Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[marshwiggle]

More germane, we have 41 percent FT teachers /59 percent PT teachers. 

How many courses are taught by each FT, and how many are taught by each PT?

Are you going to join Marshwiggle in simply denying numbers that are generally acknowledged?

What generally acknowledged numbers have I denied?

[dismalist]

People who have never really looked at the tiny colleges of under 1000 students are often stunned at the realities of having 30ish full-time faculty total and under 20 major programs after cutting all the liberal arts majors.

When it closed, Southern Vermont College looked similar to MacMurray, as did others when I looked and was trying to keep Super Dinky afloat.

I recommend people use https://www.collegefactual.com/ to really look at these tiny colleges in terms of overall faculty numbers and how many part-time faculty are being used.  It's not just scaling down a department with 25 full-time faculty and 80 adjuncts.

Go look at colleges mentioned on this thread as having tiny enrollments.  Take a tour through some of the colleges trying to pick up students from MacMurray and place your guesses on how long those places will remain open.


Ask yourself how many students will pick places that brag about having 25-40 student groups and small class sizes of under 20 when those won't be face-to-face classes.

Ask yourself how big a selection of electives are offered with only 2-5 faculty members in a department and how appealing that is to students who want a true liberal arts education.

I pick concrete examples in an effort to give additional perspective to those who may have an intellectual idea but don't really deep-in-their-guts know the stark realities of the breadth of US higher ed.

As an enthusiast for SLAC's I have followed the thread fairly closely. The examples of failing schools are depressing, but somehow comprehensible: There is a concept called "minimum efficient scale", an answer to the question of how many customers must a college have to be financially self-supporting. I do not know the precisely right answer, of course, but the Wikipedia entry for SLAC's  claims that private SLAC's typically have under 2700 students. This seems an amazingly small number to me, way too few students to cover all costs. Public SLAC's are said to be typically under 5000. This seems a more reasonable size to me, though I know not if it's big enough.

Point is that SLACs dying is systematic, and not just a collection of examples. A cure would lie in raising number of students [mergers and acquisitions, but when does it stop being a SLAC?] and wondering about and trying to control costs. I think more SLAC's will inevitably go down the tubes.

[Wahoo Redux]

More germane, we have 41 percent FT teachers /59 percent PT teachers. 

How many courses are taught by each FT, and how many are taught by each PT?

Are you going to join Marshwiggle in simply denying numbers that are generally acknowledged?

What generally acknowledged numbers have I denied?

Marshy are you honestly asking these questions?  Sometimes you ask the same basic question over and over again, and sometimes you ask questions so inane I can't tell if you are serious or not.

We are a school of 15K students, so a question like "How many courses are taught by each FT, and how many are taught by each PT?" is incredibly...clueless.  We have over 400 FT and over 560 PT faculty----a full load for faculty is 4/4 (unless faculty get a part-time research leave or course release for service work) and 5/5 for lecturers; the adjuncts have a ceiling of 3 courses per semester, and some will teach 1 per and some will teach 2 per and some will only teach in the fall and some will teach 1 in the fall and 2 in the spring etc.  Only the institutional researcher knows those answers and only after researching them.  I've posted about the numbers in my own department many times.  So you've asked a typically clueless complex question in an attempt at a "gotcha." 

Back to the ignore feature with you, my brother.

[marshwiggle]

Marshy are you honestly asking these questions?  Sometimes you ask the same basic question over and over again, and sometimes you ask questions so inane I can't tell if you are serious or not.

I honestly don't understand the intensity of snark in your responses.

We are a school of 15K students, so a question like "How many courses are taught by each FT, and how many are taught by each PT?" is incredibly...clueless.  We have over 400 FT and over 560 PT faculty----a full load for faculty is 4/4 (unless faculty get a part-time research leave or course release for service work) and 5/5 for lecturers; the adjuncts have a ceiling of 3 courses per semester, and some will teach 1 per and some will teach 2 per and some will only teach in the fall and some will teach 1 in the fall and 2 in the spring etc.

So in the most extreme case, if ALL PT people were teachinh 3 each term, that would be 3/4 of a full time load, so that would mean 420 FT "equivalent" positions. In other words, At least 50% of your courses are tuaght by FT faculty. Since most PT people probably teach fewer courses than that, the proiportion of courses taught by FT is likely much higher than that.

Only the institutional researcher knows those answers and only after researching them.  I've posted about the numbers in my own department many times.  So you've asked a typically clueless complex question in an attempt at a "gotcha." 

In many of the discussions about adjuncts, the ratio of adjuncts to full time instructors is often pointed out. But the more meaningful number is probably the proportion of courses taught by full time faculty since that is the relevant quantity in the student experience.
In other words, if 75% of a student's courses were taught by FT faculty, then all of the things about research, investment in the institution, etc. apply to most of their experience. The fact that they may have had a similar number of part time instructors who but only taught one course each is not such a big deal because they make up a minority of the student's courses.

Was that a "gotcha"?

[Wahoo Redux]

Was that a "gotcha"?

No, that's a "Duh."

The trouble with the adjunct army is that the number of adjuncts in any given department varies a great deal.  Our Sociology, Anthropology, and Gerontology Department, for instance, has 7 professors and I believe 2 adjuncts, and that covers the teaching schedule for those three subject areas.  Math and Stats, a "service" department that teaches for a lot of different colleges, have 18 profs and 4 lecturers.  English has 15 profs and 60 adjuncts who at some point teach virtually every student in the school.  Nursing, a big major, is all over the place, but that's cool because you want practitioners as well as professors there (Polly's favorite type of department).  Business hires a couple of lawyers every year to teach some classes.  So there are a lot of nurses, a few sociology majors, and everyone takes comp----what is the overall percentage of students taught by adjuncts?  You'd need a research project to figure that out.

Do you get my drift?  You want to get hard numbers not just at a tiny failing school at MacMurry? Great.  I have suggested that we need a study to do just that. Your ballpark upstairs is essentially meaningless, and even if 75 percent are taught by FT faculty, that still leaves a quarter of a student's experience taught by disposable faculty.  Not to mention that these ratios can vary broadly by school and region.

The intense snark is because you repeatedly bull your way into conversations and it would seem that you have almost no comprehension about the subject at hand.

[spork]

Anyone teaching in a full-time, tenure-track position at a university with 15K students is not going to be familiar with the cost problems that exist at a tuition-dependent institution of fewer than 2K students, unless they've previously worked in a senior administrative or staff position at such an institution.

Update on SFAI and MacMurray: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/02/two-small-colleges-winding-down-operations-coronavirus-impact-looms-over-higher-ed.

Here we've already begun issuing refunds on spring semester room/board. Revenue from summer campus events has gone to zero. We are probably looking at salary cuts for the next fiscal year.

[apostrophe]

University of Arkansas at Little Rock is now looking at cutting and eliminating various programs.  Among the proposed cuts, performing arts, any foreign languages besides Spanish, and several engineering programs that haven't been doing too well at UALR.  And the usual reductions to English, History, etc.



https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2020/mar/31/ualr-looks-at-academic-program-cuts-202-1/

Some of those majors that are proposed to be cut, require talent, prepared academic backgrounds, tenacity, and hard work from students. That's often why numbers are low in those majors. Sadly that can leave a university with a majority of programs that are fluff, and a student population, the majority of whom have no talent, are unprepared academically, can't stick with anything, and think hard work is reading 20 pages a day. This will lower the overall reputation of the university, and devalue the credential from UALR, continuing the cycle of mediocrity to its inevitable end.

We are letting American higher ed crash.

By the description of the student body above, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Like the adjunct situation, where a good remedy would be replacing lots of lousy jobs with fewer reasonable ones, part of the solution for students is to provide a better education for a smaller number who are prepared and dedicated. Institutions that contribute to both the adjunct problem and the student problem described are probably not worthy of a lot of propping up.

I think that statement (about UALR students) is excessive. There are some community colleges where that might be a reasonable description, but UALR is pretty standard as non-elite public universities are concerned. They have a small number of elite students, a ton of good students, and a few really bad students that will attend for a semester or a year. It's definitely not a majority of students, and very few of those are going to make it to the third year.

It's classed as an R2 university, although there are concerns that with cuts like this it might lose that status.

And it's the flagship university of the state, right?

[pgher]

University of Arkansas at Little Rock is now looking at cutting and eliminating various programs.  Among the proposed cuts, performing arts, any foreign languages besides Spanish, and several engineering programs that haven't been doing too well at UALR.  And the usual reductions to English, History, etc.



https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2020/mar/31/ualr-looks-at-academic-program-cuts-202-1/

Some of those majors that are proposed to be cut, require talent, prepared academic backgrounds, tenacity, and hard work from students. That's often why numbers are low in those majors. Sadly that can leave a university with a majority of programs that are fluff, and a student population, the majority of whom have no talent, are unprepared academically, can't stick with anything, and think hard work is reading 20 pages a day. This will lower the overall reputation of the university, and devalue the credential from UALR, continuing the cycle of mediocrity to its inevitable end.

We are letting American higher ed crash.

By the description of the student body above, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Like the adjunct situation, where a good remedy would be replacing lots of lousy jobs with fewer reasonable ones, part of the solution for students is to provide a better education for a smaller number who are prepared and dedicated. Institutions that contribute to both the adjunct problem and the student problem described are probably not worthy of a lot of propping up.

I think that statement (about UALR students) is excessive. There are some community colleges where that might be a reasonable description, but UALR is pretty standard as non-elite public universities are concerned. They have a small number of elite students, a ton of good students, and a few really bad students that will attend for a semester or a year. It's definitely not a majority of students, and very few of those are going to make it to the third year.

It's classed as an R2 university, although there are concerns that with cuts like this it might lose that status.

And it's the flagship university of the state, right?

No. The flagship is in Fayetteville.

[marshwiggle]

The trouble with the adjunct army is that the number of adjuncts in any given department varies a great deal.  Our Sociology, Anthropology, and Gerontology Department, for instance, has 7 professors and I believe 2 adjuncts, and that covers the teaching schedule for those three subject areas.  Math and Stats, a "service" department that teaches for a lot of different colleges, have 18 profs and 4 lecturers.  English has 15 profs and 60 adjuncts who at some point teach virtually every student in the school.  Nursing, a big major, is all over the place, but that's cool because you want practitioners as well as professors there (Polly's favorite type of department).  Business hires a couple of lawyers every year to teach some classes. 

That's pretty consistent with the surveys that have been linked to on here in the past. English has by far the biggest percentage of adjuncts. This seems to be, as suggested above, due to English courses required by virtually every student. This may actually be part of the problem: Who would want to teach 4 or 5 classes every term, if all of them were sections of the same course?

So one way to vastly reduce the reliance on adjuncts would be to remove the "box-checking" English requirements (which lots of other English speaking countries don't have and seem to do fine without.)

[polly_mer]

IHE is covering calls to ignore financial responsibility for now with reasons why that's a bad idea

The nursing major is a reason why students pick a college.  No one picks a college for the couple required-for-general-education courses in any department.  Having crummy general education is less a problem for an institution if the majors are good and match up with what students want when they're choosing colleges.

The question for years was why students would pick the very limited offerings at a tiny school when the regional comprehensive was cheaper with better selection of majors, electives, and activities.

Social media when a tiny college closes tends to point out understandable reasons:

* a very popular major that has limited seats nationally.  For example, MacMurray had a nursing program and those students are panicky about finding another seat anywhere.

* social reasons like DIII athletics where even first-year students may get to play varsity.

* vague ideas about how college is always expensive and major doesn't matter so a college within an easy commute with small, personal classes taught by full-time faculty is fine.

* most students go to college within 50 miles of home and people whose entire town is only a couple thousand people feel much more comfortable on a campus of under 1000 people total.

[apl68]

University of Arkansas at Little Rock is now looking at cutting and eliminating various programs.  Among the proposed cuts, performing arts, any foreign languages besides Spanish, and several engineering programs that haven't been doing too well at UALR.  And the usual reductions to English, History, etc.



https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2020/mar/31/ualr-looks-at-academic-program-cuts-202-1/

Some of those majors that are proposed to be cut, require talent, prepared academic backgrounds, tenacity, and hard work from students. That's often why numbers are low in those majors. Sadly that can leave a university with a majority of programs that are fluff, and a student population, the majority of whom have no talent, are unprepared academically, can't stick with anything, and think hard work is reading 20 pages a day. This will lower the overall reputation of the university, and devalue the credential from UALR, continuing the cycle of mediocrity to its inevitable end.

We are letting American higher ed crash.

By the description of the student body above, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Like the adjunct situation, where a good remedy would be replacing lots of lousy jobs with fewer reasonable ones, part of the solution for students is to provide a better education for a smaller number who are prepared and dedicated. Institutions that contribute to both the adjunct problem and the student problem described are probably not worthy of a lot of propping up.

I think that statement (about UALR students) is excessive. There are some community colleges where that might be a reasonable description, but UALR is pretty standard as non-elite public universities are concerned. They have a small number of elite students, a ton of good students, and a few really bad students that will attend for a semester or a year. It's definitely not a majority of students, and very few of those are going to make it to the third year.

It's classed as an R2 university, although there are concerns that with cuts like this it might lose that status.

And it's the flagship university of the state, right?

No. The flagship is in Fayetteville.

Yes, Fayetteville is the flagship school.  UALR has always been considered a strong #2 school in the Arkansas public higher education world.  But Arkansas, like most states, has seen a decline in the number of high school graduates.  This has hit some schools harder than others.  UALR, for whatever reason, has been particularly hard hit.

[apl68]

People who have never really looked at the tiny colleges of under 1000 students are often stunned at the realities of having 30ish full-time faculty total and under 20 major programs after cutting all the liberal arts majors.

When it closed, Southern Vermont College looked similar to MacMurray, as did others when I looked and was trying to keep Super Dinky afloat.

I recommend people use https://www.collegefactual.com/ to really look at these tiny colleges in terms of overall faculty numbers and how many part-time faculty are being used.  It's not just scaling down a department with 25 full-time faculty and 80 adjuncts.

Go look at colleges mentioned on this thread as having tiny enrollments.  Take a tour through some of the colleges trying to pick up students from MacMurray and place your guesses on how long those places will remain open.


Ask yourself how many students will pick places that brag about having 25-40 student groups and small class sizes of under 20 when those won't be face-to-face classes.

Ask yourself how big a selection of electives are offered with only 2-5 faculty members in a department and how appealing that is to students who want a true liberal arts education.

I pick concrete examples in an effort to give additional perspective to those who may have an intellectual idea but don't really deep-in-their-guts know the stark realities of the breadth of US higher ed.

As an enthusiast for SLAC's I have followed the thread fairly closely. The examples of failing schools are depressing, but somehow comprehensible: There is a concept called "minimum efficient scale", an answer to the question of how many customers must a college have to be financially self-supporting. I do not know the precisely right answer, of course, but the Wikipedia entry for SLAC's  claims that private SLAC's typically have under 2700 students. This seems an amazingly small number to me, way too few students to cover all costs. Public SLAC's are said to be typically under 5000. This seems a more reasonable size to me, though I know not if it's big enough.

Point is that SLACs dying is systematic, and not just a collection of examples. A cure would lie in raising number of students [mergers and acquisitions, but when does it stop being a SLAC?] and wondering about and trying to control costs. I think more SLAC's will inevitably go down the tubes.

SLACs with under 2,700 students are quite common.  My alma mater has hovered around 1,400 for decades.  I've seen it said in several places that having under 1,000 students makes it very hard for a college to manage the economies of scale needed to survive in today's world.  Polly has abundantly documented the reasons why this is so.  She makes a persuasive case for why schools in that range are in very, very big trouble in an environment where costs are out of control and competition for students has grown fierce--unless they have something exceptional going for them, like deep pockets, a loyal, wealthy alumni base, or a very strong niche that they fill. 

Most of these little private schools filled niches back in the day.  In a day when people tended to be more regionally-bound than they are now, a little school served as its region's place for training ministers and potential ministers' wives for a particular religious confession, or as a finishing school for the region's wealthy families, or the only place in the region that welcomed black students.  During the postwar era, when demand for college exploded, some trade schools saw an opportunity to get jumped up to college status. 

Now students--at least those with money to spend--are less place-bound, the overall market for college is shrinking dramatically, there's less demand for genteel finishing school educations, higher ed is in principle desegregated, and many religiously-affiliated schools have lost most of their identity.  They've lost their niches, and they just aren't sustainable any longer.  Polly is surely correct that we're going to see many more of these shut their doors, especially now that the world is experiencing this Covid-19 shock.  I hope that not-so-tiny schools like my alma mater still have a fighting chance.

[Wahoo Redux]

So one way to vastly reduce the reliance on adjuncts would be to remove the "box-checking" English requirements (which lots of other English speaking countries don't have and seem to do fine without.)

You, Marshy, are the kind of guy I imagine shopping at Hobby Lobby.

[Wahoo Redux]

I hope that not-so-tiny schools like my alma mater still have a fighting chance.

This is where we have to do more than hope.

I am sure Polly is right.  This virus hit at exactly the wrong time.

But what are we going to do about it?  Personally I can see no way up without public and government support. 

[marshwiggle]

I hope that not-so-tiny schools like my alma mater still have a fighting chance.

This is where we have to do more than hope.

I am sure Polly is right.  This virus hit at exactly the wrong time.

But what are we going to do about it?  Personally I can see no way up without public and government support.

From this, it sounds like the public support is pretty limited.

Most of these little private schools filled niches back in the day.  In a day when people tended to be more regionally-bound than they are now, a little school served as its region's place for training ministers and potential ministers' wives for a particular religious confession, or as a finishing school for the region's wealthy families, or the only place in the region that welcomed black students.  During the postwar era, when demand for college exploded, some trade schools saw an opportunity to get jumped up to college status. 

Now students--at least those with money to spend--are less place-bound, the overall market for college is shrinking dramatically, there's less demand for genteel finishing school educations, higher ed is in principle desegregated, and many religiously-affiliated schools have lost most of their identity.  They've lost their niches, and they just aren't sustainable any longer.