Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[spork]

Hartwick College: bond rating downgraded to Ba1 because of a 20% decline in operating revenue over the last five years.

Unfortunately I cannot locate a non-paywalled article that can provide more details.

[apl68]

If only I were able to indoctrinate my students in anything at all!  I can't even indoctrinate them in the use of commas.

Begin with the semicolon.  Socialist globalism is only a step away.

Shouldn't that be:

"Begin with the semicolon; socialist globalism is only a step away"?  We have to model what we want our students to do!

Are you trying to indoctrinate me with progressive elitist syntax?!

Actually I'm far less a fan of semicolons than of dashes--they were good enough for Emily Dickinson, they're good enough for me!

[apl68]

On a far more serious note, Henderson State University is having still more financial issues:

https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2019/dec/20/hsu-trustees-seeking-3m-line-of-credit-/


They had already announced $3 million in cuts for the coming year.  Salaries have been cut 3%, retirement contribution matches have been cut from 10% to 6%, there's an ongoing hiring freeze, some course offerings have been cut, and the budget for "supplies and travel" has been cut in half. 

They are said to have about seven days of operating cash on hand.  They've already anticipated $6 million worth of state money that will be deducted from what they had budgeted, starting in the new year.  Now the Board of Trustees has voted to seek a $3 million line of credit for emergencies--if they can find somebody to give them one.

Sigh.  They have a nice campus, which I'll probably have the opportunity to stroll across this coming week during the holidays.  It'll be a melancholy walk.

[spork]

On a far more serious note, Henderson State University is having still more financial issues:

https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2019/dec/20/hsu-trustees-seeking-3m-line-of-credit-/


They had already announced $3 million in cuts for the coming year.  Salaries have been cut 3%, retirement contribution matches have been cut from 10% to 6%, there's an ongoing hiring freeze, some course offerings have been cut, and the budget for "supplies and travel" has been cut in half. 

They are said to have about seven days of operating cash on hand.  They've already anticipated $6 million worth of state money that will be deducted from what they had budgeted, starting in the new year.  Now the Board of Trustees has voted to seek a $3 million line of credit for emergencies--if they can find somebody to give them one.

Sigh.  They have a nice campus, which I'll probably have the opportunity to stroll across this coming week during the holidays.  It'll be a melancholy walk.

Note to readers of this thread: if you work at a financially-troubled institution and have a choice of being paid over nine months or twelve months, do the former.

[secundem_artem]

Much of this thread has, in effect, discussed why so many colleges are circling the drain and what should be done about it.  Lots of questions and issues raised in this thread, but apart from Polly (let 'em go and use the money for something else) and Wahoo Redux (fight fight fight) I've not seen much in the way of solutions.  In the hope this may move the discussion along, I've got a list of what I think are  the numerous causes of how we got here.  Having a better notion of the underlying problems may be of use in identifying solutions.  Blaming one big thing or proposing one big solution is unlikely to work. 


This issue has been growing for decades and is certainly not new.  I did my undergrad in the 1970's and even then the thinking was "what are you going to do with a degree in [social science or humanities major]?

We are on the wrong side of demography.  The cohort of 18-22 year olds has decreased and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  More or less the same number of schools chasing a smaller number of prospective students.  A Malthusian growth model if ever there was.  Colleges are generally not agile enough to pivot effectively to attracting more part time students, adult learners or those working towards some kind of certificate rather than a formal degree.

Mission creep.  Teaching scholarship and service have had various versions of diversity, social justice, equity, race relations, and other hot button social issues added to what schools have historically done.  It's not done us any favors with most state legislatures and a lot of the general public who don't share that zeal.

The cost of a college degree seems riskier than it used to.  Although my undergrad cohort may have been skeptical of the value of a liberal arts degree, those graduates at the time could still go on and find entry level positions in business.  The degree, if nothing else, was a signifier that the graduate could read, write and think reasonably independently and could learn the daily ins and outs of whatever industry they had entered on the fly.  The employer sector seems to have given up on training new hires and just expects them to come in the door with a set of skills relevant to that business.  Even those with harder skills (e.g. petroleum engineering, nursing) have watched their job prospects blossom, dry up, blossom and dry up again. 

Tuition and fees climbing faster than inflation.  Some of this is out of our hands since the need for IT infrastructure, decaying physical plants, federal mandates for Title IX costs, subscription costs for a large number of necessary journals have increased dramatically.  Add on to that significant administrative bloat which we did not control very well and the costs to run the academic enterprise has become greater than many will bear.  When I started at Artem U, we had 1 Dean, 2 Dept Heads and 2 Secretaries.  I now go to meetings and have no idea who about a third of those people even are.  We have an entire office full of staff doing something that used to be done on a part time basis by 2 faculty who already had full time jobs.  Now, the same job apparently takes 6 people.

Money is fungible.  We can spend it on higher education or we can spend it on cocaine and hookers.  Or anything else the general public and our elected officials deem worthwhile.  Wahoo Redux is correct in that we have not really made a very good argument in support of who we are and what we do and why the money should be spent with us.

Fear.  In the nearly 20 years post 9/11, America has become an angry, fearful, bitter, spiteful nation.  Both parties make the case that, "If Trump/Warren/Bernie gets elected, it will mean the end of America."  Fear and anger are political capital on both sides.  In that environment, the kinds of compromise needed for long term thinking about higher education and its role in an American future is not possible.

Education used to be considered a public good.  Although Americans could long ago have followed the Bernie/Warren model and taxed the rich out of existence, we decided not to.  Instead, a reasonable proportion of the public purse was devoted to higher education.  Instead of redistributing the 1%'s riches, we spent it on education and let people work towards pulling themselves into the next higher socio-economic decile.  That bargain between rich and not rich has been breached.  The rich and their political allies are keeping more and more of their riches.  As education no longer came to be seen as a public good, it's now up to every single Scott and Susie to pay their own way through college.  America's obsession with forever lower taxes has had a predictable result.

[polly_mer]

I'll address just this one:

The cost of a college degree seems riskier than it used to.  Although my undergrad cohort may have been skeptical of the value of a liberal arts degree, those graduates at the time could still go on and find entry level positions in business.  The degree, if nothing else, was a signifier that the graduate could read, write and think reasonably independently and could learn the daily ins and outs of whatever industry they had entered on the fly.  The employer sector seems to have given up on training new hires and just expects them to come in the door with a set of skills relevant to that business.  Even those with harder skills (e.g. petroleum engineering, nursing) have watched their job prospects blossom, dry up, blossom and dry up again. 

I encounter the bolded assertion a lot.  If we're making a list of straw men, then this is one that faculty put up without enough awareness of the details on the other side.

Instead of writing a ton of stories, I will just do a reminder of my experiences and then make some declarative statements. 

On the academic side as a working professional, I have been at various institutions including an elite R1 in an engineering program, an engineering institute, an open-enrollment community college in a desperately poor region, a rural regional comprehensive that was rural location and drew from inner-city urban, and Super Dinky.  I have been an active member of both STEM departments and K-12 education units as the STEM representative.  I have taught intro general education classes through senior required engineering/physics courses.  I have been the institutional accreditation liaison officer to HLC, been on the peer-review corps for HLC, and participated in ABET accreditation activities.  I have been the director of online education, chair of the assessment committee, chair of the general education committee, director of assessment and accreditation that included all program reviews, and lead analyst/writer of the general education annual review as well as the HLC self-study. 

On the professional side, I've worked at three national laboratories as scientist at various levels and held a variety of crummy minimum wage jobs in my youth.  I am an active participant in professional societies that have academics as a significant fraction of the members, but are far from academic-mostly.  I have been such an active participant that I've frequently been an officer of a local/regional section where we work very closely with faculty members to do K-16 outreach and talk a lot about bridging the gap between formal education and OJT.  Many of my current duties are how to help recruit, retain, and ensure good assimilation including additional education one cannot get in school at all levels from high school interns through middle-aged graduate-degreed professionals.  I spend absurd amounts of time ensuring realistic expectations on what we can recruit people knowing and what we will have to teach, probably in a formal-enough classroom setting spread over months/years to people who come in with relevant graduate degrees.

Declarative sentences

* What constitutes adequate base knowledge for a competent adult who is ready to learn on the entry-level job has changed dramatically in the past decade, let alone in the time since many faculty members received their degrees.  Companies take chances all the time on the students from the elite institutions for entry-level positions that don't need a specific degree because one can be pretty certain that those graduates have the new base knowledge that includes proficiency in Microsoft Office suite, working knowledge of Windows as office workers use it, and the ability to learn from the web search for on-demand, new skills that can be acquired through a few YouTubes or written instructions.

All those complaints that faculty have on these fora regarding students wanting food chewing on top of the spoon-feeding?  Yeah, that's the same thing that employers mean when they say they can't get enough good people.  The elite graduates are snapped up immediately by places that pay more and are located in more desirable places.  One doesn't have to go very deep into the pool of graduates available at the non-elite institutions before one is out of good choices of people who are both ready to learn the next steps and have demonstrated any significant motivation in stepping up to do what's necessary to succeed in the job offered.

* Speaking of stepping up, one skill that is missing in a lot of graduates from non-elite institutions is either the ability to become interested in something or the ability to act with sufficient interest to perform well.  The cliche in job ads is "motivated, self-starter", but really it's hard to find people who show sufficient interest in a given job to lend confidence that someone will do it well, especially when "doing it well" means "seeking out opportunities to learn more, do more, and step up to be a productive member in the team success instead of focusing primarily on one's individual self".  Yes, one gets promoted by being a "star", but most companies can't function with only stars; they need dedicated, team players who are looking every day for how to help the team succeed instead of shying away from the often-tedious, often-unpleasant grunt/leg/organizational work that keeps things humming and can't be automated. 

If anything, automation has raised the bar on this point because the days when a lackluster employee who could daydream while shifting some paperwork or just help make a dent in the routine data entry of the paperwork as it shows up in the box are long gone.  Every employee now needs to be worth the money being paid and, while it's sad to conclude, a fair number of people who will just go through the motions for a paycheck aren't generally worth that paycheck in an environment that's constantly changing enough that everyone must be learning new things on their own initiative to keep up.

All those faculty members who complain about new requirements all the time, new software updates, and being tasked with things that aren't what they want to do and aren't what they spent N decades becoming qualified to do?  Yeah, that's the same problem employers face with having a constantly changing environment that needs people who both have a solid base knowledge, which includes a whole lot more than it did even 20 years ago, and a mindset about stepping up to do what need to be done in the current environment.

* One shift in employment practices is to invest more heavily in internships, externships, and other student programs instead of waiting until prospects finish college.  Thus, good companies that are likely to still be open in ten years acknowledge that the important aspects of polishing all those transferable skills are best done during the college years on the relevant-enough issues instead of having practice in a farther-removed area.  Sometimes, we are indeed ensuring that the running will be sufficient to outpace the bear, catch the train, or keep the toddler out of the street because the treadmill is only sufficient for minimum cardio requirements, not motivation and speed to act as necessary.

Thus, we will continue to read the very sad articles from talented professionals with N years experience who can't get a comparable job both because newer people are usually cheaper and because a constantly changing environment means N years of experience in one area spread over a couple decades may be less useful to the employer than the one person who has three years of current experience with the newest aspects or the person who has several 2-3 year stints at a variety of things thereby indicating a track record of coming up to speed quickly in a new area.

* Acknowledging the observed changes in how long people keep jobs before changing not just jobs, but also employers as well as acknowledging that the carrot of pensions is long gone means being mindful about where one puts resources for entry-level jobs that "any college graduate" can do.  The person who has spent three summers as an intern is both more productive from day one on the official job hire and less likely to leave in the first year for something that better fits with personal goals and interests than a random "any college graduate".  The person who had strong indicators for wanting not just A job, but THIS job through some combination of previous experience, second-hand knowledge through a reference who is employed here or otherwise credible, and materials/interview indicating stepping up to understand what the company needs, not just what the candidate wants will likely go farther and not be interviewing for a random "any college graduate" job.

Again, I will put out the statistic that 70+% of jobs are not advertised, but are instead filled through networks and word of mouth.  A job ad going out indicates that no one could be found with the relevant skills and mindset in the time allotted, which means the bar is likely higher than just "any college graduate".

* The opportunity cost in waiting for people to graduate before even thinking about helping that person explore the job is larger every year for the big employers who need a steady stream of new blood.  The idea that big companies are most of the employers is false.  About half of Americans work in small businesses with 18% of Americans working in businesses with fewer than 20 people.  "Over 99 percent of America's 28.7 million firms are small businesses. The vast majority (88 percent) of employer firms have fewer than 20 employees, and nearly 40 percent of all enterprises have under $100k in revenue." 

The small businesses that happen to be near a rural college are much better off either trying to get an intern ready for a specific job or hiring the brilliant, hard-working recent HS graduate, transitioning stay-at-home parent, or someone else who is already local who both wants to live here and is highly motivated to do well in that new job.  However, since that's what every employer wants, even in small places, the pool of the highly motivated, educated enough is easily exhausted with many jobs going vacant.

The big companies with good training plans are also competing with other places where what surveys of what 22-year-olds claim they want is not what a faculty member might want for those recent graduates.  For example, "The corporate perks highly sought after by today's workforce all deal with each employee as an individual. They want to feel like their hobbies are accepted, their values are integrated, and their goals supported within the company they work for."  Those are perks for people who have lots of employment options and money is a consideration, but only one of the factors (i.e., family of origin socioeconomic class tends to play a big factor here).

Those perks look nothing like the ones that one would have to give to get someone with sufficient computer skills to relocate to work in the local factory as one of the handful of skilled laborers or step up as the current parts clerk.  Those perks are almost in direct contradiction with what would be useful in a national ad trying to convince qualified people to move to a rural place.  One would probably do better by flat out selling the joys of the rural place and hoping that a highly qualified, currently-displaced-rural preferrer is ready to try a different rural place.

Again, I think of the contrast between what I read in certain media outlets that accords with what individuals write here as their expectations for jobs and what I see every day in different media outlets and as written material in my job about huge concerns regarding getting enough good people with specific backgrounds.  It's offer time for many fields at the BS level and $100k + full benefits is not competitive for the May graduates we want.  Summer interns are telling us that $25k/hour is not a competitive offer for how they want to spend 8-12 weeks of their summer.  More experienced folks with graduate degrees tells us that we aren't nearly as attractive as living elsewhere and making less or having a different daily experience using the same in-demand skills on other applications.

Even when we extend our recruitment to less elite institutions, we can only go so far in the trade-off between training for our needs and hiring someone with the skills already.  We can afford many more high school and undergrad summer interns who will try things out and spend most of their time learning and exploring than we can afford to hire staff members who will need to start at essentially the same skill level as the good high school interns because of how those staff members fresh from college spent their college time.  Again, having traveled around a lot, the local high school students are much better academically prepared with a mindset of "I need to work hard to get that A" than college graduates I've seen at not-at-all-elite institutions who are in college to get a better job, but aren't getting either an excellent liberal arts education or a good technical education. 

We can even afford to take high school students from the region who are identified as underprivileged, but are very likely to remain here and invest in their combination college education/internships for a much better return than hiring recent college graduates with no reason to stay.  We've trained a lot of people for the nation who are then recruited away from us after a couple years as a full-time employee.  That's a steady brain drain for us that is much more worth it when we start with local folks who wouldn't otherwise go to college than hiring the college grad who leaves as soon as they become useful.

* Many people who can spout the benefits of a liberal arts or just college education were ripped off because they, as individuals, do not have the skills or mindset associated with college/liberal arts.  Yes, it's harsh to say close those colleges.  However, many of those colleges are not providing either the education or the credential.  If we value education, then redirecting those resources to true education or true credentialing would be a much better use of the resources. 

I can still hear the voice of a recent alumna who could repeat verbatim the 30-second spiel for the liberal arts education that a senior faculty member gives at every opportunity.   I still remember thinking, "yes, that's all true, but that's not the education you have.  You have the consolation education degree that doesn't allow you to teach, but took all your time so you missed out on a liberal arts experience. If you had a liberal arts education, then you could have passed all the tests that would have let you graduate with a teaching certificate as well as doing much, much better in my class spring term of your senior year, the capstone humanities class for which I am one of the readers of the final papers and viewers of the final presentation, and the other assessment activities we do to see where programs need to improve.  I have no idea what you're going to do with the degree you have and the education it represented, but I'm glad you're currently happy with the way you spent your time at our college."

[spork]

Hartwick College: bond rating downgraded to Ba1 because of a 20% decline in operating revenue over the last five years.

Unfortunately I cannot locate a non-paywalled article that can provide more details.

Found more details on Hartwick College:

https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-downgrades-Hartwick-College-NY-to-Ba3-from-Ba1-outlook--PR_906052857.

"While the college has incrementally trimmed expenses over the past five years, reductions have fallen well short of the 20% decline in operating revenue during this period."

[Wahoo Redux]

* Many people who can spout the benefits of a liberal arts or just college education were ripped off because they, as individuals, do not have the skills or mindset associated with college/liberal arts.  Yes, it's harsh to say close those colleges.  However, many of those colleges are not providing either the education or the credential.  If we value education, then redirecting those resources to true education or true credentialing would be a much better use of the resources. 

I can still hear the voice of a recent alumna who could repeat verbatim the 30-second spiel for the liberal arts education that a senior faculty member gives at every opportunity.   

So now we are actually "closing" colleges, are we?  Getting more severe as we go.

Very impressive credentials, Polly, but do you have any other evidence of this other than a purported conversation with an alumna of your ed department somewhere?

Fortunately you are not in charge, and there's plenty of evidence for the rest of us to throw around:

For instance this ...

...and this ...

...and this...

...and this...

...and this...

...and so on.  We are so job focused in our culture that this is what you find about liberal arts majors on Google.  And I even think that we have been over this real estate before, haven't we?

What we have to do is get accurate information out there so that students do not choose a major based upon questionable anecdotal evidence.

[spork]

The point is that several, or many, depending on how you look at it, of the small, private, not-for-profit, tuition-dependent colleges don't provide the quality education that they claim to provide because they generally only attract students that aren't ready or able to benefit from such an education. Hartwick College, which I just posted about, has a fairly good reputation, yet it can't attract enough wealthy-enough students to sustain operating revenue. For every Hartwick, there is at least one other similarly-sized college with less of a brand that stays open only because it's pulling in students willing to pay a lot of money to buy a meaningless diploma. I don't know why you think this is all about liberal arts programs.

[Wahoo Redux]

The point is that several, or many, depending on how you look at it, of the small, private, not-for-profit, tuition-dependent colleges don't provide the quality education that they claim to provide because they generally only attract students that aren't ready or able to benefit from such an education. Hartwick College, which I just posted about, has a fairly good reputation, yet it can't attract enough wealthy-enough students to sustain operating revenue. For every Hartwick, there is at least one other similarly-sized college with less of a brand that stays open only because it's pulling in students willing to pay a lot of money to buy a meaningless diploma. I don't know why you think this is all about liberal arts programs.

So there's no way to help small struggling colleges?

America has no resources in this regard? 

I respect Polly's experience but generally take what she says with a salt shaker----and perhaps I see bias where there is none based on our long correspondence with each other.

[mahagonny]

Mission creep.  Teaching scholarship and service have had various versions of diversity, social justice, equity, race relations, and other hot button social issues added to what schools have historically done.  It's not done us any favors with most state legislatures and a lot of the general public who don't share that zeal.

Well there's part of the answer to the question I was asked. These are considered lefty pet causes. Like we needed another black eye.

thanks -- this was the question:

But where do those alleged far-to-the-left views come from?  My own field is not very adjacent to politics, and I am sure my students have no idea what my political views are; nor do I want them to. I understand that some fields like sociology and economics have professors whose views are made very clear in class, but still that's a very small percentage of the people a college student comes across in college. So where does this great crowd of lefties come from?  The other students?  If they are already lefties, then it can't be said that the college experience is influencing them.  If they're not already lefties, then is the great crowd that is so influential? 

And the sad thing is we need the bloated administrations because without them you won't get your hands on the money flowing through the bloated government. Someone else will get there and get the money and you'll be left out in the cold.

[spork]

This applies to several different threads, but I'll post it here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/sports/dropping-football-northeastern.html.

The person who wrote the article hypes gross revenue and enrollment growth while failing to look at net revenue. IRS Form 990s show that Anna Maria College's annual operating expenses increased from $33 million in FY 2010 to $44 million in FY 2018. Annual net revenue fell from $3 million to  $334K in the same period. The college was in deficit in FY 2013 and 2017.

Football has not improved Anna Maria's bottom line one bit. The college's survival strategy is to convince enough people to pay $20,000 per year for the opportunity to continue playing the game they played in high school. People with high school GPAs of less than 2.

[Wahoo Redux]

Ana Maria's record cannot excite the students and alumni too much.

Year   Overall   
2018   1-8, 1-5   
2017   1-9, 1-6   
2016   1-9, 1-6   
2015   1-9, 1-6   
2014   0-10, 0-7   
2013   2-8, 1-6   
2012   2-8, 1-6   
2011   2-8, 2-5   
2010   0-10, 0-7   
2009   0-9, 0-0   

[Hegemony]

"80 tenured professors plan to leave Loyola at the end of the academic year after taking buyouts which have faced criticism from faculty and students.

At the beginning of the academic year, Loyola offered about 200 tenured faculty members — full-time professors with job security and research requirements — money in return for leaving at the end of the school year, The Phoenix reported. Faculty members who take the buyout will receive two times their annual salary in advance.

The program was offered in order to save money, show appreciation to faculty and to address students changing needs, according to Margaret Callahan, the university's acting provost and chief academic officer. She said the main reason the buyouts were offered was because faculty asked for them...."

http://loyolaphoenix.com/2020/01/80-loyola-professors-plan-to-leave-university-at-end-of-academic-year/?fbclid=IwAR1L5BoCeuYgo6GZtr6NsRdKEeHZzkWgpAGqqVrfm8YixvUK2LqFKM7B7TU

I somehow greatly doubt that the main reason the buyouts were offered was because faculty asked for them! That is, I doubt the faculty said "Hey, lay a bunch of us off." They probably tried to insist on a fair deal. But it sounds as though something is rotten in the state of Denmark here.

[Hibush]

I somehow greatly doubt that the main reason the buyouts were offered was because faculty asked for them! That is, I doubt the faculty said "Hey, lay a bunch of us off." They probably tried to insist on a fair deal. But it sounds as though something is rotten in the state of Denmark here.

Well, those are two different things. The administration likely said, "Were going to lay a bunch of you off," at which point the faculty likely asked "Hey, give us a buyout if you are going to do that."