Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[mythbuster]

At Swampy state here the term is "back-filling". We do it by dropping the bar on transfer admits. And everyone wonders why our transfers struggle so much?

[spork]

In July, the Super Dinkys start contacting prospective students rejected in March to see if those prospective students would be willing to be coached through writing a letter requesting special review for a nearly guaranteed acceptance for the fall.

Having to troll back through the reject bin to scrounge up students would be a humiliating thing to do.  I'd gotten the impression, though, that SD hardly ever rejected anybody in the first place.

Both conditions can be true simultaneously. I once worked at a university with low admissions standards that often pulled from the reject pile in July and August if there were still open seats.

[polly_mer]

In July, the Super Dinkys start contacting prospective students rejected in March to see if those prospective students would be willing to be coached through writing a letter requesting special review for a nearly guaranteed acceptance for the fall.

Having to troll back through the reject bin to scrounge up students would be a humiliating thing to do.  I'd gotten the impression, though, that SD hardly ever rejected anybody in the first place.

Every fall, SD's plan would be to maintain standards and compete harder for college-ready students because we had such extensive data on what was necessary to succeed at SD.

Every spring, the applicants who fell below the clear cut-offs were nicely, but firmly, rejected.  When I arrived at SD, there was a process for appealing denial and there was a committee that reviewed cases from January until September.  Coaches in particular (70% of entering students were athletes) were good at helping assemble subjective cases for why we should take a chance on this particular student.

By the end of May, the enrollment numbers would be stark on who has decided to do something else instead of returning for another year at SD and how few of the college-ready regional HS graduates wanted to attend a college with under 20 majors, few of which were the ones in high demand by the good students with a planned future, that had an annual sticker price comparable to annual family income in the region.

At that point, someone would go back to the pile and start making the case for why being only short X amount on this one criterion is really not that bad if we draw on student support services.  Someone else would go through and make the case that we didn't look at the interactions of factors such that being a little low on all of these numerical factors, but really high on a more subjective measure tends to work out for students, again if we draw on student support services.

Thus, we'd end up with being only a little short on enrollment most years, although the final cut was along the lines of "functionally literate, no criminal record, and could scrounge the funding somehow"

However, eventually, SD got a provost who asserted that SD should just admit on first application all the people who would be likely to be pulled from the reject pile in August (i.e., avoid that embarrassment) based on quantitative information.  That provost disbanded the review committee, because there was no work to be done.  The numbers were the numbers and the only request for review would be to correct inaccuracies in the reported numbers.

That first summer was nice because we had an entering cohort in place by early June with no revisit to the reject pile.  That first winter break wrap-up was horrendous because the numbers used for admission weren't based on who graduated from SD in a reasonable time; it was based on who spent at least a year with SD.  The dismissal for lack of satisfactory academic progress takes a full year (go on probation at winter break, get the "this is your last chance" letter in May, and then be dismissed at the end of summer session for not fixing the deficiencies).

Thus, SD would turn people down during the focus-on-education stage and then would have to sigh heavily during the focus-on-paying-bills stage.

[apl68]

So it's a matter of aspiring to have standards each year, then regularly discovering that finances won't allow it.

[polly_mer]

So it's a matter of aspiring to have standards each year, then regularly discovering that finances won't allow it.

As one of my colleagues put it, let's flip the coin today to find out if we're the nice SD who will exhaust every venue to retain a struggling student or the mean SD who has rules and means it.

SD didn't replace full-time faculty with cheaper adjuncts or huge sections (25 was a large section) to save money.  That was a point of honor all around.  However, a SD recent president said in front of faculty that no one should be trying to teach people with 16 ACTs in regular courses (22 is college ready) and was surprised at faculty telling her that some of their students had relevant ACT component scores of 13 or lower.

A newer president flat out stated that our admissions cycle that year would be buying good students.  We did end up with a large faction of transfer students on top of an average size first-year cohort.  Our discount rate was well above 50% that year and yet the first-year cohort still averaged slightly below college ready.  We had clipped the low tail, but hadn't extended the upper tail; we still had a bunch of people who wanted to be athletes and were willing to settle for the handful of majors offered.

The faculty flat out refused to consider being a senior college that accepted mostly transfer students ready for their major courses because that would have resulted in more than half the tenured faculty losing their jobs with general education being irrelevant and having no majors.

Thus, the one growth area with prepared enough students to succeed was flat out rejected by faculty as too large a change in mission.

[selecter]

Polly, I could almost SWEAR we've worked together at some point ...

[polly_mer]

Polly, I could almost SWEAR we've worked together at some point ...

Many of my colleagues from SD's competitors tell similar stories because it's not just SD who had these problems.

If you're Glen, though, then we definitely worked together.  How's that new/old job going?

[Hibush]

HBCUs have long been in Dire Financial Straits. But a second big donation just made the news, and the critical difference from previous ones is that the donor is not an alumnus. That is a big positive distinction.

The donor is billionaire Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who gave $150 million to Morehouse, Spellman and UNCF. Granted, these are the cream of HBCUs. Nevertheless, tapping into eight and nine figure donations as a regular practice would fundamentally change their ability to train Black leaders.

From NY Times (paywalled)

David A. Thomas, president of Morehouse, said that raising money at the scale usually given to the top, historically white schools had been near impossible. "The reality is that our alumni have done quite well. But I don't think we have any billionaires," he said. "Before he arrived at Morehouse, Dr. Thomas taught at Harvard Business School and was the dean at Georgetown University's business school.

"There you had much more wealth within the alumni base, so you don't have to go out as much," he said. "And it's easy to raise money from people who aren't in the alumni base because your alumni can take you to them. Here, it's really about developing and cultivating relationships, oftentimes with people who don't know what an H.B.C.U. is.""

[Wahoo Redux]

HBCUs have long been in Dire Financial Straits. But a second big donation just made the news, and the critical difference from previous ones is that the donor is not an alumnus. That is a big positive distinction.

The donor is billionaire Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who gave $150 million to Morehouse, Spellman and UNCF. Granted, these are the cream of HBCUs. Nevertheless, tapping into eight and nine figure donations as a regular practice would fundamentally change their ability to train Black leaders.

From NY Times (paywalled)

David A. Thomas, president of Morehouse, said that raising money at the scale usually given to the top, historically white schools had been near impossible. "The reality is that our alumni have done quite well. But I don't think we have any billionaires," he said. "Before he arrived at Morehouse, Dr. Thomas taught at Harvard Business School and was the dean at Georgetown University's business school.

"There you had much more wealth within the alumni base, so you don't have to go out as much," he said. "And it's easy to raise money from people who aren't in the alumni base because your alumni can take you to them. Here, it's really about developing and cultivating relationships, oftentimes with people who don't know what an H.B.C.U. is.""

Rock on Mr. Hastings!

This is just the sort of philanthropy we need. 

[apl68]

Yes, it would be good to see more of this.  I'm happy for the HCBUs who've received these gifts.

[Parasaurolophus]

Should we add all of Australia to the list?

The reduction in government per-student allotments for the arts and humanities is really bad, of course, but when you take into account projected student-side contributions, they actually come out OK--provided, of course, that the cuts don't end up radically reducing the number of students in those fields. But when you compare the government and student numbers side-by-side, what you see is that total funding for the pure and applied sciences is dramatically reduced. And environmental studies faces far and away the largest cut, at around $10k per student--no surprise there; it is Australia, after all.

So: under the guise of job-readiness and only harming the arts and humanities, Australia is actually significantly cutting government funding of most of higher education, including the applied sciences it purports to want to support.

[marshwiggle]

Should we add all of Australia to the list?

The reduction in government per-student allotments for the arts and humanities are really bad, of course, but when you take into account projected student-side contributions, they actually come out OK--provided, of course, that the cuts don't end up radically reducing the number of students in those fields.

If they go through with it, it should answer a couple of important questions:

• How many students will choose humanities because they want to, rather than by default?
• Of the students redirected into STEM, how many can actually handle it?

These are two questions that, to the best of my knowldege, have only been kind of speculated about up to this point. Having actual data to go on should be useful for future discussions.

[Hibush]

Johnsen has resigned as Alaska president. Apparently is is better to be unemployed than to lead the Wisconsin system.

Why are presidential searches so secret these days? The petition that prompted his resignation made the case that "Jim Johnsen has demonstrated that he is more willing to invest his efforts in advancing his own career than in leading the university system through these difficult times."

University of Alaska system cuts 40 programs while still considering institutional mergers.

As an illustration of how much the problems predate COVID-19:

Programs that were cut were chosen from a larger list of programs previously selected by university administrators, university officials said. Thirteen of them had previously been suspended, some as early as 2013.

I'm guessing many of those "suspended" programs had no students in them by this point.

We've discussed Alaska at length last year when big cuts to finances were proposed by the governor along with the insistence that the system only needed one campus.

This week we learned that Jim Johnsen, the president of U of Alaska will become the next president of the U of Wisconsin system. His training as a top-down business executive did not sit well with the Alaska faculty. Perhaps he is going to drive consolidation in the UW system, which we have also discussed at length here. Many of the UW campuses have worrisome demographic and financial.

Breaking news: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2020/06/12/sole-finalist-uw-system-president-withdraws/3175165001/

Dr. (?) Johnsen withdrew from consideration. There was a lot of backlash in both states about his potential appointment, so I think that's why

Johnsen wrote " "I appreciate the strong support from the search committee at Wisconsin, and for all those who supported my candidacy, but it's clear they have important process issues to work out." 

I read between the lines that as bad as the situation is in Alaska, with no sign of shared values between the government and the university, and no trust between the faculty and system administration, the conditions in Wisconsin are substantially worse.

[jimbogumbo]

I know there is a furlough thread, but this seems more appropriate here.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/06/23/deep-faculty-cuts-u-michigan-flint

[onthefringe]

Re Jim Johnsen, if I were 60ish and had been pulling down a salary of minimally $325,000 per year for five years, I might prefer to "retire" than to get involved in the snakes nest that is undoubtedly the Wisconsin system in the time if COVID.He can alway consult or something if he needs cash.