Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[apl68]

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

Almost half of their lecturers in one fell swoop!  I don't think we've ever heard before of a school that size experiencing such a large cut.

Enrollment was already down 16% over five years.  Looks like the university system has decided that Flint is their most expendable school.

[marshwiggle]

This is from one of the comments to the article:

If we had more financial aid, for example, something like the GoBlue Guarantee which is available only for Ann Arbor where students from families that make under $65,000 a year get free tuition, we would have more students. (By the way when asked about why Ann Arbor won't fund something like GoBlue at Flint and Dearborn, Schlissell has said that the program is there to attract more POC and poor students to Ann Arbor, and that Flint and Dearborn already have enough)

Anybody know if this is accurate? If so, it's an interesting situation- funds used to expand diversity at a particular campus, ironically, aren't used to support the diversity of the system, no doubt because the scrutiny of each campus would mean the system wouldn't get the same amount of credit.

[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

Almost half of their lecturers in one fell swoop!  I don't think we've ever heard before of a school that size experiencing such a large cut.

Enrollment was already down 16% over five years.  Looks like the university system has decided that Flint is their most expendable school.

Just looked at the Math Department. Assuming I counted correctly, there 21 full time faculty, 11 of them lecturers.

I'm pretty comfortable from what I've read that UM Flint is letting go or reducing appointments for well over half of its full and part time faculty.

[Wahoo Redux]

Government considering additional funds to help education reopen.

[Wahoo Redux]

UConn eliminates 4 sports.

[mamselle]

If that saves their tiny but very good medieval program, that's a win in my book.

M.

[spork]

Johnson & Wales U. will close its Denver and Miami campuses at the end of the 2020-21 academic year:

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/06/26/johnson-wales-university-will-close-denver-and-miami-campuses.

[Hibush]

Johnson & Wales U. will close its Denver and Miami campuses at the end of the 2020-21 academic year:

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/06/26/johnson-wales-university-will-close-denver-and-miami-campuses.

This is a Northeastern school that is actually trying to go where the students will be in the future. Florida and urban Colorado are both growing areas, so it makes some sense. Apparently they didn't quite have the right juice to make it work. Culinary schools have been having a rough time of it, so that may be part of the challenge. They have had the combination of high tuition for a degree that qualifies you for a job with terrible wages and working conditions

[TreadingLife]

Ursinus goes public with a 66% discount rate. They don't make it clear if that is the first-year discount rate or the average discount rate. At some point it doesn't matter if you maintain that trend for 4 years.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/06/29/ursinus-college-met-its-admissions-goals-money-and-faculty-attention

Will schools like this be able to keep doing this? I realize time will tell, but it doesn't seem sustainable. Net tuition revenue will flatten out eventually unless you can pick up more bodies.

[spork]

Ursinus goes public with a 66% discount rate. They don't make it clear if that is the first-year discount rate or the average discount rate. At some point it doesn't matter if you maintain that trend for 4 years.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/06/29/ursinus-college-met-its-admissions-goals-money-and-faculty-attention

Will schools like this be able to keep doing this? I realize time will tell, but it doesn't seem sustainable. Net tuition revenue will flatten out eventually unless you can pick up more bodies.

I need to preface this by saying that I don't work at Ursinus nor do I know anyone who works there.

To answer your question: no. It is not sustainable. The statistic in the article that I found most striking: discount rate of 66% this year, but last year it was 65%. This is nowhere near the average, as is stated in the article, and it's not caused by the pandemic. One-fifth of the students are minority and a fifth are first generation. There is probably significant overlap between those two groups, but in general Ursinus is not pulling in nearly enough full-pay or close to full-pay students. Those students have many other options and the vast majority exercise them.

[Parasaurolophus]

Illinois Wesleyan:

On June 12, IWU sent pre-termination notices to 25 tenured faculty in the departments of Anthropology, Philosophy, Religion, Sociology, the School of Music, and French and Italian within the department of World Languages Literatures and Cultures, telling them their positions were under review for possible termination. That's about 21% of IWU's faculty.

[secundem_artem]

Ursinus goes public with a 66% discount rate. They don't make it clear if that is the first-year discount rate or the average discount rate. At some point it doesn't matter if you maintain that trend for 4 years.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/06/29/ursinus-college-met-its-admissions-goals-money-and-faculty-attention

It says in the article that one of the reasons they have attracted as many students as they have is that faculty were asked to call prospective students to answer questions, talk the place up, etc.

We did that a couple of years ago at Artem U and I called around a dozen admits who had not yet tendered a deposit.   If the number I had was a land line, I usually had to leave a message with mom or dad since the student was never home.  If the number I had was the student's cell phone, it went straight to voice mail since nobody picks up for a number they do not recognize. 

I came away from the experience feeling like a stalker and ended up not convincing anybody to attend Artem U.

I don't know what secret sauce Ursinus used, but in my experience this was just a waste of time.

[Bonnie]

Illinois Wesleyan:

On June 12, IWU sent pre-termination notices to 25 tenured faculty in the departments of Anthropology, Philosophy, Religion, Sociology, the School of Music, and French and Italian within the department of World Languages Literatures and Cultures, telling them their positions were under review for possible termination. That's about 21% of IWU's faculty.

Particularly troubling about the IWU issue: faculty and admin had spent the year doing program reviews. Some programs were marked for discontinuation. And then operating on its own, admin added additional programs into the discontinuation heap. For instance, sociology and anthropology I believe made it through the intensive review process marked as "sustain." And then admin tossed them on the discontinue heap without explanation.

(That's the story as told to me over the last 10 months by a friend at IWU.)

[Parasaurolophus]

Illinois Wesleyan:

On June 12, IWU sent pre-termination notices to 25 tenured faculty in the departments of Anthropology, Philosophy, Religion, Sociology, the School of Music, and French and Italian within the department of World Languages Literatures and Cultures, telling them their positions were under review for possible termination. That's about 21% of IWU's faculty.

Particularly troubling about the IWU issue: faculty and admin had spent the year doing program reviews. Some programs were marked for discontinuation. And then operating on its own, admin added additional programs into the discontinuation heap. For instance, sociology and anthropology I believe made it through the intensive review process marked as "sustain." And then admin tossed them on the discontinue heap without explanation.

(That's the story as told to me over the last 10 months by a friend at IWU.)

Yeah, the article seems to confirm that. Very troubling.

It's worth noting that IWU's VP of finance, Matt Bierman, did something similar at Western Illinois in 2016, before he jumped to IWU. Part of his rationale for the program cuts was the need to maintain more than 6 months' operating cash in reserves, which was more than the WIU endowment. He also set a number of majors that every program had to have each year (based on the goal of ensuring 60% of Illinois adults earned a college degree), regardless of size or status as a discovery major. The result was the elimination of philosophy, religious studies, women's studies, and Afrian American studies (Physics, Geography, Health Sciences, Musical Theatre, and Bilingual/Bicultural Education were also on the chopping block, and a few others, but I think they all survived), although some of these programs did manage to grow to meet the required numbers once the targets were set.

[polly_mer]

Ursinus goes public with a 66% discount rate. They don't make it clear if that is the first-year discount rate or the average discount rate. At some point it doesn't matter if you maintain that trend for 4 years.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/06/29/ursinus-college-met-its-admissions-goals-money-and-faculty-attention

It says in the article that one of the reasons they have attracted as many students as they have is that faculty were asked to call prospective students to answer questions, talk the place up, etc.

We did that a couple of years ago at Artem U and I called around a dozen admits who had not yet tendered a deposit.   If the number I had was a land line, I usually had to leave a message with mom or dad since the student was never home.  If the number I had was the student's cell phone, it went straight to voice mail since nobody picks up for a number they do not recognize. 

I came away from the experience feeling like a stalker and ended up not convincing anybody to attend Artem U.

I don't know what secret sauce Ursinus used, but in my experience this was just a waste of time.

Super Dinky did the faculty calls to prospective students as a group phone bank every year.  We had a pretty good pick-up rate, but we didn't have much of an effect on enrollment from the phone calls themselves.

The coaches who spent months texting and calling prospects had a substantial effect on student enrollment.

A big discount rate had a real effect on enrollment as we experimented year to year with the rate.

Students who did a campus visit and spoke with faculty tended to come as people who were really interested in the small campus experience.