The art of predicting what will happen with higher education after the pandemic is now a cottage industry, but it should be no surprise to see all pundits arguing that it will be neither extreme (ie., not 'everything changes' and not 'nothing changes'). This article is a good analysis of the in-between, and makes some telling points. For example: "some of the students who are taking the year off won't come back." That seems undeniably true, but the key question here is 'how many', and if the economic consequences are what we think they'll be, the answer is 'lots'. There will be impacts inside institutions as well. We haven't yet hit the real economic fallout of the crisis, which will be significant. It seems reasonable to assert that "colleges will need to make budget cuts ranging from 15% to 30% over the next one to three years." And in many ways, technology won't fix this. As Feldstein says, "scale is not the answer". Rather, growth (or in this case, preservation) will be accomplished "not so much by scaling as by diversifying, and by rebalancing the academic portfolio."
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