Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman popularized the concept of zombie ideas—constructs that are not really alive, but somehow simply will not die. He literally wrote a book on the topic.
The hallmark of zombie ideas is that they lack evidence, or that the available evidence disproves their thesis. Yet, they persist and, even worse, are often accepted as obvious, even self-evident.
We are currently, I believe, watching the creation of an education zombie idea – the idea that we are facing “waves of college closures”. The idea has been around at least a decade, since wild predictions were made that more than half of all colleges would fail. Then, the reason was the rise of for-profit schools and online education. They were going to crush the old, big schools that could not innovate.
