Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[Wahoo Redux]

I also would point out that, should Wesley fold, Dover (and its regents) would be left with 50 acres and 20 buildings to re-purpose or let fall derelict. 

Again, I don't want to be melodramatic about the scenario, but I currently live in a part of the world where a closed hospital campus, closed factories, and vacant strip-malls are now large 'brown spaces' and fire hazards in the landscape.  These do nothing good for anyone.

Perhaps Dover could convert the Wesley campus into a business park or simply demolish the remaining buildings, both of which are expensive undertakings, or DE could rally to save the college.

It is impossible to know if 5 years down the line Wesley will finally funnel down the drain or, conversely, if 100 years from now the great-great-great-grandchild of a Wesley alumni will walk across the stage, accept hu's degree, and then board Space-X's next rocket to the Mars colony----and this period of instability will be a couple of news articles in Wesley's digital archives.

Oh, and stemer, see Hibush's commentary for why you sound like a troll who has read a few things on-line.

[Wahoo Redux]

The problem is it's not a one-time $3M expenditure to save 500 jobs and 1500 students.  Wesley will need to be propped up every year for the foreseeable future because it's not a viable institution.  In addition, this particular $3M comes on top of two other recently granted requests that also total $3M. 

I get it, Polly, I really do.  And I know I am being idealistic, particularly with other people's money.

But I am also talking about something bigger in culture which I think we might also think about.

The Kingdome cost $67M in 1976 (the Internet claims that's $295M in today's dollars) for a sports pavilion which lasted 24 years before it was demolished.  The Washington Post claims Clinton raised $1.4B and Trump raised $957.6M or their respective campaigns---the total price tag for 2016 all combined campaigns was, according to WaPo, $6.5B.  Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides reportedly cost Disney $379M to make.

It's not that America can't pony-up.  It's what we think is worth ponying for that I am talking about. 

Despite your typical and predictable digs at the lib arts (and a strangely classist [?] comment about education which I am not sure quite made sense), education is worth the passionate appeal----which we need many more of.

Far more kind to everyone involved and a better use of the people-of-Delaware's money is to help transition all the affected people into something else with a 2-3 year graceful closure instead of just barring the doors at the end of the term at which Wesley runs out of money with perhaps a two-week notice.

Yes, it's likely to be the end of some folks' academic careers.  A large number of people in the US will lose their academic jobs in the next five to ten years.  The kindest thing to do now is acknowledge that reality and help people find something else that meets their fiscal, intellectual, and emotional needs... 

Sounds good on paper.

Do we have any realistic way to do this?

[tuxthepenguin]

Alright, maybe all this is no match for $3M expenditure (which would be a flat refund of around $3.10 for every citizen of Delaware) but these do bear thinking about.

Yes, it's likely to be the end of some folks' academic careers.  A large number of people in the US will lose their academic jobs in the next five to ten years.  The kindest thing to do now is acknowledge that reality and help people find something else that meets their fiscal, intellectual, and emotional needs instead of trying to prop up everything currently in the system.  There's no way to prop up the system enough so that everyone who wants an academic position in certain fields can have one.  That's what the data from the institutions that get away with paying peanuts and still having qualified people teach indicate.

A common mistake is to stay on a sinking ship too long.

"What will I do if I leave?"

"How can I get another academic job?"

The academic job is gone. If you wait too long to switch, you won't find a good nonacademic job either.

Age discrimination is maybe the closest thing there is to an iron law of hiring. It's about the only constant in a changing world. As technology eats the world, age discrimination gets worse. The most humane solution is to offer free training to academics losing their jobs and then help them find a new job as soon as possible.

[Hibush]

I know I am being idealistic, particularly with other people's money.

But I am also talking about something bigger in culture which I think we might also think about.

Thanks so much for chiming in on this thread with some rooting for these colleges. The discussion can drift into morbidly watching the death throes from afar.

[spork]

[. . .]

Do we have any realistic way to do this?

Don't know how realistic this might seem, but one option is to elect government officials that don't waste $2 trillion on a two-decade long unwinnable war in a faraway country.

Anyway, since I resemble Hibush's remark . . .

Summary of today's Fall 2019 Current Term Enrollment Estimates report. Year to year decline of ~ 230,000 in the number of college students, and a drop of more than 2 million since the peak in 2011.

Note that the author of the Forbes article, former president of Missouri State, recommends reducing the subsidy that "nearly all institutions annually plow into intercollegiate athletic programs."

[Wahoo Redux]

I know I am being idealistic, particularly with other people's money.

But I am also talking about something bigger in culture which I think we might also think about.

Thanks so much for chiming in on this thread with some rooting for these colleges. The discussion can drift into morbidly watching the death throes from afar.

Thank you.  I'm trying.

We are bailing and rowing at the same time.  And there are realities we must face.  But I just refuse to believe that we have to sacrifice every struggling institution and accept every lousy job as the new normal.

In fact, if you consider a $2,000,000,000,000 price-tag on foreign conflicts, as Spork says, or the cost of the War on Drugs, as just two examples, I simply cannot accept that we can't support a small college and vaccinate our children at the same time.  Priorities.  And godd***it education is seriously important. Seriously.

P.S.----I don't know if Forbes is the most unbiased source.

[Hibush]

There are three distinct societal trends that are affecting college stress.

• Depopulation of some regions. This demographic shift results in fewer college students in some regions and there is simply less demand for this particular service. The pressure on colleges is the same as the pressure on all other service and consumer businesses. There will be fewer in the future. While that will be painful for the losers, it's not an inherently bad thing.
• Economic disparity.  The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, even among schools. I don't know the solution. As a practical matter, it is good to be employed at the former.
• Disinvestment in education. I'm convince some of this is being orchestrated. Perhaps it is that educated people are harder to fleece, and the prospective fleecers are driving policy. Those of us who value an educated society that is environmentally sustainable and socially equitable need to be speaking up in the right places to make those the communal and political norms. We don't have the leadership to do so effectively.

It's helpful to think which of these to push against. Also to identify which are at work for a particular school's troubles.  E.g. Wesley may be more #1, where Illinois is more #3, and Pennsylvania is all three.

[polly_mer]

education is worth the passionate appeal

Yes, education is worth many passionate appeals.   

What is the evidence that any particular small institution that's circling the drain by every measure we have is worth precious resources that could go into supporting education for those who are willing to invest their own time and energy to become educated and are trusting the experts in what constitutes a good education?

The hoarding aspect related to academic institutions is a refusal to look case-by-case and say, yeah, not this one that has dropped below providing an education to only going through the motions as a zombie institution so we can redistribute resources including students/faculty and save those institutions that are still providing an education and have not yet dropped into the death spiral. 

Yes, I am familiar with driving down the main street and seeing a bunch of closed store shops etc.  I currently have three houses because two of those houses are in dying areas where people are leaving and the ones who remain are those who either cannot find any other job or are unwilling to believe the evidence in front of them.  If we're already at the point that a significant fraction of businesses go under and don't get replaced by new businesses, the smart thing to do is abandon ship for places where healthy turnover exists; we must believe the evidence that this is a dying place and act accordingly.

When I was investigating places to live and work to leave Super Dinky, I saw a lot of small, struggling institutions where the biggest problem was being the Nth choice when, realistically, people who were ranking on any reasonable way to chose a college will fill the slots at the Nth-J institutions first.  For example, Super Dinky was really about 10th choice for the students wanting a small college and there are only enough students in the region looking for that kind of institution to fill slots at two S(mall) Liberal Arts Colleges and four S(mall) Selling-the-benefits-of-a-liberal-arts-education-but-most-students-major-in-nursing-criminal-justice-and-business Colleges).   If out-of-pocket cost is the main concern, people will fill the two regional comprehensives and the local branch of the CC way before getting to Super Dinky at three times the cost.  Super Dinky didn't really want to accept that the only people purposely choosing them were the aspiring nurses because those slots are scarce and the athletes who were picking the first open slot where they would get court/field time.

Students who most need an education are also those who are most relying on us, the experts, to provide educational activities that have some value.  That's not a knock against any particular area of human knowledge, but an acknowledgement that people with the least social capital and least exposure to certain areas outside of a formal educational environment need the most support we can give them in the formal educational environment.  That support could be investing in particular institutions that are doing great things on a shoestring, so the main problem is lack of money.  Instead of having dozens of tiny struggling institutions, we could have several small, not struggling institutions that serve the students they accept well by working near capacity and having an expanded capacity due to additional resources.

Support could be helping more programs that take small cohorts of students who share certain backgrounds and give those students extra support in a not-at-all-struggling institution while acknowledging the realities of being underprepared, but highly motivated.  The Posse Foundation is one such program; many institutions are becoming more purposeful about various flavors of bridge programs.  Getting more people into good environments with sufficient support that they can take advantage of additional choices is a far better use of our resources than continuing to spread everything so thin that many would-be-good-enough institutions are much closer to duct tape, bailing wire, and bubble gum than necessary. 

Better resource allocation focused on student demographics and student needs underpins the case for states having a hard look at the current landscape and ask hard questions about spreading the resources so thin that many institutions are struggling hard instead of being purposeful so that each program that exists is a good choice for someone who wants that type of education.  Especially for programs that rely on other students to provide a good experience, having a critical mass of engaged students in one program is far better than having lots of programs each with one or two engaged students and then having to close all those programs as being underenrolled and thus not worth the overhead resources.

In short, the academic hoarding mindset (we have to keep everything we currently have) is one factor that is accelerating closure for some institutions that wouldn't have to close if we were better at stating what education means and allocating resources in such a way as to achieve good education for everyone who invests the time and effort to learn.

As for the faculty and staff who are affected by closures, as tuxthepenguin wrote, I am very, very familiar with people who spend far too long on the sinking ship and then end up out of options.  People who wait too long have to accept whatever job they can get today that will pay this week's bills.  People who see the handwriting on the wall and take action can often find some other good enough job. 

How do we realistically help those people?  Well, one way is to have the constant message of what the red flags are that mark the point of institutional no return and help people redirect themselves to something else.  Individuals--excellent teachers, passionate researchers, fabulous mentors, the best team players who carry the heaviest service loads--must take responsibility for exploring the whole of the paid work available and figure out a personally good enough trade-off in terms of intellectual stimulation, emotional satisfaction, and remuneration (salary, benefits, bonuses) outside of academia.  Academia cannot possibly grow enough to provide good jobs for all those who are qualified and want them.

A societal problem that is in no way limited to academia is we, as a modern society, no longer need every adult who can work to work.  That's something that automation and other technology, particularly in agriculture, has done for us.  We're even past the point at which every college educated person who wants to work can find something to do that requires that college education.  That's not a knock on any one field at the college level, that's a recognition that the types of careers have changed and that the strongest case for Universal Basic Income is we simply don't have the jobs and won't have them in the future, either.  Remember, we're only at 30% of the adult population even having a bachelor's degree and that's possibly too many as a generic number for good middle-class jobs and too few in some specific areas where specific formal education is required.  One case for UBI is that more people could make the trade-off to live frugally and spend their time/energy doing something intellectually rewarding or artistically rewarding without needing to have such time-consuming bill-paying jobs that they don't have time for their intellectual/creative endeavors.

Turning again to the students who will benefit by purposefully closing some current institutions, the students who enter college with a minimum of social capital, a minimum of academic capital, and plans to go back to a dying place as someone making middle-class income by virtue of a college degree in anything are the ones who most need a solid education in anything, not a checkbox credential that won't even get them a job.  The students who end up at the institutions that are circling the drain are often those who didn't have other choices or didn't know they had other choices.  Eliminating a poor-to-bad choice and replacing it with better choices means everyone benefits.

However, that means being realistic on how the resources could be allocated and doing the triage of dead/can't-be-saved, doesn't need intervention, and needs the resources we aren't wasting on the dead-but-hasn't-yet-gasped-that-last-breath.

[Wahoo Redux]

worth precious resources

Because we as a people have the resources. 

I realize that this sounds cavalier when talking about other people's money, but I refute you thus.

[apl68]

There are three distinct societal trends that are affecting college stress.

• Depopulation of some regions. This demographic shift results in fewer college students in some regions and there is simply less demand for this particular service. The pressure on colleges is the same as the pressure on all other service and consumer businesses. There will be fewer in the future. While that will be painful for the losers, it's not an inherently bad thing.
• Economic disparity.  The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, even among schools. I don't know the solution. As a practical matter, it is good to be employed at the former.
• Disinvestment in education. I'm convince some of this is being orchestrated. Perhaps it is that educated people are harder to fleece, and the prospective fleecers are driving policy. Those of us who value an educated society that is environmentally sustainable and socially equitable need to be speaking up in the right places to make those the communal and political norms. We don't have the leadership to do so effectively.

It's helpful to think which of these to push against. Also to identify which are at work for a particular school's troubles.  E.g. Wesley may be more #1, where Illinois is more #3, and Pennsylvania is all three.

I don't believe there's any need to invoke conspiracies to make the population dumb.  Our society values education less because it has come to place less value upon anything that involves hard work and deferred gratification.  And because fewer and fewer people have enough generosity of spirit to believe that there's such a thing as a public good that needs investment.

Let's be fair, too, in acknowledging that, in the eyes of those on the outside looking in, the higher education sector as a whole has squandered a great deal of public good will over the years.  Many people feel that they or someone they know has been burned by an expensive post- K-12 institution that they feel promised more than it delivered.  That sort of thing leads to skepticism, which in turn makes people less generous toward what they feel skeptical of.

[apl68]

worth precious resources

Because we as a people have the resources. 

I realize that this sounds cavalier when talking about other people's money, but I refute you thus.

That's fair enough, but sputtering about how higher education deserves more resources just because it's higher education isn't going to impress the average person whose whole life hasn't been dedicated to higher education.

This reminds me of our town's efforts in recent years to build a new high school campus.  The old school opened in the late 1950s.  The building wasn't a dump, but it was showing its age and lacked all sorts of telecommunications infrastructure and other features of an up-to-date school building.  We got a new school superintendent who began advocating for a bond issue millage to build a new school.  She was quite passionate about it.  Unfortunately she failed to make the best possible case to the public for it.  I recall that at public meetings she was asked some quite pertinent questions to which she didn't have the answers.  She promised to have them at the next meeting.  Come the next meeting, the questions were asked again, and her answer as the same--she'd have the answers at the next meeting. 

Meanwhile in her administration of the schools she appeared to be floundering.  I noticed this in my own professional dealings with her.  She was hardly incompetent, but something about the way she handled things failed to inspire confidence.  The bond issue vote for the new school ended up failing.  It was a great disappointment to many of us.

The superintendent retired, and a new superintendent came.  This superintendent got to work making the case for a new effort at passing a school bond issue.  The new superintendent made the case much more effectively.  When asked questions he got those answers quickly and efficiently.  He made sure that day-to-day operations ran smoothly in a way that inspired confidence.  He successfully got across answers to certain legitimate concerns in the community in a far more effective way.  When the vote came up again, it passed.  Our high school students are now meeting in a far better facility as a result. 

What made the difference?  In part the second superintendent was able--as he himself was generous enough to acknowledge--to build on the spade work that his predecessor had already done.  But I also noticed something about their respective careers.  The first superintendent had spent her entire career--absolutely her whole working life--within the world of K-12 education.  To her the case for building a new school was a total no-brainer.  How could any reasonable human being not see that? 

Well, as it happened, a lot of them needed help in seeing that.  The second superintendent--who had had job experience outside the world of education--was able to adopt this outsider's perspective.  This made him able to consider and understand outside viewpoints, which in turn made him able to find ways to appeal to those who needed convincing.  He convinced enough of them to make the difference.

This is the kind of advocacy that higher education needs.  Higher ed's advocates need to find ways to stretch their understanding of those who aren't in higher education and need convincing.  I think that's what polly has been trying to do.  Certain elements of her presentation--her massive wall-of-text posts, her expressed biases, her endless use of phrases like "checking boxes," etc. may seem off-putting.  But her basic message is worth paying attention to.  Higher ed's advocates can't just take it as axiomatic that higher ed can always use more money.  A case that people outside of higher ed--people that those on the inside may not understand and may even at times hold in disdain--can see has to be built.

[spork]

^What apl68 says.

I know I am being idealistic, particularly with other people's money.

But I am also talking about something bigger in culture which I think we might also think about.

Thanks so much for chiming in on this thread with some rooting for these colleges. The discussion can drift into morbidly watching the death throes from afar.

Thank you.  I'm trying.

We are bailing and rowing at the same time.  And there are realities we must face.  But I just refuse to believe that we have to sacrifice every struggling institution and accept every lousy job as the new normal.

In fact, if you consider a $2,000,000,000,000 price-tag on foreign conflicts, as Spork says, or the cost of the War on Drugs, as just two examples, I simply cannot accept that we can't support a small college and vaccinate our children at the same time.  Priorities.  And godd***it education is seriously important. Seriously.

P.S.----I don't know if Forbes is the most unbiased source.

Maybe, but the piece is clearly identifiable as an op-ed. It highlights a report about federally-collected data. Then, the editorial part, lists the author's opinions about what should be done in response.

----

Related specifically to the article's recommendation to end subsidies for intercollegiate athletics, the USA is the only country in the world, as far as I know, where taxpayer dollars and private donations are used to subsidize the operations of professional sports leagues. If I was a parent of a college-bound child, I would choose not to send my child to such a university. But there are plenty of parents who finance their children's college education who don't care about this. And it ignores the large proportion of (primarily male) 18-year olds whose choice of college is heavily influenced by the desire to continue playing a sport that they played in high school, regardless of how well they played it.

This is still not the big picture. The big picture is that higher ed is an information industry like music and journalism, and like music and journalism, it is being transformed by technology whether we like it or not. Trying to preserve the entire system as is (a.k.a. going back to the "good old days" that were never really that good for certain groups of people) is like trying to generate fusion through gravity, never being able to squish the atoms together hard enough to overcome the strong nuclear force, when quantum tunneling makes fusion possible at far lower energies, as demonstrated by the stars that are already shining.

[Wahoo Redux]

Adapting and evolving is what makes Western Culture so creative and durable.  And obviously the colleges we have today are vastly different from the institutions that existed 120 years or even 70 years ago.

But what I think we observe today is not adaption and evolution.

We seem to be experiencing a moment in which academia is a whipping boy in the culture wars and considered one of the first expendable elements in society.  Sure, Wesley et al. are small individual colleges among something like 1,200 total higher ed institutions...but what does it say our reaction to a college in financial difficulty is simply to kill it while spending literally billions on political campaigns and sports complexes.

In theory I have no trouble with college sports---I think sports have their place on college campuses.  I enjoyed sports myself and think they have had a very beneficial effect on my life, and it is possible that big college football saved my undergrad alma mater.  And I wouldn't have any trouble with the expenditures of college athletics if we could keep it in perspective and ALSO support our actual colleges at a reasonable level to achieve their primary mission.  As a culture, we can do both.

What I think we need to do is change the nature of the conversation, particularly with the public.  I'm trying to do that in my own small way----probably not successfully.

[Wahoo Redux]

Let's be fair, too, in acknowledging that, in the eyes of those on the outside looking in, the higher education sector as a whole has squandered a great deal of public good will over the years.  Many people feel that they or someone they know has been burned by an expensive post- K-12 institution that they feel promised more than it delivered.  That sort of thing leads to skepticism, which in turn makes people less generous toward what they feel skeptical of.

See, I don't really see how academia has squandered anyone's good will.  We inundate our students and their parents with PR materials before they even enroll and then we are responsive to students and parents throughout people's college careers, maybe more than we should be.  We inundate students with FY experience, counselors, student groups, etc. their entire student lives in order to make their experiences "fun" and worthwhile.  Every institution has alumni outreach and spontaneous, non-money, grass-roots alumni organizations.  And whatever else we can say about major college sports, they do keep a certain contingent involved with their alma maters, sometimes for their entire lives.  I also think we can simply take stock of income and career outcomes to argue that college pays off.

Certainly we have people who resent being judged by their professors, resent the costs, resent their own failures by blaming their educations, resent the notion that they are forced to go to college (by parents or whatever)---but this is simply going to be part and parcel of an industry that challenges and evaluates people's performances.

What I think has happened is academia has come to represent class and politics in some people's mind, and we have allowed the conversation to portray academia as a business model.  And we turn on each other, crabs in a barrel. 

[Aster]

So much of the revenues and personal incomes in the U.S. are being increasingly diverted towards health care and the health care industry. State budgets. Federal budgets. Individual budgets.

Health care spending grows larger every year. It's over 17% of the U.S. GDP now.

Local and state government budgets are getting bleaker, with more and more diversions into health care spending.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/696016.pdf

There's only so much money, and with more and more being shunted into health care, everything else (like Education) is being starved out.