Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[JCu16]

I've heard a few draconian measures, but here is a system that wasn't doing great to begin with (recent mergers) - Vermont States board is voting on whether to close two campuses, including Northern Vermont/what was Lyndon State:

https://www.caledonianrecord.com/news/vermont-state-college-chancellor-calls-for-shutdown-of-nvu-lyndon-campus/article_3d7ae316-80c8-11ea-8aa9-03a36f71f8fb.html

[jimbogumbo]

Valparaiso: https://www.nwitimes.com/news/valparaiso-university-furloughs-200-employees-president-to-take-30-pay-cut-in-covid-19-reductions/article_38544283-26d4-53b6-a7ef-3a4314fc5b21.html

[Wahoo Redux]

One specific thing we can do is vote as many Democrats into office as possible. 

[biop_grad]

I've heard a few draconian measures, but here is a system that wasn't doing great to begin with (recent mergers) - Vermont States board is voting on whether to close two campuses, including Northern Vermont/what was Lyndon State:

https://www.caledonianrecord.com/news/vermont-state-college-chancellor-calls-for-shutdown-of-nvu-lyndon-campus/article_3d7ae316-80c8-11ea-8aa9-03a36f71f8fb.html

Three: all of NVU (what was Lyndon State and Johnson State) and Vermont Technical College's campus in Randolph Center.

My sense though was that NVU was in some difficulties before this.

[spork]

More details here, and of course local politicians are complaining. I find it interesting that the chancellor is apparently putting his own job on the chopping block:

https://www.vnews.com/vermont-plan-would-close-tech-college-campus-in-randolph-33952015.

[Hibush]

More details here, and of course local politicians are complaining. I find it interesting that the chancellor is apparently putting his own job on the chopping block:

https://www.vnews.com/vermont-plan-would-close-tech-college-campus-in-randolph-33952015.

Thanks for that informative link. It is notable that legislators who vote to starve the beast are complaining loudest that the beast is starving.

[Wahoo Redux]

More details here, and of course local politicians are complaining. I find it interesting that the chancellor is apparently putting his own job on the chopping block:

https://www.vnews.com/vermont-plan-would-close-tech-college-campus-in-randolph-33952015.

Thanks for that informative link. It is notable that legislators who vote to starve the beast are complaining loudest that the beast is starving.

Publicize.

[polly_mer]

One specific thing we can do is vote as many Democrats into office as possible.

Under normal conditions, maybe that's an action worth recommending, assuming one is in a state in which the Democrats are the people who fully support education and have the will to send money to the higher ed institutions in the state.

However, when the money's really, truly, no foolin' not there and, by law higher ed is one of the few parts of the state budget that can be cut, realists will cut the higher ed budget and cry over doing so.  The higher ed budget in many states has not recovered from cuts in 2008, which was itself on top of cuts for 2002.  For example, California is making significant revisions to the 2020-2021 budget announced in January based on new information, with education as one of the areas.

"Vote Democrat" has an underlying implication that a specific political party will somehow exert control over higher education in a way that everyone wants.  That's problematic because even those of us who support higher education don't all want the same things and that's part of the problem.

I will explicitly ask why the rest of us should want to have more professors in a given field over all the other possibilities in higher ed.  I understand that you, Wahoo, want more humanities professors.  That's been clear for years.

The question is why the rest of us should prioritize those particular jobs over the things we see as necessary, valuable, or even just desirable in higher ed.  I don't grok college athletics because my undergrad was spent at a place with only intramurals (i.e., the gym put out sign up sheets, you put your name as either part of a team of friends or someone who would like to be assigned to a team, the gym arranged a schedule, and everyone who wanted to play got to play).

However, I also don't grok the insistence that the humanities are at the heart of a college education, because that wasn't true at my alma mater and still isn't true there or anywhere else I've been, including Super Dinky that was still billing itself as a liberal arts college as recently as last week when I went to look.  The demographic shifts and the distribution of bachelor degrees people have been earning in the past three decades mean many, many of us have college educations that aren't humanities based or even liberal-arts based.  Thus, all the assertions of the necessity of the liberal arts to the college/university experience tend to fall flat, just like an assertion in a general public venue that a Subaru Outback is really the only vehicle worth having and all those who ride the bus, have a Honda Accord, or keep driving that old pick-up truck on the ranch are just plain wrong.

In recent years, approximately 150k people taught at least one humanities course at the post-secondary level and that includes all the contingent faculty including graduate student instructors of record.  In recent years, approximately 50k people earned graduate degrees in the humanities.  That means we could replace all the humanities faculty every three years, which is also problematic when careers can be multiple decades long.

However, if we look at what programs are turning away prospective students for lack of capacity, the humanities aren't generally in that category.  During discussions of how to hire more faculty to meet student demand to expand programs that are currently turning away qualified students (i.e., reduced enrollment that could have been at the institution), the humanities are seldom on the list of necessary new faculty hires.

So the question remains, why do you think that voting Democrat is going to result in hiring more full-time humanities faculty when the problem is many of us who aren't (aspiring) humanities faculty don't see a need for all the humanities faculty that we currently have, especially when resources are tight and the needs are so pressing in other areas of academia? 

Publicizing that trustees or even legislatures are doing exactly what people-who-aren't-you want doesn't tend to result in shaming with those people-who-aren't-you.  That's one reason that Trump still has an approval rating of mid-40s--he's doing what he promised to do and a noticeable fraction of the US public wanted that and continue to want that.  SPADFY continues to be a thing.

[selecter]

Had to look up grok, and when searching for SPADFY, most of the results come from the Chronicle, including more than one from our own Polly.

I'm in VT, having relocated to work at a college that is no longer in Dire Straits, and which has instead passed from this mortal coil. It is deceased. Stone cold dead. And while I followed Polly's advice as much as I could in the last ten years (it really is sound advice) I didn't realize said college was bereft of life because it was resting on a perch it had (in fact) been nailed to. It had incredible plumage. Some deft 990s and fraud papered over the deepest trouble, and NECHE's double-secret-probation (which is called, privately, "notice of concern") didn't help. The college I left (in the midwest, which might even be Super Dinky) is a worse college, with worse plumage. It has no pulse, but the time of death has not been called.

Hundreds of other humanities programs are nailed to the perch, and I'd say at least a hundred whole colleges are similarly propped in their cages. The math has caught up with higher ed, and covid-19 has accelerated realizations, while worsening all underlying financials. The colleges that will be here in 2024 will have a brand already, will be nimble, and will have cleaned up their operations over the last ten years (which will necessarily have included one of the following: a) an enormous endowment, or b) a serious and continuing de-emphasis of humanities programming.) I think those colleges will prosper.

I like the rescue plan offered by NAB, and I believe the humanities and SLACs have value and power. Not more value, though, than other things that are similarly *undervalued* by "starve the beast" politicians and consumers who vote with their feet. This retrenching is long overdue, and the scarce resources we've got simply aren't best-allocated toward the humanities. This thread will be useful for those wanting to tell the history of humanities-based higher ed. It was a luxury, and seems like it was a fun ride, but it was never actually the center of the universe, as it had imagined.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZw35VUBdzo

[Wahoo Redux]

Well, firstly Polly, do you really want to go over this again? 

If you are waiting for me to capitulate, probably not going to happen, mainly because I acknowledge most of what you have posted, but we disagree about what should be done next. 

Students are not enrolling in the humanities in the numbers they were in years past.  Humanities doesn't bring in much if any grant money or big donors.  Humanities do not teach many directly applicable job skills except maybe "written communication"----at least not job skills you can list with any specificity on a resume---at least not job skills you couldn't claim from any number of different disciplines----even if the humanities actually are a good (and no, Polly, not the ONLY way) to learn some valuable job skills.  To make matters worse, humanities professors are terrible about marketing themselves and disinclined to try in the first place. To make matters even worse, we have entered a time of austerity. Campuses are closing. Then, to hand us a nail, COVID hits.

You and I believe the same things except when, as is so typical of human beings, in order to make a point you must exaggerate or distort or strawman what I have posted (which is a reason to ignore you as I do certain other posters...I almost did this time).

Who has ever said that "the humanities are at the heart of a college education"?  YOU keep saying that.  This is the point you would LIKE to argue, but it is not a point that anybody has except for you.  Your irritation shows at times like this.

What I believe is that the lib arts are part of the whole, and an important part, even for the "practical" or "professional" degrees.  Check the responses on the polls I posted, particularly the The Purpose of College is Employment.  Suuuuure, of couuuursssse, this is a tiny cross-section on a tiny Fora----but it is probably pretty representative. 

Secondly, my point about the jobs for "humanities" is one which, again, I have stated over and over.  I actually took this point from someone on the old CHE fora.  Very simply, I got tired of hearing that "there are no jobs" in the humanities when, in fact, there are literally thousands of jobs in the humanities----the trouble is that they have been diced into bits and pieces which is not good for anyone.

Specifically I was thinking of the writing instructors who teach a class that literally every college student in America must pass at one point, whether in duel-enrollment, on-line, or whatever.  If you want to post something stupid, please tell us that our students, even our smartest ones, don't need this writing coaching.  Please post that somehow, since we can't seem to fix college, we will somehow, when we get that magic bag of money, upgrade K-12 and teach everyone to write by the time they are 17-years-old. 

We will still need college writing teachers.  Writing is a skill that is developed across years of practice; it takes maturity.  If you want, research why Harvard started the first comp class in the late 19th century (sorry, forgot the actual date) until the local high schools could get up to snuff. 

If you want to post that somehow these classes are unimportant in the age of cyber-communication, go for it.

Then, of course, we have all the business writing, creative writing, advanced writing, medical writing, screen writing, technical and professional writing classes which students want to take.

Then, of course, we do have those students who really do enjoy taking the odd humanities class (anyone watch the semi-finalist on Jeopardy talk about his "liberal arts" degree?).  I had two pre-med students this last semester before we launched on-line---you can figure out what I am about to say about their participation in my classes.

So, to sum up, I am saying that one of the crucial classes of college education has been frittered away until certain hyperbolic people can refer to them as "box-checking" classes because of some odd, fairly extreme bias that most other faculty, even if they acknowledge the writing on the wall, don't share (no play on words intended).

I also believe that---as our world becomes increasingly interconnected and polarized at the same time, increasingly multicultural and xenophobic at the same time----language, history, and political science classes are also very justifiable. 

And I don't think that education is just so kids can get jobs.  Most academics agree to one degree or the other (I suspect I know who voted "Yes" on my poll above).

Democrats have been the education party as long as I've been alive---and maybe some of them have enough brains and cultural insight to remember when college was considered a social good.

I also know that large groups of people change their minds about things.  Sometimes it take a while, but I've never seen a "Whites Only" sign anywhere but in pictures on the Internet taken before people started to do something about it.  If we as a culture can do that, I think we can revitalize our colleges.

[marshwiggle]

What I believe is that the lib arts are part of the whole, and an important part, even for the "practical" or "professional" degrees.  Check the responses on the polls I posted, particularly the The Purpose of College is Employment.  Suuuuure, of couuuursssse, this is a tiny cross-section on a tiny Fora----but it is probably pretty representative. 

Discussions like this are difficult when there's an attempt to force a choice. As tuxthepenguin said in that thread,

Employment is the important thing.

Education is not job training.

Yes: Higher ed, particularly undergraduate education, should be completely predicated on future employment goals.

No: There's more to life than 9 to 5.

Well...kind'a...: This is what I think...

I'm not on board with this framing of the issue.

We take lots of classes while in college, so we accomplish more than one thing. I don't talk to a lot of students that only hope to get a job out of their college experience. Even the biggest Trump supporters enjoy taking history classes and learning about things that will have no direct financial benefit to them in the future.

One of the outcomes we should be striving for is employment opportunities. College is expensive. It only works if we're able to transform students from low earners to high earners on average. (We do a remarkable job of this now.)

Something that we should not be doing is job training. It's great to offer classes that have an intellectual component and a job skills component like making pretty graphs in Excel. Degrees that are nothing but job training are not likely to have much value in the workplace. There are better ways to get that type of training.

tldr: There's no one purpose for college and no conflict.

(Emphasis added)

A similar "poll" could be conducted about the purpose of buying a house.

• The purpose of buying a house is to put a roof over your head.
• The purpose of buying a house is to have an investment.

If you're buying a house because it's an investment, but you can't stand to live there, you're buying the wrong house. If you're buying a house that you want to live in but are crippled by the debt, you're buying the wrong house.

If someone spends 4 years and tens of thousands of dollars and can't identify any improvement in their job prospects, then there's a problem. Even if "job training" wasn't their primary goal.

Specifically I was thinking of the writing instructors who teach a class that literally every college student in America must pass at one point, whether in duel-enrollment, on-line, or whatever.  If you want to post something stupid, please tell us that our students, even our smartest ones, don't need this writing coaching.  Please post that somehow, since we can't seem to fix college, we will somehow, when we get that magic bag of money, upgrade K-12 and teach everyone to write by the time they are 17-years-old. 

We will still need college writing teachers.  Writing is a skill that is developed across years of practice; it takes maturity.  If you want, research why Harvard started the first comp class in the late 19th century (sorry, forgot the actual date) until the local high schools could get up to snuff. 

It fascinates me that this amount of English instruction after high school is seen as so essential in the U.S., when it isn't in so many other English speaking countries.  Is there any evidence that those countries produce much less literate graduates? In the Harvard example above, you have a potential self-fulfilling prophecy; if universities intend to remediate the defects from high school, then high schools don't need to improve.

I also believe that---as our world becomes increasingly interconnected and polarized at the same time, increasingly multicultural and xenophobic at the same time----language, history, and political science classes are also very justifiable. 

And so are classes in medicine, environmental science, psychology, and so on. How is it anything but completely arbitrary to pick certain areas as something "everyone" should study, and everything else is just for those who are interested?

[TreadingLife]

Wahoo said this above:  language, history, and political science classes are also very justifiable.

As I see it, there is a big difference between valuable classes and viable majors. There are a lot of valuable courses that are of interest to a wide swath of students. However, those same students have made it clear by voting with their feet that they do not want to pursue those majors. They will dabble but not dive in. And there is real value in the dabble. The issue as I see it is that some faculty are unwilling to face this reality. They do not want to teach "service" courses that are not in pursuit of a major.  I've even seen a former department refuse to teach what they considered to be "remedial courses", even though that was what was needed by the student population to get into courses that were required by other majors. Their response, "Go to the Khan Academy, or take it at a Community College." What a great student-centered, and net tuition revenue cognizant response!  They didn't want to become a "service program". Well guess what? Their program was cut. But don't worry, because apparently not having a job is superior to still teaching in your content area to students who want those particular classes.

I also find it incredibly galling that some entitled faculty don't seem to care that their classes in their major don't fill and that it is increasingly difficult to fill their teaching loads or to give them busy work to justify their full pay. They think they are entitled to a full salary at 75% or 50% teaching load. Pretty nice deal if you can stick it to the students like that. Oh, and it is also galling to faculty in growing majors who have teaching loads 150% and 200% of the average faculty member, without a resulting increase in salary.  Entitlement and privileged indeed. And while it isn't always the case, often the entitled faculty are older faculty hoping the institution holds on for 5 or 10 more years, until they can retire. They certainly don't care about the long-term viability of the institution and the impact on current students or alums, or the ability of their junior colleagues to have 30 year careers. Sure, they were able to have plush 30 year careers. But as long as they get theirs, they don't really care about the impact on others. It sounds amazing to have been a professor over the past 30 years. Regular salary increases of 4%? Automatic cost of living increases? Solid health insurance plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays? High TIAA CREF matches?  It sounds like a dream! And guess what, it was. It wasn't sustainable and its over and we're not going back to that any time soon. Fight all you want, but yearning for yesteryear, when everything was 'great' ain't gonna bring it back. But that's just it. The goal isn't to bring it back. The goal is to resist any change, to limp along under the cozy system you know and love, hoping upon hope that the system can be milked for as long as you need it to, until you can jump off the sinking ship and slink into your Captain's Chair (assuming we can still afford to send you one when you retire.) Heck, just steal one from the library conference room on your way out. We are going to have to liquidate those assets at some point anyway.

Don't worry, I'm not bitter or anything.

[Wahoo Redux]

TreadingLife, are you actually blaming the faculty for the current state of higher education?  You must teach in a very different place than those I am familiar with.

Very, very few faculty are in the 1 percent, including those at the big, powerful, famous R-1s.  Most of us, if we are lucky enough to be employed full time, are somewhere in the 22 percent tax bracket.  Most faculty I know are earnest teachers, even if some are lazier than others (and please note that I said "most" since, yes, all of us know someone somewhere who never should have graced a classroom with their presence).

And most of us contract to teach a certain number of classes for a certain pay, and if those classes do not achieve the minimum enrollment for economic viability, they are cancelled.  If we are lucky enough to be employed full-time, we are assigned classes whether we like them or not.  Where do you teach that your faculty have that much power?  This semester I had over a hundred students in 5 classes with 4 different preps, all of them assigned to me with no real input from my very friendly chair.

What I'd like to know is, why can't I teach scantron classes instead of individually commenting on the multiple papers of my 50 to 100 writing students, depending on what the school needs from me, I get every semester?  That's what chaps my hide, all these professors with GTAs who write and grade their tests for them, easy lab time, the same three classes every two semesters, and who haven't researched anything new in 20 years!!!  These are the people who...okay, I don't really believe that; I was just making a point.

I'm sure you're right that we're going to be chopping appendages off the academic corpus.  What is interesting to me are how many academics (presuming you are who you seem to be) come here to root for the constriction of higher ed because of their unique resentments. 

[mahagonny]

Sure, they were able to have plush 30 year careers. But as long as they get theirs, they don't really care about the impact on others. It sounds amazing to have been a professor over the past 30 years. Regular salary increases of 4%? Automatic cost of living increases? Solid health insurance plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays? High TIAA CREF matches?  It sounds like a dream! And guess what, it was. It wasn't sustainable and its over and we're not going back to that any time soon. 

I wouldn't be too sure of that, TreadingLife. There are rock-solid provisions in place that protect the entitlements of the winners of the game. They may be able to fund fewer winners in the future than they will this year, but the extreme opposites in employment status are well fortified from all sides including accreditation. The future is very bright indeed for those who get to that echelon.
And we can forget about who finds this 'galling.' Have your PhD, your strong CV, but no job prospects? You made bad life choices. That's what your problem is. No PhD? You're not qualified. You're lucky we let you adjunct.
No this is a well designed pyramid scheme, built to last.

[TreadingLife]

Sure, they were able to have plush 30 year careers. But as long as they get theirs, they don't really care about the impact on others. It sounds amazing to have been a professor over the past 30 years. Regular salary increases of 4%? Automatic cost of living increases? Solid health insurance plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays? High TIAA CREF matches?  It sounds like a dream! And guess what, it was. It wasn't sustainable and its over and we're not going back to that any time soon. 

No this is a well designed pyramid scheme, built to last.

I need to send you a bill for a new laptop. I burst out my drink when I read that line. Thanks for the laugh.