The Chronicle of Higher Education recently asked whether there is a college bubble about to burst:

With tuitions, fees, and room and board at dozens of colleges now reaching $50,000 a year, the ability to sustain private higher education for all but the very well-heeled is questionable. According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent — more than four times the rate of inflation and almost twice the rate of medical care.

…

Consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college. There is a growing sense among the public that higher education might be overpriced and under-delivering.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this question as it pertains to — or, specifically, compares to — the current state of print journalism. It’s become generally accepted wisdom that whereas the business model of making content is in jeopardy, the business model of teaching students to make content (that they’ll never, ever get paid for) is largely secure. Intuitively, this seems plausible to me: we have an university system whereby wealthy parents pay ungodly sums for their children to study the liberal arts and generally hone their self-expression, and only after that do the children surrender those dreams to get broken on the the capitalist wheel as lawyers or businesspeople or what have you. (Jeff Howe sketches this same basic idea, less polemically than I just did, in an early chapter of his book Crowdsourcing.)

But what I find irritating is when people use this shift to claim that some intrinsic failing exists in the old journalistic business model. Clay Shirky, for example, in a Q&A with the Columbia Journalism Review a few months back, basically blamed journalists for being naive about where their money was coming from:

A lot of working journalists, and especially print journalists, are in the position of being sort of kept women. They don’t really understand where the money comes from but, you know, their particular sugar daddy seems pretty flush, so they just never gave it much thought. And then one day the market crashes and they suddenly discover, “Wait a minute, we were a business? And our revenues had to exceed our expenses every year? Why wasn’t I informed?” And I think one of the reasons that journalists, in particular, are so stunned by this is not that they just didn’t happen to think about the previous business model, right? Like, why is it that the guy sitting in Mosul in a flak jacket is being subsidized by Bonwit Teller? You wouldn’t make this up from scratch, it just doesn’t make much sense.

I.e., in Shirky’s view, a model where overseas war reporters get subsidized by department-store ads is inherently unsustainable, irrational, even insane. But advertising supported print periodicals handsomely for over a century! Meanwhile, Shirky (who I generally admire, by the way) seems to make his own money from (a) being a professor at NYU and (b) riding the tech-lecture circuit — two business models that are far younger and seem every bit as insane, if not more so. Charging parents $50K/year in exchange for only marginal economic benefits down the line? Charging companies thousands of dollars a head to attend conventions where hardly any meaningful business gets done? If you were “making it up from scratch,” you wouldn’t count on any of these business models.

Of course, these are all cases of prestige economies, where individuals and companies are spending their money for reasons that are indirectly economic or entirely uneconomic. For public-image reasons, it mattered to Bonwit Teller, or Bergdorf Goodman, or Tiffany, to be in the pages of the New York Times, and so they paid for it.  It matters to plutocrat parents to send their kids to NYU instead of CUNY, so they pay for it. It matters to Microsoft to strut Paul and Ringo across the stage at E3 and so they do it, at god knows what shareholder expense. I won’t deny that these prestige business models “make sense” in that they sometimes work, and can even continue to work for quite a while. Just don’t try to pretend post hoc that the failing ones never made sense.