordered some gyro.” Yeah, I remember that. “Do you remember that I threw up?” “Yeah, I remember that too.” “Now I can’t stand the smell of gyro.
I find it unbearable and so I can’t apply to the University of Illinois.” “Larry, what does that got to do with anything?” “I’m reading the materials.” It says that the University of Illinois leads the United States in Greek life. I mean, there must be gyro cooking on every corner.
17-year-olds are ignorant of the world. How do we deal with that fact when you are trying to persuade a consumer who doesn’t know what he’s talking about?
Geoff Baird:
It doesn’t surprise me that you would’ve not understood at 17 years old Greek life at a major university. But your point is very interesting, and this is hard. This is a big decision of someone’s life in many cases, and you’re dealing with 17 year-olds and they don’t necessarily understand the ramifications of the decisions. And why it’s easier to lean into the emotional component of college life as opposed to the outcome and what you’re trying to drive and deliver.
Ultimately, it still comes down to being able to drive a deeper connection with students. It is certainly tough to communicate with potential students is through mass email or campaigns that look exactly the same as they’re getting from five other schools, because everyone has hired the same firm to go put together their yield campaigns. It’s a real challenge. T It’s a unique situation with this level of stakes and decision. And you are talking about Larry Bernstein at age 17. This is why institutions can’t just follow the pack and have to find their own unique path to sort of break through the noise.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Geoff, I would like to turn to our second speaker Bob Zemsky who is a Professor of Education at Penn and the Co-Founder of the College-in-3 Exchange.
Hampshire College just announced its closing. Is this the canary in the coal mine?
Robert Zemsky:
You better believe it is. Hampshire was the ideal small liberal arts college nestled in New England with small classes. They were sure they knew what they were doing. They really did. The market is rejecting the Hampshire product.
Larry Bernstein:
What is it about the product that is unattractive?
Robert Zemsky:
The product is what the faculty want to do. It’s not what the students want to learn or do. This is a different student market than when I left Yale. The students who go to places like Hampshire are gamesters. They like problem solving of gaming. If you have a curriculum that has not fundamentally changed in 40 years, you are missing that revolution.
When a quarter of your freshman class checks out during the freshman year that is not an equation for success. You cannot lose a quarter of your market when you are a small market to begin with.
The biggest institutions are doing the best. They have variety and that they don’t trap students in endless rounds of Gen Ed in which the faculty get to teach exactly what they want to teach. There in a nutshell is the problem.
Larry Bernstein:
You have been an advocate for changing college education from four years to three years. Tell us about that.
Robert Zemsky:
There are 120 institutions that are ready to do this. They’re not going to swap their entire curriculum and go three years, but they’re going to find small groups of faculty to do the experiment who do not want to be trapped by the old shibboleths.
They want to do it their way. They don’t want to have to pass a vote of the faculty. If they can get 10 of them who will do it together, that’s great. What we know in college in three is higher education is on the brink of a major experimentation with an alternate curriculum.
Larry Bernstein:
Why do you want to cut the number of courses in college to get kids out faster to the working world?
Robert Zemsky:
I was looking at Gen Ed and I came to the conclusion that a lot of this is wasted energy. College in 3, what is attractive to it is not the time, but that you get to recast the entire product and that’s what’s needed.
Larry Bernstein:
You get your bachelor’s degree in three years and not in four.
Robert Zemsky:
The easiest way to do it is that you have a 90-credit degree, not a 120-credit degree, though it is possible to teach 120 credits in three years to go to summer school.
The idea is what can we do without? And what you can do without is the Gen Ed nonsense which is what the faculty want to teach. It is not what the students want.
Larry Bernstein:
Can you give me an example?
Robert Zemsky:
It turned out, institutions were experimenting with alternate degrees because that was the easiest to have a blank slate. They do cybersecurity or an AI degree. Degrees that didn’t exist before. So there are no hard and fast rules of what you have to do. You can truly experiment. College in 3 turned out to be a massive experimental mindset.
We have 82 institutions who think of themselves as members of our organization. A typical college in 3 program may be 40 students. It is a thin slice with 10 faculty members experimenting with what they want.
Higher Ed is consumed by diversity battles, by Trumpism battles, and by financial woes. You’ll need students for three years, not four, but that’s not the answer. They’re not going to stick with you because they want to save the money. They’re going to stick with you because you are offering them something different. This is one of those rare moment where the academic has said, “It’s an experiment.”
Larry Bernstein:
Why are small colleges less adept at providing what students want as compared to larger universities?
Robert Zemsky:
This is purely a question of scale. The big universities have lots of things hanging out the door. Big places aren’t susceptible to purity tests. Small places are.
Larry Bernstein:
And the purity test means you have to take in the first year these eight classes?
Robert Zemsky:
That’s what it boiled down to.
Larry Bernstein:
There are a lot of colleges that offer two-year degrees.
Robert Zemsky:
The community college business is shrinking. They were going to be for financially strained people who weren’t ready for college, whatever that meant. When you’re designing a two-year degree, what you’re designing is a set of pre-learning experiences that students need to do the real work. When you’re designing a three-year degree, you’re designing the whole thing. It turns out the first year is a lot more important than you realized, and that you have to be very purposeful about exactly what happens in the first year.
Larry Bernstein:
Small colleges have a retention problem. What is the dropout rate after a year?
Robert Zemsky:
Typical is 20%.
Larry Bernstein:
What do those students do? Do they transfer to a different college? Or are they dropping out of college entirely?
Robert Zemsky:
The evidence tells us they go to work.
Larry Bernstein:
What do the students want that would make them stay in college?
Robert Zemsky:
I think what students want is what you get from sophisticated gaming. That means you get a problem, you scope it, you scale it, and you test solutions to see if you have got a solution. That’s not the nature of college curriculum.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you think that a critical purpose of a college education is to teach values?
Robert Zemsky:
That just doesn’t resonate anymore. College does values, it does skills and it does problem solving. The values part is being overwritten, in part because it’s dangerous. It’s DEI and all of that, but the value part is losing traction. Students, as best I can tell from our experience, is they want puzzles to be solved. That’s not what I did in college. Is that what you did in college?
Larry Bernstein:
I was an undergraduate in the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Robert Zemsky:
The Wharton School’s a good example. They actually teach problems.
Larry Bernstein:
That’s exactly right.
Robert Zemsky:
The Wharton School’s not losing enrollment, let me tell you.
Larry Bernstein:
Not only did it not lose enrollment, but there were enormous transfers from Penn’s liberal arts school to the Wharton Business School.
In the Wharton curriculum, if you take a management class, there will be a case study of a problem that needs to be resolved.
Robert Zemsky:
You got it.
Larry Bernstein:
But how do you do that in an English class?
Robert Zemsky:
Ah, now you’re getting to what the problem is. English or philosophy is the hardest. If you are in English, what you want is a population who can distinguish between pieces of the literature, and its things that young people do not like to do, but that is what it is. It is bibliographic work. Big surprise that it is the pure humanities that are the biggest problem, because they do not have what the market recognizes as learning problems to be worked through.
Business has learning problems. Engineering has learning problems. Healthcare has learning problems. Sociology has learning problems. The social sciences are doing much better, but you must have a recognized problem that you then say to the student, “Figure out what the problem is and give me back a solution.” Can you see that said to an English class?
Larry Bernstein:
Why are colleges and universities incapable of change? Why are they so inept at trying to listen to their customers and give them what they want?
Robert Zemsky:
Because that’s not why they learned what they learned. They believe they were following the truth and once they’ve got the truth, they want to give the truth to other people. That is not problem solving.
Larry Bernstein:
When you said kids are quitting to go to work, does it reflect a value judgment that college is not worth the money they are charged.
Robert Zemsky:
That is not the way the kid processes that. It’s money I do not have, and I can get a job and have money.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to go back to your previous point about gamification. That students enjoy games as a means of problem solving and that they find this entertaining and relevant to problem solving in the real world.
Robert Zemsky:
Yes. It’s all games. I say games, not pejoratively. Games are a good thing. Games are one of the nice achievements of the last 30 years. We’ve gotten better at games.
Larry Bernstein:
When kids come home from school, the first thing they do is play video games because it’s fun. It’s a challenge. It’s something that their peers are doing.
Robert Zemsky:
It’s confidence building.
Larry Bernstein:
They see a problem. They don’t get it the first time. They get to a one level. They’re so happy. They go to the next level. And on and on it goes. They’ll burn out sooner or later on that game. They’ll switch to a new game. The parent walks by and says, “Turn that off, enough already. Go do your homework.
Robert Zemsky:
No, the game is their homework. That’s the problem with gaming is we have a parental generation that still believes gaming is silly.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned that skill building is one of the reasons to go to college. An English professor would say that there is a benefit how to read analytically and critically, and write cogently and persuasively. And those are real skills.
Robert Zemsky:
It’s the writing skill that’s the most important, not the reading. Reading they do well. It’s the writing. And that’s why all this argument about AI, nobody’s going to write anymore, that’d be terrible.
Writing is not literary criticism. Writing is you write the solution to the problem. People who are good writers tell you, “Well, I don’t know what the answer’s going to be. I’ll tell you at the end when I get there.” That’s what a good writer says. A scholar says, “I’ll let you know when the proof is solved.” It is a totally different mindset.
Larry Bernstein:
Most Penn professors create scholarship, and that scholarship is written in a way meant only for other scholars to read. The language used is unappealing or unavailable to the laymen outside of their field. And it’s written in a way purposefully to be meant for a very select group. The scholars, as they teach their classes, are trying to teach this approach so that they can have another generation of scholars. But the student is not interested in being a scholar.
Robert Zemsky:
He’s not interested in that. That’s right.
Larry Bernstein:
He wants to be an applied person in the practical world away from the Ivy institution.
Robert Zemsky:
I’m a storyteller. My father is the one who showed me the power of storytelling telling stories rather than making proofs. Scholars write papers that make proofs. People understand stories. Let the story dictate the language, not the discipline. That’s a really important insight.
Storytelling is coming to a fore. Though he’s not my favorite president, Trump gets some credit for that. How often do we say he’s all over the map? Well, if you’re a storyteller, by definition, you’re all over the map. That’s just the nature of the beast.
Larry Bernstein:
Going back to problem solving as being the core principle.
Robert Zemsky:
I’m going to make you stop there. It isn’t problem solving as the core principle. It is finding problems that need to be solved. You discover problems. That’s the other part of gaming is that you don’t make them up. They must come up naturally out of the game. It is the recognition of the problem as a first step to solving it.
Larry Bernstein:
Voltaire said judge a man not by his answers but by his questions. I think the essence is if you are answering the wrong questions, you’re nowhere. So you got to figure out what question to ask to move forward.
Robert Zemsky:
You keep wanting to make it purely academic. We’re going to discover what a question’s to ask. That’s the scholar’s way of saying it.
The gamer says, “I’m going to solve this game whether it kills me or not. “ Wholly different way of looking at it.
Larry Bernstein:
There are many universities that are getting more selective and are excelling, and there are a substantial number of colleges that are shrinking that will go out of business. This is creative destruction. What is the problem with saying thank you very much, goodbye?
Robert Zemsky:
That’s what we’re doing.
Larry Bernstein:
But we’re doing it in a way where we feel bad. You read the article in The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times about Hampshire College closing.
Robert Zemsky:
They are mourned.
Larry Bernstein:
It’s a great loss for the faculty, students, and for the town it was in. It reflects something sad that is an emotional, moral and ethical loss.
Robert Zemsky:
What they are really saying is, this shouldn’t have happened. It’s sad.
Larry Bernstein:
Yes. And I’m saying it’s not sad. We are reallocating resources to institutions that provide products that the consumers want to pay for.
Robert Zemsky:
This current cycle, I think will go on for another 20 years, and we’re going to have a lot fewer colleges.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Geoff and Bob for joining us. If you missed our last podcast the topic was Can Congress fix the Trump tariff refund problem? John McGinnis, a constitutional law professor at Northwestern was the speaker.
The Supreme Court decided that $165 billion will be refunded to importers—money that, in many cases, could be seen as a windfall. I think there may be room here for a bipartisan solution to give money back to consumers and John explained how Congress can fix it.
I am doing a series of podcasts on the war in Iran.
Our most recent podcast was Iran’s Rope-a-Dope Strategy with Anthony King who is a Professor of War at Exeter University in the UK. Previously, we had a podcast Allies Fighting Together with Yaakov Katz who is the former Editor in Chief of the Jerusalem Post and the author of While Israel Slept about the 10/7 massacre. Before that What Will Define Success and Failure in the Iran War with Hal Brands. I also did a podcast on the Opening the Strait of Hormuz with James Holmes from the US Naval War College.
I had a podcast on Fine Tuning the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act Loop to Win the War in Iran with Israeli Brig. Gen. Eran Ortal. We started the series with former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton about what steps we need to take to win the war.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Why Does the Press Think We Lost the War in Iran?, here.
