John Marcus

That's now down to just a little bit better than 60%.

That is a big, big drop in a very short time.

And that has to do with the cost of higher education and the growing interest

skepticism about the return on the investment.

So that's really taking a toll.

That is not helping.

It's clearly, under this current presidential administration, we are seeing a lot of other impacts on higher ed that people have been reading about, in my opinion, kind of

obscuring the reality of what's going on about the sustainability of higher education has been the kind of the focus that we've all understandably had on this firehose of funding cuts and lawsuits and attacks on DEI.

You see what we're doing with the colleges and they're all bending and saying, sir, thank you very much.

We appreciate it.

In the end, though, the kinds of colleges that we're talking about that are at risk of closing, this doesn't affect them because they don't do

federally funded research.

The one sort of policy under this administration that is hurting some of these small colleges is the crackdown on international students.

Some of these small colleges have recruited international students because they're profitable, they pay the full tuition.

And so we've seen now a 36% decline last year in the number of visas issued for new international students.

That's a giant hit.

Essentially, it's just a perfect storm of all of these things happening at the same time to colleges that are already overextended, overly indebted, and don't have enough students.

Yeah, nothing good.

Nothing good happens to those students.

There is research that shows that half of those students transfer, half of them don't, half of them end their pursuit of a degree.