Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[polly_mer]

Benjamin Franklin: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/12/02/metro/already-edge-pandemic-has-made-it-even-harder-small-colleges/

[dr_codex]

UC Berkeley: https://www.kqed.org/news/11849485/were-fragile-uc-berkeley-officials-battle-budget-woes

Thank you, Polly.

Some old, some new.
Lots of borrowed. Lots of blue.

I'd encourage everybody to read this one. Scary.

[mamselle]

Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in merger discussions with Wentworth Institute of Technology:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/09/20/metro/benjamin-frankin-institute-technology-wentworth-are-talking-merger-secret/.

Interesting. A friend works at BFIT. Hope they'll be OK.

M.

As usual with Boston-area colleges, the real estate deal in the mix is interesting. BFIT's plan to sell off its South End location to move to Nubian Square could be a cash windfall for Wentworth.

Yes, sorry to say, they've been having trouble for a bit.

M.

[polly_mer]

Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in merger discussions with Wentworth Institute of Technology:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/09/20/metro/benjamin-frankin-institute-technology-wentworth-are-talking-merger-secret/.

Interesting. A friend works at BFIT. Hope they'll be OK.

M.

As usual with Boston-area colleges, the real estate deal in the mix is interesting. BFIT's plan to sell off its South End location to move to Nubian Square could be a cash windfall for Wentworth.

Yes, sorry to say, they've been having trouble for a bit.

M.

That merger fell through per the link I posted yesterday.  The news isn't that they are in trouble; the news is that they aren't getting out of it and the accreditation clock is ticking quickly.

[apl68]

UC Berkeley: https://www.kqed.org/news/11849485/were-fragile-uc-berkeley-officials-battle-budget-woes

Thank you, Polly.

Some old, some new.
Lots of borrowed. Lots of blue.

I'd encourage everybody to read this one. Scary.

Only 13% of their budget is from the state?  It's substantially higher than that at state schools in our predominately rural red state.

[polly_mer]

For several years, the state flagships that are truly national gems have been in the news for what a small percentage of their budgets have come from the state.

Possibly useful information for those who missed it:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/05/05/public-higher-education-worse-spot-ever-heading-recession 

https://www.jkcf.org/research/state-university-no-more-out-of-state-enrollment-and-the-growing-exclusion-of-high-achieving-low-income-students-at-public-flagship-universities/

https://www.highereddive.com/news/are-we-seeing-the-dissolution-of-the-public-flagship-university/437869/

CU-Boulder is usually the poster child at under 10% of the budget from state appropriations: https://coloradosun.com/2019/02/25/colorado-universities-out-of-state-enrollment/

The smaller state branch campuses that get a substantial portion of their funding from state appropriations should be shaking in their boots at this point because cutting 20-50% of the budget as the state money runs out is much, much worse than having to make up 5 or 10% of the budget from the state appropriation cuts.

[polly_mer]

Speaking of the smaller branch campuses, Indiana University of Pennsylvania is in the NYT today for their mission of educating the poor and yet having had a bad financial decade even before Covid hit including a 30% decline in enrollment: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/us/college-coronavirus-tuition.html

[apl68]

For several years, the state flagships that are truly national gems have been in the news for what a small percentage of their budgets have come from the state.

Possibly useful information for those who missed it:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/05/05/public-higher-education-worse-spot-ever-heading-recession 

https://www.jkcf.org/research/state-university-no-more-out-of-state-enrollment-and-the-growing-exclusion-of-high-achieving-low-income-students-at-public-flagship-universities/

https://www.highereddive.com/news/are-we-seeing-the-dissolution-of-the-public-flagship-university/437869/

CU-Boulder is usually the poster child at under 10% of the budget from state appropriations: https://coloradosun.com/2019/02/25/colorado-universities-out-of-state-enrollment/

The smaller state branch campuses that get a substantial portion of their funding from state appropriations should be shaking in their boots at this point because cutting 20-50% of the budget as the state money runs out is much, much worse than having to make up 5 or 10% of the budget from the state appropriation cuts.

Why have we as a society been so determined in recent years to set up our youth to fail in life?  In funding for higher education, and in many, many other things.

[mamselle]

Why did Chronos eat his young?

M.

[selecter]

Lots of cynical "prioritization" in this one, apparently to avoid dire straits.

https://www.oakpark.com/News/Articles/12-23-2020/Cuts-at-Concordia-put-college-on-edge---/

[kaysixteen]

Because the Boomers, who got the best of everything,  pulled up the ladders after they got it.  They have largely doubled down on this behavior,  even as their  grandchildren approach adulthood.   Sorry about not.coming to visit you in the old folks home, grandma,  I'm off to work my third job.

[marshwiggle]

Because the Boomers, who got the best of everything,  pulled up the ladders after they got it.  They have largely doubled down on this behavior,  even as their  grandchildren approach adulthood.   Sorry about not.coming to visit you in the old folks home, grandma,  I'm off to work my third job.

I think the statistics probably show that boomers have invested a lot in their own children and grandchildren. The reason a lot of 30 year olds live at home is that they have all kinds of stuff at home that their boomer parents didn't have growing up. Boomers didn't expect to be making six figure salaries a few months into the first job which would be rewarding and allow work-life balance while making the world a better place. They just expected to have to find something to pay the rent.

[polly_mer]

For several years, the state flagships that are truly national gems have been in the news for what a small percentage of their budgets have come from the state.

Possibly useful information for those who missed it:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/05/05/public-higher-education-worse-spot-ever-heading-recession 

https://www.jkcf.org/research/state-university-no-more-out-of-state-enrollment-and-the-growing-exclusion-of-high-achieving-low-income-students-at-public-flagship-universities/

https://www.highereddive.com/news/are-we-seeing-the-dissolution-of-the-public-flagship-university/437869/

CU-Boulder is usually the poster child at under 10% of the budget from state appropriations: https://coloradosun.com/2019/02/25/colorado-universities-out-of-state-enrollment/

The smaller state branch campuses that get a substantial portion of their funding from state appropriations should be shaking in their boots at this point because cutting 20-50% of the budget as the state money runs out is much, much worse than having to make up 5 or 10% of the budget from the state appropriation cuts.

Why have we as a society been so determined in recent years to set up our youth to fail in life?  In funding for higher education, and in many, many other things.

Only about a third of US adults over the age of 25 have a college degree.  If a college degree were truly important to success in life, then that fraction would be higher or far, far more people in the US would be in dire poverty (i.e., failure at life).  Instead, a good many people don't have college degree and are reasonably fine because of their personal networks or don't use their college degrees in any appreciable way and are reasonably fine because of their personal networks and other resources.

There's a huge number of people who start college in the US, but don't finish in any sort of timely manner: https://money.cnn.com/2015/03/25/news/economy/middle-class-kids-college/

Both stats found that fewer than half of middle class students were actually leaving with a bachelor's degree.

Only 40% of college entrants who were high school seniors in 2004 and whose families earned between $46,000 and $99,000 had secured bachelor's degrees by 2012, according to the first measure.

This compares to a graduation rate of 63% for those from the top of the income ladder, and 28% and 20% for moderate- and lower-income students, respectively.

Similarly, the second measure, which looks at all dependent students who started college in 2003 from families with incomes between $60,000 and $92,000, found that only 45% had earned a bachelor's by 2009.

Many community college attendees already have a bachelor's degree and go back to get something more job useful: https://hechingerreport.org/graduates-of-four-year-universities-flock-to-community-colleges-for-job-skills/

If a college degree were truly crucial to success in modern American society, then the dire poverty rate would be pretty close to 50% during normal times and would be mass starvation in the streets level here during Covid times.

But, it's not.

We're as a society short on people who can do certain jobs that require a college education (i.e., well beyond a solid K-12 education).

We're as a society short on people who want to do certain jobs that require a college education (i.e., jobs that can't be pick up by smart people who work hard right out of a solid K-12 education and that generally require math and computation followed by the science and technology that rely on being proficient in mathematical/computational thinking)

We're not, however, setting people up to fail because they lack a piece of paper that doesn't reflect a college education, especially when the places they want to live don't have very many jobs that require a college education or the great jobs are filled mostly by networking instead of an open call for special skills only obtained through specific college curriculum.  Nurses get jobs by answering job ads; most middle-class jobs where a college degree is standard don't advertise, but instead fill those jobs through friend of a friend discussion or the internship program.

Some places in the US are having a rough go now and in the most plausible foreseeable futures because they are places that few people not already living there want to live and have generally neglected their K-12 education to the point that their HS graduates cannot easily get a college education due to lack of academic preparation and non-academic habits that are absolutely required like being able to take good notes and learn at a level higher than mere memorization.  Those places don't die immediately because of the local jobs done by locals, but a more affordable college education is not going to fix their community problems.

I'm a lot more worried about what's going to happen as the engineering-and-a-few-other-fields degree-seeking foreign national population continues to drop, which means we will no longer be able to plug some gaps with students who immigrate and stay than I am that some people didn't get to study what they like for four years of a college experience before going into a middle class job that doesn't require the knowledge gained, but more reflects having a middle-class background.  That trend in enrollment was already started before Trump was elected in 2016: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign-students-and-graduate-stem-enrollment

One way to fix the college funding problems is to reduce public enrollment to the people who can benefit from college, as is common in much of the world.  The US sends a lot of people to college who won't benefit and that drives up the cost by attempting to educate people who aren't even studying something they like, but are instead just trying to get a magic piece of paper they can use as an entry ticket into a middle-class job--a method that doesn't work if the job requires a college education that can be applied to a changing world and what someone has is an appreciation of the lyrics of The Major-General's Song

[apl68]

The widespread neglect of K-12 education was one of the "many, many other things" that I had in mind.  Also various cultural and economic factors, which I won't get into here.

[apl68]

Lots of cynical "prioritization" in this one, apparently to avoid dire straits.

https://www.oakpark.com/News/Articles/12-23-2020/Cuts-at-Concordia-put-college-on-edge---/

Sounds simply realistic to me.  Apparently they're cutting some trendy majors, like "Game Art" and some of the business school programs, that they decided to try a few years back and found didn't pan out.  Cuts to the Gerontology program, if it is indeed a strong program for its size, wouldn't seem advisable.  Gerontology is going to be an important field in a nation with a rapidly aging population.

I don't really understand the criticism about an "anti-secularist agenda" in what is, after all, a denominationally-affiliated school.  It doesn't sound like they're firing people on religious grounds, or anything like that.  Most schools with an historical religious affiliation have moved very much in the opposite direction--and, like Super Dinky, have in the process lost any sort of distinctive mission or "brand identity" that would help them to stand out in a crowded field of small colleges.

They had separate programs in English as a Second Language and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.  What's the difference between ESL and TESOL?  I'm curious.