Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[dr_codex]

Not sure that this is going to make any impact, but I'd like to try.

This thread, and its ancestor on the CHE boards, has always been a valuable ticker for tracking institutions in distress. I've learned a lot from both iterations, and want to thank Spork for sharing expertise, insight, and a toolbox for doing the work on our own.

The frequent hijacking of the thread by the same folks who hijack almost every thread into the same, dreary, predictable dead ends is frustrating.

I'm not a censor. I'm not a mod. I'm not crying goodbye, cruel fora. But I'd ask everybody to think about where they comment, if not what.

Happy Thanks, to those who Thanks.

DC

[mamselle]

Not sure that this is going to make any impact, but I'd like to try.

This thread, and its ancestor on the CHE boards, has always been a valuable ticker for tracking institutions in distress. I've learned a lot from both iterations, and want to thank Spork for sharing expertise, insight, and a toolbox for doing the work on our own.

The frequent hijacking of the thread by the same folks who hijack almost every thread into the same, dreary, predictable dead ends is frustrating.

I'm not a censor. I'm not a mod. I'm not crying goodbye, cruel fora. But I'd ask everybody to think about where they comment, if not what.

Happy Thanks, to those who Thanks.

DC

+1

I've mentioned this a couple of times before.

Seemingly--hijackers gotta hijack.

I wish they wouldn't, also. The basic info and some interpretive responses are useful, the spiral galactic reasoning pudding, not so much.

M.

[Hibush]

Not sure that this is going to make any impact, but I'd like to try.

This thread, and its ancestor on the CHE boards, has always been a valuable ticker for tracking institutions in distress. I've learned a lot from both iterations, and want to thank Spork for sharing expertise, insight, and a toolbox for doing the work on our own.

The frequent hijacking of the thread by the same folks who hijack almost every thread into the same, dreary, predictable dead ends is frustrating.

I'm not a censor. I'm not a mod. I'm not crying goodbye, cruel fora. But I'd ask everybody to think about where they comment, if not what.

Happy Thanks, to those who Thanks.

DC

+1

I've mentioned this a couple of times before.

Seemingly--hijackers gotta hijack.

I wish they wouldn't, also. The basic info and some interpretive responses are useful, the spiral galactic reasoning pudding, not so much.

M.

I'm afraid I set it off by calling Dubuque "rural". Sorry about that.

[kaysixteen]

So the hicks want to get back at us by voting for someone who will poop in the cool kids' pool.   And they are feeling hopeless, feeling that nothing could be done to better their circumstances, so what the hey, just muck up things for everyone else as well.   These morons have forgotten what people like FDR, with their political philosophy, did do for the Appalachians of the country.   Why this is, and why they have bought into the lies of Trumpery, is very complicated, doubtless....

But it is certainly true that people like this do rightly see themselves as being looked down upon by people like me.   I will not deny that I fight this daily, esp given the job situation I find myself in.   Many of these people behave in ways vastly different from standard middle class morality, and they evince moronity daily, such as by wearing a 'Trump' facemask whilst flipping out the food stamp card to pay for their Doritos.  I am well aware that attitudes such as mine are not at all helpful in getting these people to give a hearing to me or those thinking like me, and I try to fight it.   And I am also well aware that many of the policies the secular left wing of the Democratic party advocates are deeply insulting to the morality and culture of many 'heartland' America types, and it is dumb to expect them to vote for you, when what you are publicly espousing violates all these principles, and when you do not sell yourselves adequately for how voting for you would do good things for their life.  I confess, however, that I am running out of all patience, and it is becoming very hard for me to respect anyone who voted for Trump this year, having seen what the disaster Trump has been (though, again, there's that propaganda, ignorance, and closed-loop fact-free parallel universe again).

[polly_mer]

One contributing factor to many colleges being in dire financial straits is attitudes like:

But it is certainly true that people like this do rightly see themselves as being looked down upon by people like me.   I will not deny that I fight this daily, esp given the job situation I find myself in.   Many of these people behave in ways vastly different from standard middle class morality,

, which neglect why many people go to college or want their children to go to college.  I can't find the reference right now, but I read a great book a couple years ago explaining the sociology/anthropology research that many of us who start life in upper-lower-class beginnings don't want to have the lives that we associate with being upper-middle class and higher.

Instead, we want basically the lives that our parents/grandparents have with enough extra most months to have a savings account for emergencies, benefits on the job so we have health insurance, and physically easy enough jobs that we can work until 65-70 instead of having to figure out what to do when our bodies start to give out in our late 40s-early 50s.  We want one good enough job instead of several part-time jobs that mean we work much more, but end up with much less.

Thus, the second worst advertisement for a college education at a struggling only-regionally-known institution is to focus on the things that only teachers and college professors know with no one else in the community knowing or valuing.  We understand that we don't know what the doctor does, but we value that expertise.  We don't know what the regional sales manager does all day, but it's pretty unlikely that they are doing a lot of English literature-related tasks or drawing on their Nth-earlier-than-20th-century history regularly.

The worst advertisement for a college education anywhere are all the people who went to college to get snooty and end up with lives that are essentially materially the same or noticeably worse than what they could have had by choosing well straight out of high school and working hard into early middle age.

That adjunct who teaches a 7/7/3 for $25k per year without benefits and insists that their humanities-based general education is the most important part of a college education?  That person directly undermines the message every single day by being an example of the fears of investing in a book-based education that won't pay off.  The regional sales manager who teaches one course every term makes a much more compelling case for why a little book learning enhances one's life in non-material ways.

That person who has the same retail job that one can get right out of high school as a middle-aged adult for years instead of being store manager or anywhere on the career path that leads to district/regional offices and then deigns to be snooty about "people who didn't even try to improve themselves"?  Yeah, that's being the poster person for why book learning is far less useful than other types of learning.  Every snooty comment just reinforces the fact that book learning just makes one insufferable and not a regular person who fits in, especially when having nothing to be snooty about.

That person who claims to have the abilities to do something great and yet is observably piecing together multiple part-time jobs that pay very little, but take a lot of time, with a net result of working all the time, but being food insecure, living in a tiny apartment far from family, and having nothing saved for a rainy day, let alone retirement?  Again, that's being the poster child for why book learning is not automatically a path to success.  The creative person who has a very modest office job with benefits who then has plenty of free time for art/music/writing/acting may not be the life we'd want for ourselves, but is understandable in being a good enough life.

Having the college requirements that the faculty want to keep their jobs or that they know are important doesn't work at all when the prospective students can see that those requirements are at best irrelevant and at worst are mostly a jobs program for the faculty.  Prospective students from modest beginnings are much more willing to believe that the majors that lead directly to a good enough career path probably know what they are doing.  After all, one seldom encounters a degree holder in those fields who is living a struggling poor life, even if they are doing something different from their degree.  One doesn't have to look very far to find someone in the humanities or certain social sciences who has all the attitudes of acting better than we are while very clearly being a sucker who is trying to con the rest of us into also being suckers.

If anyone is trying to drag us down to their level, it's the academic people selling snake oil in the form of a college education that is checkbox going through the motions to ensure they have a job, not the people who see through that con and choose either working hard in the world to get ahead or a college major that is very likely to pay off for the time and effort invested.  "the job situation I find myself in" indicates being someone with no agency, unlike the people who started in the same job right out of high school and worked their way up to department manager, store manager, or regional/district anything.  I find it hard to respect people who insist that voting "wrong" is a mark against intelligence when the observable results of the critical thinking that results in personal action is not favorable to the actor.

[marshwiggle]

One contributing factor to many colleges being in dire financial straits is attitudes like:

But it is certainly true that people like this do rightly see themselves as being looked down upon by people like me.   I will not deny that I fight this daily, esp given the job situation I find myself in.   Many of these people behave in ways vastly different from standard middle class morality,

, which neglect why many people go to college or want their children to go to college.  I can't find the reference right now, but I read a great book a couple years ago explaining the sociology/anthropology research that many of us who start life in upper-lower-class beginnings don't want to have the lives that we associate with being upper-middle class and higher.

Very much. And even when we "fit in" with upper middle class circles, it's performative. I know which fork to use, but if I were cooking for myself I'd be happy to make one dish meals and eat both courses WITH THE SAME FORK! (Shocking!)

And those "blue collar" Trump voters? Those would be our parents, grandparents, and other people who are compassionate and hard working, but don't appreciate the snooty attitudes of people who've never had to get their hands dirty but couldn't live without other people doing so.

Instead, we want basically the lives that our parents/grandparents have with enough extra most months to have a savings account for emergencies, benefits on the job so we have health insurance, and physically easy enough jobs that we can work until 65-70 instead of having to figure out what to do when our bodies start to give out in our late 40s-early 50s.  We want one good enough job instead of several part-time jobs that mean we work much more, but end up with much less.

I virtually never refer to what I do for a living as my "career"; I almost always refer to it as my job. (And in casual coversation, I usually simply say I "work at the university". I could be a custodian or the president; it's often not remotely relevant to the person I'm talking with.) I enjoy it; it suits me, and pays well enough for a decent life, but I intend to retire as soon as it's financially reasonable to do so, because there are other things I want to do that have nothing to do with academia.

That adjunct who teaches a 7/7/3 for $25k per year without benefits and insists that their humanities-based general education is the most important part of a college education?  That person directly undermines the message every single day by being an example of the fears of investing in a book-based education that won't pay off.  The regional sales manager who teaches one course every term makes a much more compelling case for why a little book learning enhances one's life in non-material ways.

It's glaringly obvious to "normal" people that this supposedly "smart" person who got all this education can't seem to figure out how to get higher paying employment, even though they clearly wish they had it.

That person who claims to have the abilities to do something great and yet is observably piecing together multiple part-time jobs that pay very little, but take a lot of time, with a net result of working all the time, but being food insecure, living in a tiny apartment far from family, and having nothing saved for a rainy day, let alone retirement?  Again, that's being the poster child for why book learning is not automatically a path to success.  The creative person who has a very modest office job with benefits who then has plenty of free time for art/music/writing/acting may not be the life we'd want for ourselves, but is understandable in being a good enough life.

A lot of this is tied up in the "career" versus "job" distinction I mentioned earlier, and to lots of "normal" people the distinction is not very important.  Doing honest work that pays the bills makes a person worthy of respect; not having some kind of title or letters after your name.

[kaysixteen]

You miss my point, but that is pretty normative for you.   I said that I am trying hard to overcome my views towards these people, whom I encounter every day, not only at work but even in my very working class neighborhood.   But it is damn hard.   One need not be a college grad, a humanities egghead, etc., or even at all well-off financially, to recognize that sh*tty personal behavior and sub-middle class morality personal choices, everything from the moderately benign decision to tattoo one's fingers, to the much more problematic decision to scream the f word at your kid in a store, to the loathsome decisions to smoke weed (however legal it may be in places), make babies with numerous different people you never intend to marry, are bad things and contribute not only to your failure at life, but also make it harder to sympathize with them, want to help them out with welfare, etc. (those of you who have never, or even just not recently, worked retail, think hard on what it feels like to be sworn at, treated with contempt, etc., by a customer who then whips out a food stamp card to pay for their chips).   And these sorts of contempt-inducing behavior do not even take into consideration the bad choices to vote for people who are snookering them, and, once in office, enforce political policies that are exactly the opposite of what would be in the financial, moral, and cultural interests of the dumb-dumb voters in question.... especially when said dumb-dumbs in question double down on those poor voting choices, in order to  'own the libtards' or some such crapola.   Really, this is hard.   And what makes it harder, all things being equal, is the mind-numbingly stupid attitude that actually rejects booklarnin', the development of critical thinking, etc., that one gets in college, *especially in humanities classes* (studies now show that a majority of GOP voters actually think college and colleges are bad for America, presumably meaning they do not want their kids to go there, when historically working class folks saved, worked hard, and actively encouraged their kids to go there), thereby baptizing ignorance and wooly, uncritical thinking.   Sue me if you wish, but I will continue to view such attitudes and actions as just plain bad, and bad for America.

Now as to someone like me, caught in the unfortunate position of having a PhD earned in one of the most collapsing academic fields, who began his PhD studies at a time when all the public advice and proclamations told him (and thousands of others) that jobs would be there aplenty for them on graduation, well I am stuck.   I try to deal with this, not to think about it overoften, etc., but I quite frankly tire of the repeated claims made by polly, and some others following her, that somehow non-academic wonderful careers are available for me, and presumably would have been all along had I merely sought them, and thus somehow I am a loser not worthy of having those working class folks pay any attention to me.   One can claim things like this all the time, as often as one wants, but it does not make it true-- so I will repeat in clear enough terms for a PhD engineer to get, there really are not legions of nonacademic employers eager to hire 50+ classics PhDs (even ones who also hold an MLS) for serious, well-paying, meaningful, and personally fulfilling professional and/or business employment.   Really, there just ain't.   If I had been paid my current Wallyworld hourly wage for every hour I have spent searching for employment over the last 15 years, I could probably buy a new Mercedes.

Now one more thing-- what does this mean: " I find it hard to respect people who insist that voting "wrong" is a mark against intelligence when the observable results of the critical thinking that results in personal action is not favorable to the actor."?   I can make a couple of guesses, but perhaps you'd care to simplify it for me....

[marshwiggle]

You miss my point, but that is pretty normative for you.   I said that I am trying hard to overcome my views towards these people, whom I encounter every day, not only at work but even in my very working class neighborhood.   But it is damn hard.   One need not be a college grad, a humanities egghead, etc., or even at all well-off financially, to recognize that sh*tty personal behavior and sub-middle class morality personal choices, everything from the moderately benign decision to tattoo one's fingers, to the much more problematic decision to scream the f word at your kid in a store, to the loathsome decisions to smoke weed (however legal it may be in places), make babies with numerous different people you never intend to marry, are bad things and contribute not only to your failure at life, but also make it harder to sympathize with them, want to help them out with welfare, etc. (those of you who have never, or even just not recently, worked retail, think hard on what it feels like to be sworn at, treated with contempt, etc., by a customer who then whips out a food stamp card to pay for their chips). 

Tatoos? Weed-smoking? Having sex without any long term plans? How are those unique to the right? (And instead of yelling at kids, probably applauding their bad behaviour is not a big improvemnt.)

[polly_mer]

Apologies for not quoting kaysixteen, but that's hard on this device.

1) Let's start with the most important factor: we agree that few good business jobs exist for people with kaysixteen's educational background where he wants to live.  The take-home message for most of us observing is that far fewer people should be spending their early adult life in school that won't pay off and many more people should be doing something else during those years that is much more likely to pay off.

It's exactly because it's so clear (and has been since the 1970s) that a lot of book learning takes a lot of time and energy, but doesn't result in good jobs for most people with just that book learning that college is seen as less of a good bet, even for the smart people with a solid K-12 education.

It's not that I don't understand why kaysixteen doesn't have a better job with all that schoolin'; it's that the logical conclusion by observers is that so many cautionary tales like this exist that smart people would not follow that path...unless they come from families where the result won't be Walmart, but will be a middle-class job, college-expected with benefits.

I have no additional specific-to-kaysixteen advice because my focus in people avoiding ever being in that situation.  Once someone has been in that situation for years and still hasn't managed to accept being a worker bee whose best bet is working up the ladder to shift supervisor, department supervisor, or team lead, then, yes, I know exactly why no outside business wants to hire someone who only has outdated book learning certificates and no recent experience doing anything associated with success.

2) Yes, kaysixteen, you watch trashy folk in Walmart do trashy folk stuff.  How frequently do you watch the solidly middle-class folks who have upper-middle-class aspirations yell at their kids for stepping a toe off the path to success at athletic events, art performances, academic contests, or even just grade reports?  People yell and otherwise treat their kids poorly for many reasons.  Go read about the Tiger Moms and get back to me about how that's really a successful life, even when the offspring end up with fancy titles and enough money.

I will take my "trashy" family with too many tattoos, being a grandparent at 32, and living in a trailer loud enough that everyone yells at the time just to be heard over the day-in, day-out noise over having to be on all the time to be one of the chosen.

Obviously at one point, you, too, made the choice to be genuine in a lower-class way over performative in an elite way or else your degree from Dear Alma Mater would have paid off in terms of a network where someone could have found you something cushy enough.

Truly elite people never end up working at Walmart.  period.  Those classy elite people have networks with some stern warnings on not messing up this time as second assistant clerk who just has to be moderately competent and mostly likeable to advance up the ranks.

3) Somehow, the college faculty and often administrators don't want to believe that many, many people go to college to get a good enough job that requires specialty education that can't be picked up by smart enough people just out in the world.  Focusing on an abstract "critical thinking" instead of much useful material that includes how to think about additional material encountered out in the world is itself a failure of critical thinking.

Someone who is smart enough to learn one book-learning expertise well probably can learn other book-learning expertises well enough.  However, it's very clear in many cases that people who are great at book learning aren't necessarily great at being able to learn things that aren't presented in a book-learning context.  While many successful people have solid book learning, book learning alone doesn't make one successful in any endeavor, even (or perhaps especially) academia.

[polly_mer]

<Now that I am on a device where quoting is easy>

Particularly relevant to this thread discussing why many small, isolated colleges are in dire financial straits by refusing to address the needs of the community:

And what makes it harder, all things being equal, is the mind-numbingly stupid attitude that actually rejects booklarnin', the development of critical thinking, etc., that one gets in college, *especially in humanities classes* (studies now show that a majority of GOP voters actually think college and colleges are bad for America, presumably meaning they do not want their kids to go there, when historically working class folks saved, worked hard, and actively encouraged their kids to go there), thereby baptizing ignorance and wooly, uncritical thinking.   Sue me if you wish, but I will continue to view such attitudes and actions as just plain bad, and bad for America.
<...>
so I will repeat in clear enough terms for a PhD engineer to get

Note that kaysixteen is still asserting that his college education is better than my engineering education, despite all evidence to the contrary on life outcomes that matter including having been a full-time, TT faculty member.  I am not a failed academic; I used my critical thinking skills to find a professional job that is much more stable than an academic job at one of the dire financial straits institution.

Note that kaysixteen is not owning his own experience of how book learning doesn't count out in the world nearly as much as one might hope.  He has the same job as someone right out of high school (possibly not even a high school graduate) and, despite years in that job, he has not advanced by doing the things one does as a good Walmart employee to climb the ladder.  He does not identify as a Walmart employee; he identifies as an academic, a librarian, something different from decades ago as possibilities, not the reality.

He's still asserting that it's better to go to college and learn critical thinking without any evidence that he has in fact learned the critical thinking that matters outside the classroom.  Yep, drinking and screwing around on the job instead of working hard are bad life choices.  Investing a lot in book learning and then still screwing around in the low-paid retail world is also a bad life choice.

He's still asserting that somehow, despite all the evidence, he is better than I am on some nebulous life outcome that bears no resemblance to the reality in which I live, let alone all his coworkers at Walmart who are living in the same daily reality as he is.

Down at the not-at-all elite end of the food chain out in the world, we all know multiple kaysixteens.  We are unlikely to know any full-time faculty members at the regional college, but we all know someone who is holding a crummy job and yet tells us that we're losers because we have that same job without the wasted years and money in college learning all those critical thinking skills that somehow don't translate to a comfortable life in a place we'd want to live.

Consequently, we're not going to enroll in the regional institution that doesn't offer the majors we want that either lead directly to a job (e.g., teacher, social worker, criminal justice, engineer, nurse) or are somehow good enough that even when one doesn't use that major directly, one has a good middle class fall back--almost half of new graduates in engineering immediately take some other job unrelated to engineering and a fair number of teachers are no longer at a school district within five years of their first teaching job.

Very few of the 600ish colleges that were projected to go under in the foreseeable future as demographics shift offer engineering or nursing and often they don't offer social worker or criminal justice, either.  While many, many people are wrong about their abilities/interest in becoming engineers, those students pick universities that offer those programs.  Then, when those aspiring students change majors, they don't start over their college search.  They stay at the institutions where they enrolled and choose one of those majors.

The colleges that keep advertising critical thinking and an educated citizenry as goals of college education are sending the wrong message to the people whom the colleges need to convince to enroll.  Our lived experience interacting with our community kaysixteens are very, very strong and will win over any stranger asserting that we're wrong to dismiss book learning (not necessarily education, but definitely disconnected book learning that we only encounter in the classroom) as really the avenue to the middle class. 

The evidence we can examine (not locked up in academic journals, but our routine interactions with the kaysixteens of the world) means those well-meaning academics are at best confused and at worst lying to us to keep their own jobs as college faculty instead of having to work at Walmart with the rest of us.

[marshwiggle]

He's still asserting that it's better to go to college and learn critical thinking without any evidence that he has in fact learned the critical thinking that matters outside the classroom.  Yep, drinking and screwing around on the job instead of working hard are bad life choices.  Investing a lot in book learning and then still screwing around in the low-paid retail world is also a bad life choice.

I think it would be telling to look at the educational history of all of the people advocating "socialism" so loudly. There would probably be lots of *humanities graduates, and very few engineers, or other professionals.  The people most in favour of all kinds of economic redistribution are not the unskilled recent immigrants, or even unemployed in rustbelt areas, but people who chose to get an education that did not prioritize gainful employment. (As a Canadian, I'm used to and in favour of more robust social programs than in the US, but that's not remotely close to socialism.)


*Particularly "grievance studies" programs, which reinforce the idea that ones' own choices have very little to do with one's outcomes, even when one lives in a place where the freedom, time, and resources to get such an education is virtually universal.

[arty_]

Back to our regular programming.
Colleagues at U Wisconsin-Whitewater are telling me they've been offered a buyout -  approximately 30% of annual salary to leave at the end of the academic year. 2 weeks to decide. The folks I know there are mostly snubbing their noses at this, but apparently some academic staff have taken it. Also, a lot of different versions of stories from department heads vs deans vs chancellors regarding cost cutting measures of axing degrees, e.g. departments. It seems that each university in the UW system is handling their budget cuts entirely separately, with no visible coordination.

[apl68]

He's still asserting that it's better to go to college and learn critical thinking without any evidence that he has in fact learned the critical thinking that matters outside the classroom.  Yep, drinking and screwing around on the job instead of working hard are bad life choices.  Investing a lot in book learning and then still screwing around in the low-paid retail world is also a bad life choice.

I think it would be telling to look at the educational history of all of the people advocating "socialism" so loudly. There would probably be lots of *humanities graduates, and very few engineers, or other professionals.  The people most in favour of all kinds of economic redistribution are not the unskilled recent immigrants, or even unemployed in rustbelt areas, but people who chose to get an education that did not prioritize gainful employment. (As a Canadian, I'm used to and in favour of more robust social programs than in the US, but that's not remotely close to socialism.)


*Particularly "grievance studies" programs, which reinforce the idea that ones' own choices have very little to do with one's outcomes, even when one lives in a place where the freedom, time, and resources to get such an education is virtually universal.

I wouldn't know about that.  Socialism is ultimately a highly technocratic worldview.  I would think that that would appeal to many engineers and such.  Certainly Marxist and socialist governments have traditionally made much of how they were taking a "scientific" approach to running society and allocating its resources.  Here in North America you probably don't find a lot of engineers and professionals who advocate socialism.  But then you don't really--despite the accusations routinely leveled against them from some quarters--find many in the humanities here who think much of socialism either.  At least outside the "grievance studies" programs, which a great many in the humanities find every bit as annoying as you do.

[apl68]

Back to our regular programming.
Colleagues at U Wisconsin-Whitewater are telling me they've been offered a buyout -  approximately 30% of annual salary to leave at the end of the academic year. 2 weeks to decide. The folks I know there are mostly snubbing their noses at this, but apparently some academic staff have taken it. Also, a lot of different versions of stories from department heads vs deans vs chancellors regarding cost cutting measures of axing degrees, e.g. departments. It seems that each university in the UW system is handling their budget cuts entirely separately, with no visible coordination.

Any ideas about how many of the faculty at Whitewater that that's affecting?

[lightning]

Back to our regular programming.
Colleagues at U Wisconsin-Whitewater are telling me they've been offered a buyout -  approximately 30% of annual salary to leave at the end of the academic year. 2 weeks to decide. The folks I know there are mostly snubbing their noses at this, but apparently some academic staff have taken it. Also, a lot of different versions of stories from department heads vs deans vs chancellors regarding cost cutting measures of axing degrees, e.g. departments. It seems that each university in the UW system is handling their budget cuts entirely separately, with no visible coordination.

30%?!? What a rip-off.