CONTEMPLATING THE WRONG BUBBLE, AGAIN. At Phi Beta Cons, David French anticipates a market test for weak universities.

Can any given college withstand 10 percent enrollment decreases without layoffs or without painful cuts? And a 10 percent loss wouldn’t fall evenly.

Bring it.

A special task force on right-sizing (Nineties-speak for strategic planning) determined that our enrollment target was around 19,000 students. (When I started in 1986, our enrollments were around 24,000, and there were 23 tenure-track faculty in economics. That task force determined our faculty size to be 15 for that 19,000. We are currently nine for the 25,400.)

With a ten percent enrollment decrease my colleagues and I might be able to give our students the kind of attention headquarters would like to provide them. That right-sizing exercise was supposed to manage a 20 percent retrenchement.

Mr French is focusing on that same small subset of colleges and universities that serve that same small subset of the population.

The world’s best universities always have a market for their educational product. But what of the legions of second-tier private schools that cost nearly as much as the nation’s best? Could they withstand a 15 percent or 20 percent loss?

Not relevant to the land-grants and the mid-majors. Our student body looks more upscale this year (the traffic jams at class-changing time have a lot of spectacular iron on display), perhaps as some parents see the financial advantage (regressive transfer or not) of a less pricey option for their kids.

Never mind that when those kids arrive, they might see Mr French's future, if they know where to look.

The world of the bursting bubble may not feature shuttered universities (though certainly some smaller private or public universities may fail); it is more likely to be a world of layoffs, of hiring freezes, of aging infrastructure, and of empty or half-full buildings. Bitter faculty, angry students, and besieged administrators would change the psychology of campus, making the situation feel much worse than it will be.

We have plans for the renovation of the Stevens Building and Cole Hall, but the heavy equipment has not yet moved in. Some stairwells remain partially out of service for floor or tread repair. The diving well in the pool is closed (as the rest of the pool is safe, a noncompliant drain at the bottom of the well is quarantined).

We have avoided furloughs, although the University of Illinois system has not.

My explorations of other academic weblogs also suggest high student-to-faculy ratios and stressed departments at state colleges and universities beyond Illinois.

Is it too much to ask that the peanut gallery on occasion note the experience of the majority of actually existing university students and faculty?