When I was a college soccer referee, I routinely worked a lot of D-2 games in West Virginia. Some of the schools in the Mountain East and the Great Midwest conferences were in towns where there were at least a few economic clusters that exported tangible goods and services. Wheeling had a steel mill. Charleston had the state government. Fairmont had a fairly significant federal services clusters. These towns had multiple export producing industries where the town and its residents produced services that out of region money paid for.
However, there were several absolutely gorgeous three hour drives to the middle of nowhere in the first week of October that ended up in tiny hamlets where the minuscule campus was the only export industry in the town. These towns may have been coal towns at one point, but now they existed to support the college with under 2,000 enrolled students. The academic staff produced educational goods that were in surplus to local requirements. Some of the colleges had 15-20% international composition (at those schools, the men’s soccer team was 75% British Commonwealth… those matches were FUN!). The academic business model was predicated on the international students paying list price before the semester started.
How do those schools survive and re-open in September? Who is travelling internationally and what families are going to be plopping down $30,000 or $40,000 in cash for an education at non-brand name US universities when economic uncertainty and asset prices have crashed? Even if there was no regulatory barrier, what is the value proposition that a little college in the middle of nowhere can offer to an international student? A distance learning program runs into significant federal regulatory problems as well as a value proposition problem for international students. A significant chunk of the value of a US education for an international student is socialization with future leaders of the global hegemonic power. That is achieved by 2 AM bull sessions in the dorms, long hikes along mountain ridges in September, watching cartoons during a break from differential equations. That is not achieved by logging into a ZOOM class room from 6 time zones away from the instructor.
So what happens to the little colleges that are in the middle of nowhere towns this September? What happens to the towns where those colleges are the only export economic cluster?
Open thread
schrodingers_cat
When the Orange Ogre bans all immigration, the colleges won’t have any decisions to make at all.
Brachiator
People find a way to adapt. We are, after all social animals.
We have a community here at Balloon Juice, for example, even though I have not personally met anyone here.
WaterGirl
In a competent administration, people would already be thinking about things like this. I’m glad that you are, and others like you, but there is no substitute for competent government.
There’s a reason we aren’t all putting out fires in our own houses.
Duane
At least the town’s have strong state governments to help them recover. Oh oh.
BGinCHI
Until states acknowledge that investing in higher ed is an economic engine, as well as contributing to the success of the state’s citizens in almost every metric, this is gonna go downhill fast.
State divestiture of higher ed was already eroding things. Will this be a wake-up call?
Walker
Oh yeah, it is going to be brutal. I am at a university that has more than enough endowment to weather this. But we have been having very frank internal discussions about the budget, both medium and long term. While we expect to have some in-person instruction in the fall, almost no one believes that we will have any foreign students. We also expect, like 2008, for the current economic situation to increase demands on financial aid.
Not my university, but since they are open about it, everyone should read John Hopkin’s post on the financial implications of COVID:
https://hub.jhu.edu/novel-coronavirus-information/financial-implications-and-planning/
Shawn in Showme
In Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, the Solarians don’t have physical contact with others from birth and only on rare occasions with their pre-selected spouses. They visit by viewing each other’s holographic images. Maybe this is how it starts?
A Ghost to Most
After the Great Comeuppance, a lot of wealthy selfish assholes need to learn the value of the “common good”. Hard.
khead
Concord? Welcome to my (former) neck of the woods.
Martin
Regulatory problems aren’t an issue. The value proposition is more than valid as much of the goal for international students is to land a US job and corresponding visa, so you want that F1 and level it up to an H1.
The real problem is that the value proposition for both domestic and foreign students is centered around residency, and so US institutions have largely neglected distance learning, and now we’re pretty fucked since the residency component is busted.
The answer to the problem is that this is what endowments are for. We are not practiced at using endowments as anything other than income generation, but now they’re needed for more.
zhena gogolia
Too depressing to even talk about.
Kent
Short term, many with small endowments are likely in deep trouble. But many of them were in deep trouble and closing before Covid-19 even hit. Here in the Portland area, which is a fast growing and relatively wealthy metro area we have had two private colleges close in the past several years. Concordia, a Lutheran school, and Marylhurst, a Catholic school. That had nothing to do with Covid-19.
Long term I think the only way that many of these schools stay viable is to develop public-private partnerships in some sort of massive overhaul of higher education. Sort of like how Cornell has both private and public land-grant elements. So, if, for example, Oregon needs more nurses and software engineers the state can build more public university capacity, or it can contract with private universities to operate in a quasi-public fashion to provide the same services at public tuition rates.
Of course a lot of these 1950s era leafy liberal arts colleges (and I attended two of them) are going to have to really re-invent themselves to stay relevant. Especially those in remote areas.
The biggest problem for a lot of these schools is that they were founded as religious schools to impart religious instruction so that young people got Lutheran, Catholic, Mennonite, Methodist, etc. educations. Those days have mostly passed for today’s young people as only a small minority of college students use religious denomination as their primary criteria for college. So being a Lutheran college in rural Oregon is simply not the sell that it was several generations ago.
Cheryl Rofer
They will die. They were already in difficult straits, and this will knock a lot of them over the edge.
I went to a small midwestern college for my undergraduate education. At that time, many small, and often rural, colleges served a national market and had national reputations. Now it’s all about “brand-name” universities.
The entire market has been badly distorted by the insistence on lowering state taxes, which has undercut state universities. And, I suppose, the general and unthinking insistence on the “brand names.” Which the small colleges used to be; people easily recognized their names across the country.
So yeah, it’s going to turn into even more of an assembly line, no thinking or self-reflection needed. But that’s apparently what people want.
Martin
@Shawn in Showme: We’re already improving on it.
Flyover Country
Just announced today – Urbana University in Ohio will close permanently at the end of the spring semester – May 9th.
Another Scott
@BGinCHI: My recollection is that the Commonwealth of Virginia pays less than 5% of the overall budget of the University of Virginia. I’m sure it’s the same everywhere.
It’s going to be very, very expensive for states to pick up more of the funding for their universities, and they won’t be able to do so for years even if we have a V-shaped recovery instead of the probably more likely square-root recovery…
We know that Donnie has trouble planning beyond his next daily rally/campaign event. David brings up excellent points, as does schrodinger’s cat. Donnie’s demand for “small numbers” wrt COVID-19 is doing huge damage just about everywhere we look.
Lots and lots of institutions (of all kinds, beyond colleges) will go under unless there’s quick creative thinking, and funding, to cover these issues.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ohio Mom
You mean like little Bethany College in that cute town in the West Virginia panhandle?
BCHS Class of 1980
@khead: Or Bluefield or Glenville or A-B or D&E or Salem. I could see Fairmont surviving because of proximity to Morgantown, UofC because of the C part and maybe Bethany.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Those tiny schools will go under. The professors will leave for other opportunities, mostly in the private sector. It will economically devastate these towns. The locals who depend on the schools and resent them at the same time will get what they voted for. They will also never stop whining about it.
Martin
@Cheryl Rofer: I think the bigger problem is that we went full credentialism. The quality of education didn’t matter because any metrics were locked up inside the institution, if they existed at all. It didn’t matter how shitty a Harvard student you were, you went to Harvard and that’s all that mattered (waves at Jared Kushner).
That turned into a form of rent seeking on the reputation of the institution rather than investment in the quality of education and most decisions flowed from that reality. Most of the cost associated with higher education is tied to the residential aspect – dorms, labs, in-person services, etc.
Higher education has been ripe for disruption for some time. I’m not sure this will spur it because the investments to make online teaching a good value and desirable are significant, but there’s an opportunity for places like WGU here.
Van Buren
I have been thinking about this for a while now. I expect that small liberal arts colleges are going to be hammered in the next few years, and it greatly saddens me, because I believe they have a lot to offer. I made a small donation to my alma mater, and they acknowledged that it was not looking good.
R-Jud
Most of my work is in higher ed marketing, and most of the schools we work with have been thinking about this for a few years. They’ve pivoted to aggressively recruiting continuing and grad students with online programs in things like education administration, criminal justice administration, nursing administration and family nurse practitioner prep (mostly online, with arrangement of practice teaching/clinical experience locally). Lots of older adults return to school now to change careers or complete a degree they need to get promoted.
There wasn’t a whole lot of growth in traditional undergrad populations coming out of the last recession, and now there will be none. Little schools that have been slow to embrace that change will suffer. Shame.
Brachiator
@Kent:
But this was also true of Harvard when it was founded in 1636, and most other colleges. The nature and mission of colleges expanded from this first goal.
Kent
This is a real issue for us as I have a HS junior and was planning a spring break west coast college visit trip before the virus hit.
We have been looking at both the flagship publics and more prestigious privates on the west coast and especially the Northwest. I’m glad we aren’t looking at fall 2020 admissions. But fall 2021 is coming soon enough.
I’m not sure as a parent if this makes me lean more towards big flagship publics like the UW in Seattle, or more towards smaller liberal arts schools that may be somewhat more isolated in a pandemic but on less stable financial footing.
The daughter was leaning towards our in-state flagship, the UW in Seattle before this all started. I’m not sure covid has changed any of those calculations. She is interested in biomedical research and genetics of some type so UW would be the place to be anyway.
BGinCHI
@Another Scott: No, it varies widely. For many flagship campuses, and in some states it’s low, and UVA is probably near the lowest in the nation. On my campus the state pays about 35% of the budget, and almost all the rest is tuition.
But short of giant endowment money, if a state university wants to offer access as a major part of its mission (as we do), tuition has to be kept low, which means the gap has to get filled by the state.
BGinCHI
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: “The professors will leave for other opportunities, mostly in the private sector.”
Hmm. Doing what, exactly? You make this sound really easy.
HumboldtBlue
It’s not just small independent rural colleges it’s state schools as well. There is serious talk this event will be the end of Humboldt State University which is facing a budget deficit of upwards of $20 million over the next five years and the school has been struggling to attract students during the good times.
The school focused heavily on minority recruitment but talk to the young black and Latin students and very white Humboldt County isn’t best known for its amenities catering to minority communities or students.
The only reason I and hundreds of other people live up here is because of the university (many of whom are graduates) and what it brings to the community. You lose that and you lose a good chunk of the populace and that means even more economic hardship for an area that has seen its historical natural resource extraction industries almost completely dry up.
HSU is the biggest employer in the county and it’s an economic engine on its own and if it goes down so does Humboldt County.
Kent
Yes, that is all well and good when you have the means to expand your mission by either having a prime location in a popular metro area, or a national reputation and funding like a Notre Dame or Vanderbilt or Duke.
But if you are a small struggling religious college in nondescript rural America the only thing you ever had going for you was the denominational connections and when those are gone you no longer serve a purpose. I grew up in the Mennonite church and that is what is happening to most of the Mennonite colleges. They don’t have the location or resources to compete, so they are declining. There is no Mennonite Duke or Notre Dame. And, there is the horrible conservative/liberal infighting that goes on in these religious-based schools that tears them apart as well. As the conservatives holding the purse strings want things like anti-LGBT policies. That is partly what killed Concordia in Portland. The Lutheran Missouri Synod pulled the plug because they had an LGBT recourse center on campus. That was at least part of the story. For example:
https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2020/02/did-concordia-get-shut-down-because-it-was-too-progressive-on-gay-rights.html
BGinCHI
@Martin: This is a really grating thing to hear when you teach at a resource-poor, incredibly diverse, low-tuition & debt institution with no competitive sports, a tiny (very recent) dorm, no extravagant facilities, and a mission to deliver high-quality education as job 1.
I hear what you’re saying, but there are lots of places that have been working honestly and ethically in the trenches for a long time.
Cheryl Rofer
@Martin: I’m not clear what you’re getting at here. And what is WGU?
Was the rent-seeking on the part of the universities or their students or both?
And we’ve got disruption now. The question will be how to put things back together. What’s likely to happen in consolidation to state university systems unless the Republicans starve them even further. Then it’ll be $100K per semester for the few who get into Harvard and Yale, and community college for everyone else.
John Revolta
Repubs have been trying to shut down everything but the business schools for a long time. Breeding grounds for dirty librals dontchaknow. So, feature not bug.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ohio Mom: There’s a set of streets in Burbank, CA named after colleges, one of them is Bethany.
BGinCHI
@R-Jud: Hey, we were just Zoom meeting this morning to talk about the marketing we’re doing for summer and fall courses. That’s my dept., not the university. We’ve just taken things into our own hands to try to get people from the community interested in our courses. Sick of waiting on the university to get its act together.
Wonder if you’d have any advice for a single dept doing this with a small budget (<$10K).
Shawn in Showme
Just by donating 1% of their respective endowments, the top 3 Ivy League schools could sustain 30 small colleges for a year. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have a combined endowment of 95 billion.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@BGinCHI: It depends on what they are teaching. For professors in STEM fields and the B-schools, it isn’t hard to transition to something that pays well. For folks in the liberal arts, it is more challenging. However, they do have management, writing, and research skills outside of their disciplines that are useful. I have a doctorate and was an adjunct for a while with hopes of being brought on full time. I gave up the dream and I don’t regret it.
RSA
@HumboldtBlue:
Yes. I was recently talking with a friend and former colleague at “my” public university (largest in the state, by enrollment), and he’s heard of parents asking for partial refunds of tuition and room/board for the current semester. The fall semester? Uncertainty almost to the point of complete ignorance. Shortfalls will be passed down to departments, and those that depend heavily on foreign students (think STEM) will have to cut back significantly. These large universities won’t go down, but it can be expected they’ll be hobbled, possibly for a long time.
burnspbesq
@Cheryl Rofer:
some will, some won’t.
At one end of the spectrum, it’s hard to imagine the likes of Williams, Washington & Lee, or Claremont suffering; they have multi-billion dollar endowments (I haven’t done the math, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Williams’ endowment per student is more than anyone other than Harvard or Stanford) and incredible demand for slots. Plenty of schools that lack those attributes will suffer; I can easily see a place like Lewis & Clark folding.
And there are some bigger, “brand name” private schools that will find themselves on thin ice. Wake Forest, with an endowment of only $1.3 billion, may be the most obvious case, but the Catholic schools that play in the Big East and West Coast conferences also look vulnerable (except for Georgetown).
Hildebrand
@BGinCHI: Right. The ability of faculty , outside of the hard sciences and maybe business, to get a non-faculty job is pretty non-existent. Of course, there aren’t many faculty positions available either.
I think this will just speed up the great culling of colleges that has already begun.
Brachiator
@Shawn in Showme:
These schools, and schools like USC in Los Angeles, are also increasing the number of full scholarships they offer to moderate income students.
RobertB
@Flyover Country: That sucks. My daughter spent a week there at a Tae Kwon Do camp, when she was a little girl. A very tenuous relationship with the institution for sure, but still…
gene108
@BGinCHI:
I don’t know how to determine a state’s investment in higher education. What’s the metric to use?
PA, NY, NJ, and New England have much higher instate tuition rates, than colleges in the southeast, for example. But the southeastern schools are very good academically, and retain top instate students, which I know NJ (from living here) struggles with.
H.E.Wolf
Urbana University is an interesting example. It was founded in 1850 as a Swedenborgian seminary. In 2014, its “assets were acquired” [sic] by Franklin University, which targets – I use the word advisedly – adults who work part- or full-time and want to get a college degree.
BGinCHI
@Hildebrand: “aren’t many” is about to become “none.”
I’m afraid this will just cement the end of the Tenure Track professional caste of profs and make higher ed teaching low pay, no research. If that happens, American higher ed will sink into mediocrity, at best.
For those of us who are first gen college students, we know that if it hadn’t been for the oasis of higher ed, we never would have gotten anywhere in the world. The students I teach need the resources of higher ed.
Kent
Why is that their job?
A 1% wealth tax in this country could probably fund much of higher education. Warren’s Wealth Tax would have raised $3.75 trillion over 10 years.
burnspbesq
@gene108:
if you had alternatives, would you go to Rutgers?
Poe Larity
Students or staff first? There is a benefit to the rest of the population with students being in dorms and not at home infecting grandma.
Profs on screen, RA/TAs have laser thermometers, janitors work night, cafeteria is take out only.
Or just drop SS eligibilty to 60 for a few years, send the old profs home and give some youts early tenure.
trollhattan
The shakeup will occur up and down the ladder and agree that some, perhaps many smaller, shakier schools won’t survive. Suspect a few larger ones are also under threat. Related to sports, just read this.
R-Jud
@BGinCHI: Digital advertising – Google, which reaches far, and (*spits*) Facebook, which allows for more precise demographic targeting. If you are after younger undergrads, ensure your Facebook ads also post to Instagram. You can define audiences and set your own budget on both platforms.
Decent-performing ad copy varies, but this is a pretty reliable template:
Interested in [JOB OR CAREER?]
Earn a Bachelor’s with [SCHOOL]
XX Months Online [or another major USP, like US News ranking]
Get started training for your dream career with personal attention from experienced faculty. We’re accredited and we’ve offered online classes for X years. Enrolling now!
There’s a guide to character limits for various ad types here: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-character-counter/
Important: Before hitting publish on your ads, make sure you know what your compliance/legal department does or doesn’t allow you to say. Generally, any promissory language which implies a student WILL get a job, WILL get financial aid or WILL graduate within a set amount of time is frowned on. Because, you know, of lawsuits at other schools.
Ads should send people to a landing page for your program, not your institutional or departmental homepage. Get someone to put a lead capture form right on the page, too, so admissions people can call or e-mail them. Put another “contact us now!” button at the bottom of the page, too, in order to mop up the 1.5% of people who actually bother to read that far.
Follow up on leads as quickly as you can. That should get you started. Good luck.
BGinCHI
@gene108: At least some of the math is simple: operating budget equals state contribution plus tuition dollars. When the state’s contribution goes down to, say, 10-20%, then the school has to have revenue, and that means tuition. There are, of course, fees, and some federal grants, etc., but those are not major budget fillers.
Schools with large endowments have a booster built into their budget configuration. But for the majority of state schools, and many privates, that’s just not much money.
Kent
I’m assuming Western Governors University, an online school out of Salt Lake City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University
It’s kind of a weird place. It’s a private non-profit but also closely linked to the governors of some western states who are in the board of trustees. Also reportedly heavily Mormon-influenced in its operations in SLC. That’s all I know about it.
thalarctosMaritimus
@Cheryl Rofer:
Western Governors University, an acccredited online non-profit.
https://hub.jhu.edu/novel-coronavirus-information/financial-implications-and-planning/
BGinCHI
@burnspbesq: What’s wrong with Rutgers?
Many (most, really) universities with no “reputation” have tremendous faculties across many fields. Higher ed has been bursting with talent on a narrow job front, and that means quality has quietly risen like crazy. Older faculty who got jobs almost without applying, from another era, and who often weren’t very professionalized, have left the academy, replaced by hungry, eager faculty who are brilliant.
Of course, you could choose university based on big sports, or reputation, but that’s probably because you’re in a class of people for whom that matters more than learning, diverse experiences, etc.
MoCA Ace
Yeah but it’s free… I ain’t spending tens of thousands of dollars per year for “priceless” wisdom from you Jackals!
rikyrah
I know that we aren’t supposed to believe in polls, but, I do believe in the polls that have Biden leading with Seniors.
Why?
Because of The Rona, they can’t see their grandchildren. Even if they are Fox watching nuts, a lot of them have children who are like, Nope, not coming to see you.
Whatever bullshyt Fox is selling, folks know when their grandchildren and children can’t see them.
This is what has the GOP stymied. The Fox bubble rubs up against the actual lives folks are leading.
Kent
Lewis & Clark is sort of old-money Portland. It has a lot of deep-pocketed Portland area alumni and supporters. There are probably 10 other colleges in Oregon and the greater metro area that are going to be in much dire straits than Lewis & Clark: Off the top of my head, Willamette, Linfield, George Fox, Pacific University, Warner Pacific, Western States, etc. Even University of Portland which is Catholic Reed is probably the only Oregon private college that is in better shape than Lewis & Clark.
But out here in the Northwest we don’t have nearly as many private schools as in the Northeast.
Leto
Not quite my college, but definitely fun. I think we had right around 25%? Both from the UK and from the Caribbean Isles.
Some guy
30 to 40K? I’d be thrilled if the small, rural liberal arts college my son just got into were that cheap. Many are 50-60 plus housing.
BGinCHI
@R-Jud: Many thanks.
We’ve already done quite a bit of this, and have learned a LOT by just doing it, with small budgets.
We’re targeting some local media, and also some twitter/FB (spits, also)/public radio.
I wish the university would just (I can’t believe I’m saying this) outsource marketing, as ours is lousy.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Hildebrand: I don’t completely agree. Mathematics and computer science are not the hard sciences, yet there are ample opportunities there. I know of one former professor (liberal arts degree, I believe) who became a project manager. Another, works for a non-profit.
Kent
Growing up on the west coast I always thought that Rutgers was just one of those fancy east coast private schools. It wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized it was the state university in New Jersey. Public schools like Rutgers and Clemson and Auburn that don’t take their state name really have extra marketing to do outside their region.
swiftfox
@HumboldtBlue: I’ve always thought of them as one of the top ten wildlife schools.
BGinCHI
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: OK, that’s 2 (ish). Now do ten thousand.
raven
@Ohio Mom: Way back in the 80’s I attended the North Carolina State University School of Sports Management that was held at Oglebay Park up the mountain from Wheeling. The closest place we could find a gym to shoot the hoop was at Bethany College.
burnspbesq
@BGinCHI:
where would you like me to start?
Sab
@rikyrah: My granddaughter lives next door and we can only see her over the fence. We understand. She doesn’t. Her dog doesn’t understand either.
Kent
@swiftfox: In my area (marine science) Humboldt State was where you went to study oceanography or fisheries science if you couldn’t get into UW or UCSD. I ran into numerous Humboldt State grads over the years in fisheries work.
BGinCHI
@Kent: Purdue grad here…….
BGinCHI
@burnspbesq: Terrific argument, counselor.
gene108
@BGinCHI:
A lot of State schools have only relatively recently adjusted to the reality of needing an endowment, because state funds had been reliable from their founding, until 10-20 years ago.
This really allows a few wealthy donors, if so inclined, to dictate terms to a university
Kent
Exactly. How many Americans outside of Big-10 country even know that Purdue is in Indiana?
raven
@gene108: The University System of Georgia institutions have experienced record budget cuts and record enrollment for 20 years. How’s that?
Fair Economist
@HumboldtBlue: Given how crowded the California University systems are, I’m surprised students aren’t in HSU if for no other reason than they can’t get spots elsewhere. Once upon a time that kind of location would be a nice draw as well but I guess most are looking for urban and near-home if they’re not going to a Ivy brand or equivalent?
California does have a problem with a shockingly low percentage of Latinos going to college. Would be great to fix that, and it would help the college systems.
raven
Aw shit they are starting on the pets and the virus again.
MoCA Ace
Eeeeeeeeeeeeewww
Uncle Cosmo
The gig economy is nothing new to academics – over 30 years ago I had a number of friends with MFAs, writers mostly teaching English, who couldn’t get any full-time positions (not even at the community colleges, let alone tenure-track at a 4-year school). They were piecing a living together teaching one course a semester at this school, two courses at that, one course at a third.
I wonder if Thuh Vars**, via distance learning operations, isn’t going to turn academia into a “winner-take-all” (really “top-cats-take-lion’s-share”) proposition, where a very few prominent well-fed academics deliver course lectures to thousands (tens, hundreds of thousands) of students, with a brigade of poorly-compensated TAs to handle student questions, test administration, paper grading, etc. Something on the order of a somewhat more elaborate & structured “Master Class”***. Maybe that’s the future of “higher education.”
** This is how my mom’s relatives in & around Fairmont WV (nice shout-out, David!) pronounce “the virus.”
*** Ads keep popping up before my UToob selections for this stuff: Ron Howard teaching directing, Neil deGrasse Tyson teaching scientific method, astronaut Chris Hadfield teaching space exploration, etc.
Shawn in Showme
@RobertB:
Starting last year, Washington University is offering full rides to any Missouri or southern Illinois student from an under 75k household that gets admitted. Great for the kids, awful for the small regional colleges that make these kids a priority.
Mai naem mobile
How much of a college is made up of faculty overall? Probably not a huge percentage. It’s the ancillary staff who would have a hard time finding jobs. The clerical staff, administrators, housekeeping, counselors, food services staff, the surrounding businesses who depend on the students. I live in a big college town with a thriving downtown and even I notice there is a noticeable difference in street traffic and store traffic during the summer when most students are gone. Jeezus, I cannot fucking believe nobody could get through Orange Douchebag’s or Jared’s brains on the massive widespread effects of a pandemic. I remember reading that Alex Azar was losing out in a palace war between him and Seema fucking Verma. This must have been one of the issues he couldn’t get Donnie to pay attention to because Verma was better at flattering him. This is the same woman who was trying to cut the Medicaid/Medicare budget. Now she’s got a completely blown budget. So much incompetence. This is like the New Coke launch version of running a government but a million times worse.
BGinCHI
@gene108: Indeed. We had a good reserve fund, built up over several years, but our GOP billionaire governor (world’s biggest asshole: Bruce Rauner) cratered higher ed in the state such that all state unis had to use reserves just to stay afloat.
Building a real endowment is VERY hard when you’re an access university.
germy
Here’s what a “proud trump supporter” has to say:
gene108
@raven:
I got my Bachelor’s degree from North Carolina State University. How did you like your time there?
trollhattan
@Fair Economist:
CSU system is pretty easy to enter, especially for Californians, and IIUC is pretty much guaranteed open to qualifying Cali JC transfers. Much bigger system than UC.
BGinCHI
@Kent: More the last few days after Brain Genius Mitch Daniels is conducting a human experiment on campus this fall.
BGinCHI
@raven: If you have healthy enrollment and strong tuition revenue, your state budget money can shrink.
trollhattan
@germy:
Somebody give Juanita a swift kick in the ladyparts, por favor.
Yes, we absolutely need to close a bunch of colleges and send our kids to machinist school instead.
MoCA Ace
@Sab: Oh that’s terrible… face timing the grand kids sucks but it might actually be worse having them so close and not being able to scoop them up :(
BGinCHI
@Uncle Cosmo: Correct. Adjuncting is definitely on the rise, and has been for quite a while.
BGinCHI
@Mai naem mobile: Republicans are TERRIBLE at capitalism, and only use the economy as a means to shuttle wealth upwards.
It’s not a secret.
Michael Cain
During the 2007-08 recession, the budget planners in my state’s legislature discussed the possibility of getting out of the higher ed business. At least to the degree that they required each of the state’s post-secondary schools to write a letter outlining their plans for survival if state funds were cut off. The decision was put off when the feds came through with a bunch of higher ed money. No one knows yet, but I expect the shutdown is blowing a much bigger hole in the revenue stream than happened in 2007-08. Given that, it may be appropriate for our state schools to be considering what they would do if the state money disappeared for at least a couple of years.
Zelma
I did some research into higher education in 2014 for a campaign for governor in Pennsylvania. It was an eye-opening experience. The state has just about the highest tuitions in the country for its state university system. (Do not ask me to explain the insanity of the whole business of “state-related” universities – Penn State, Pitt and Temple). Between 2008 and 2014, state support for higher ed decreased by about 40%. The state’s graduates have the highest student loan debt in the nation.
Like the small liberal arts colleges Dave describes, most of the schools in the state university system are located in small towns far from urban areas. They are often the largest employers in the county. And their enrollments were decreasing before the current crisis. Many of them are on life support and depend on the ability of their state representatives to protect them. But often these representatives are Republicans and don’t like them librul perfessers. I can see at least half of them going under.
Plus you have a huge number of private colleges and universities in the state. And many of them are facing serious financial issues because the number of traditional aged students is declining rapidly. And now we are facing a depression. I fear it’s going to be a bloodbath.
burnspbesq
@BGinCHI:
Rutgers is, at best, not horrible academically; it’s probably roughly comparable to schools like UMass, Florida, and Minnesota (not remotely comparable to UC, UT, Michigan, UVa or the service academies. The campus is mostly a shithole, there is no social life or culture in New Brunswick, and athletics are laughable.
I graduated in the early 70s from one of the most prestigious public high schools in the state. I knew exactly one person in my class of over 600 who went to Rutgers, and she only ended up there because Tufts didn’t give her enough financial aid.
New Jersey can and should do better.
gene108
@raven:
Tuition and education quality still make it a relatively better value proposition, than going out of state or to a private university.
I’ve seen the same thing with the University of North Carolina System, where enrollment increases, despite higher tuition, because of its relative value (NCSU grad).
Kent
Humboldt State has always been popular with middle class white hippie kids who want to spend four years surfing, playing frisbee, hackey sack, and smoking pot. At least that was the case (and reputation) in the 80s and 90s when I was in school. Recently I think they have tried to ramp up their recruitment of Black and Hispanic students which doesn’t work so well as that part of far-north California is whiter than Vermont.
If you grew up in Southern California or the central valley it is a hell of a long way to go away to school. Actually closer and equally cheap to use WUE to go to Arizona, Arizona State, or UNLV, with in-state tuition for example.
germy
thread:
Ohio Mom
My main takeaway from this conversation is, We’re about to have an even more ignorant general population once the options for college educations shrink.
Uncle Cosmo
In the larger or more prestigious schools with postgraduate education, professors customarily spend most of their time & energy working on & chasing research grants from industry, while grad students on assistantships furnish cheap labor (they do often get tuition remission though). Teaching undergrads doesn’t pay the rent, so tenure & promotion decisions are largely based on how much $$$ they can bring in, & very little attention is paid to the quality of instruction.
It was that way 50 years ago when I was in school, & I’m conjecturing it’s the same (if not worse) now.
One thing that smaller schools have done to keep faculty is to band together in regional research consortia. At one time it was done to keep good researchers from bolting to the bigger schools where they could pursue their interests. Now it may be a necessity to keep those small schools afloat.
BGinCHI
@Zelma: Thanks for this. I’m afraid you’re right.
Ripping the cultural fabric of the state…..
germy
@Ohio Mom: I’m not sure if people who learn a trade would be considered ignorant.
Jared went to Harvard. I’d consider him ignorant.
Kent
Not mentioned so far in this thread, is that the US is almost completely unique in the developed world in how we have so many residential colleges and universities and in the tradition of leaving home and going across country to college.
I’m somewhat familiar with Germany, Chile, and Canada and that isn’t really the case in any of those countries. Even Canada which is the closest comparison to the US doesn’t have nearly the tradition of leaving home for college and a much higher percentage of college students in Canada live at home while in college. In Chile where my wife went to college is it almost universal. Everyone lives at home and just take the subway or bus to whatever university they are attending. No one thinks of leaving home to another city to go to college. We have had several German exchange students and they mostly lived at home for university.
I expect the US will shift more in that direction over time as well. An increasingly urban and diverse population simply isn’t going to be interested in remote liberal arts colleges in rural towns. But big urban universities like UW, UCLA, and University of Houston will always have a market.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
My step niece got her masters in ecology from Humboldt State. If they were smart, they’d have a great developing program in the cannabis industry.
BGinCHI
@burnspbesq: 1. Rutgers has an amazing men’s basketball team. They’re now playing in the Big 10 and were the surprise squad of the season. Rutgers football is up and down, like a lot of schools, with bowl visits, and very stiff competition in the Big 10 now. I’m sure there are other successes in women’s sports and elsewhere. But then again, I wouldn’t go to a university just for the sports. I sure know people who would do that, though.
2. If you’re saying it’s not one of the top 5 overall universities in the nation (like UVA and MI, the former a very small flagship that can afford to be far more selective than a place like Rutgers), then you’re ignoring the service it does for its students and its community. You’re judgment is just snobbery. Like saying the best wine is the most expensive. Well, that’s often true, but it depends on what you mean by “best.” A lot of marketing, reputation (again), making less of it so that you can charge more, etc.
3. I’d rate a university on its value: where can you get the best education (“best” of course varying across a number of criteria) for the least amount of money? You can buy status and upwardly mobile friends, but critical thinking can be had for a much lower price, and is readily available.
gene108
@burnspbesq:
Good summary of Rutgers, New Brunswick. Tracks with friends kids, who graduated from NJ high schools in 2010 to 2014, and had scholarships to Rutgers, felt about it.
I do not understand how they let their athletics get so bad. There is so much basketball and football talent in NJ, it takes a profound combination of incompetence, and neglect to have it be as bad as it has been for so long.
BGinCHI
@Kent: I think this is right. Hard to be in the middle of nowhere and recruit. Sports will ameliorate some of this.
BGinCHI
@gene108: See what I said about basketball. They were AMAZING this year.
Here’s football: https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/schools/rutgers/index.html
This is a WAY better record in the last 20 years than, say, Indiana Univ. or Kentucky or U Conn or MD.
Kent
@gene108: I’m a big college football fan, but I’m not convinced Rutgers is wrong for not trying harder to become a football or basketball factory. There are other more important priorities than keeping up with Clemson and Alabama in football.
Some of the best public universities in the country have basically no major sports and do just fine. UC San Diego, for example. It is one of the premier public universities in the nation and doesn’t have a football team. They are not hurting in their student recruitment. It is an exceedingly popular school to attend.
Captain C
@burnspbesq: Williams alum here. I actually looked up the endowment the other day out of curiosity and it was nearly $3 billion. So, with 2,000ish students at any given time, that’s close to a million and a half per person.
Back when I was starting, around thirty or so years ago, it was at $300 million, and they were kicking off their “Third Century Drive,” hoping to raise another $150 million by the bicentennial (also my graduation year). They got it. The same wiki dive that told me the current endowment also let me know that there are 10 or so billionaires among current alums. One of these is Hal Steinbrenner, who a friend of mine once apparently decked (and it was subsequently strongly suggested to said friend by the admin that he take a year off). I only found out about this years later. Knowing my friend, he probably had a good reason for doing so.
tl;dr Williams is in no way hurting and could probably afford to be generous with its less well-endowed neighbors. For example, Bennington College, 12 miles away across the border in Vermont, has an endowment of around $40 million.
Luigidaman
David, David David…. Don’t you worry about those little colleges. As long as they have “feeder churches” from where they can send their flocks from, there will still be plenty of little colleges. They just won’t be bastions of liberal education and free thought. In Ohio, I’ve noticed a number of high school students suddenly having the desire to go to a small and very religious college called Cedarville University. Highly religious and touted by conservatives and conservative churches everywhere, we here in Ohio will soon be having our very own Liberty University. Those autumn drives will still be lovely. As long as they are headed to church.
gene108
@BGinCHI:
Much better than I thought overall. I never heard of them having success outside of Schiano’s tenure.
Zelma
Poor Rutgers. It just doesn’t get any respect! I grew up in NJ and to the best of my recollection, none of the graduates of my middle class high school went to Rutgers. (Of course, I couldn’t have gone, being of the female persuasion.). Now I’m back living in NJ, and, as best I can tell, few of the best students from the local high schools go to Rutgers. But Rutgers is more than the New Brunswick campus. In both Newark and Camden, the Rutgers campuses are very important in providing higher ed for lower income students.
NJ has always been mediocre at best in doing higher ed. We have more high school grads going out of state than any place else. It was like that 60 years ago and it’s like that now. Half the private colleges in PA would fail without NJ students.
A university’s reputation often has little relationship to the quality of the undergraduate education it provides. You can get a very good education at Rutgers. Now ask me what I think about Penn State.
Soprano2
Earlier this year I met with a rep from my alma mater, Drury University. I guess they were meeting with a lot of their perennial donors. She told me that colleges were looking toward a demographic “cliff” in 2025, as the population of college-aged students was going to drop off significantly. So, they were already planning for a tough future, at least until the end of the decade. She said she believed that quite a few colleges wouldn’t survive it, but Drury was planning to. Missouri State, the local state university where I sing in the choir, launched a huge fundraising effort last fall. They want to raise $50 million for their endowment for the next five years, to finance a lot of campus improvements and expand course offerings. I sure do hope both of them survive the next couple of years. I agree that it’ll probably be a bloodbath for smaller, liberal arts colleges in more rural areas. It’s a sad state of affairs.
Captain C
@Kent: Given their county’s most famous export, and given the legal status in Cali, has Humboldt State thought of some sort of Cannabis Ag/Business program? Serious question.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
Location, location, location.
Captain C
@Roger Moore: Beat me to it.
gene108
@Kent:
Most schools don’t have the athletic budgets to keep up with Clemson or Alabama, and it’s a suckers bet to try. There’s a lot of room for good teams to occupy, even if they don’t go to the CFP.
Rutgers is focusing on sports, which is why they joined the Big East and now the Big Ten.
Captain C
@gene108: Even if their teams perpetually suck, there’s still that sweet, sweet TV money from being in a major conference.
HumboldtBlue
@swiftfox:
It is excellent biology, forestry, oceanography, environmental and energy (Schatz Energy Center is outstanding) and fishery programs along with some of the most stunning natural beauty to be found on the continent.
@Kent:
What Kent said.
@Fair Economist:
Latino recruitment is a key component of their recruitment strategy but as is pointed out elsewhere getting kids who grew up in the sun of the Central Valley or SoCal to stay and live here can be a challenge.
Poe Larity
@Kent: HS seemed half pot smoking hippies and half pot smoking logger kids when I was in town 5 years back.
Now, I’ve met hippies who did logging and canneries and ag kids who are at non-profits, so it may all be eco-koch-incest now.
HumboldtBlue
@Captain C:
Yes in addition to the other excellent programs I mentioned above.
burnspbesq
@BGinCHI:
20-11, 11-9 in conference. That’s amazingly average. The last time Rutgers was good in men’s basketball was 1976, when the Scarlet Knnnnnnnigits made their first and only Final Four.
Rutgers was barely competitive when it was in the Big East. They have no chance in the Big 10.
@BGinCHI:
Shawn in Showme
@Kent:
The exceptions to the rule always seems to be in California. To have 3 world class cities in the same state is an incredible advantage when it comes to all kinds of quality of life issues.
BigJimSlade
@BGinCHI: Reminds me of this Doonesbury cartoon
DAVID ANDERSON
@Ohio Mom: they were d3 and yeah it’s the college and hone of an almost top 10,000 blog.
DAVID ANDERSON
@khead: never did a Concord home game… Too far so after gas and travel, it would have paid out at $12/hr
BigJimSlade
@Kent: Yep, Humboldt State is close to nothing! You gotta to go to nowhere northern California (which may be lovely), then still drive another couple hours.
BGinCHI
@BigJimSlade: HA! I needed that.
arthur
@Kent: Rutgers has a much better reputation among universities than New Jersey does among states. A few decades ago a state senator started advocating that Rutgers name be changed to New Jersey State University, and Rutgers alumni responded by proposing that New Jersey change it’s name to Rutgers.
BigJimSlade
@Kent: Love my folks, but, boy, I couldn’t wait to leave home for college. I can’t imagine it any other way. My first rule in choosing a college was that it had to be far enough away that living at home was impossible.
Martin
@Cheryl Rofer: WGU is Western Governors University.
If you look at how universities operate, we’re black boxes. The value of the education is purely a function of our reputation and nothing more. So long as US News has been the standard by which everyone is judged, it works fine for those on top. But this crisis is revealing big cracks in that system – many top ranked universities are completely unprepared to teach students online, and many lower-ranked universities are far better at it. How we evaluate schools is changing considerably.
What makes the big flagship universities what they are is the massive investment in land and architecture from dorms and classrooms to sports stadiums. That keeps most other institutions from competing on those terms (the land grant value of my campus is over 5 billion dollars – that’s undeveloped value). So we tie the value of the education in terms of our ranking to the investment in land and architecture and make is so that you must come here, pay for our dorms, pay for parking, pay for meals, and all that. Our value proposition is in residency (and the community that comes with it) more than it is in education.
That’s why Harvard is priced what it is, but also why UMich is as well. We know from internal metrics that its pretty common that the community colleges do a better job at educating students than our flagship university does – at least in lower division courses – but look at the reputation they have. It’s not based on their ability to teach students, nor is ours.
At some point there will be a disruption and realignment there. Maybe this is it, but I doubt it. State funded institutions will persist because the states cannot see a future where they don’t have a public university system – if only to keep the SEC intact. The small privates will go under because this is an unsustainable approach built around the wrong ideas of value and service to the population and they don’t have anyone who will save them, even though they’re arguably doing a better job of educating students (undergrads, at least). Covid is the first strike against this system. There may or may not be other strikes.
It’s unclear who will move into the void created here. I don’t think it’ll be the states. My guess is it’ll be industry.
Martin
Boy, talk about setting a low bar. But yes, Rutgers is a good school.
New Jersey would massively help their reputation as a state if they showed they had enough faith in the population to let them pump gas and turn left.
Uncle Cosmo
If you’d grown up in Europe you couldn’t imagine it that way; very few schools (and only the newest) have “campuses” as such, most are embedded in a town or city. (Oxbridge only seem like campuses because the business of the school overwhelms the town they’re in.)
But the entire educational system there is so utterly different from ours. When I was in school, undergraduates were required to accumulate a certain number of credits in courses outside their eventual major area (which they didn’t officially declare till the end of sophomore year) – the idea being to complete their general education before specializing. In Europe that doesn’t happen: Kids considered headed to university are tracked fairly early into the lycée/Gymnasium/liceo where they get a more intensive and comprehensive pre-college education than in all but a very few US high-schools. University there is like grad school (or maybe the last 2 years of undergrad) here: a field of study is fixed before matriculating, and the student takes only courses from that field (or closely related ones).
(A kid I knew a few years younger than me got whipsawed by this difference – in his senior year of HS, his parents separated & Mom picked up the kids & moved back to her native Sweden. Mats [not his real name] was a bright guy & he could have gone to university over there – but he had to know exactly what he wanted to study; he wouldn’t get the two years’ slack while taking requirements at a US school to look around & make the choice. His dad offered to pay his freight to a US school, but he was too pissed at him to accept. And he never did get a university degree; at one point he was a long-haul truck driver.)
How about if we made the first 14 years of education (HS + community college or trade school) a free ride & prop up the more fiscally precarious of the small colleges as semi-public “JuCos” eventually feeding the upper levels of the stabler institutions?
Honus
@Another Scott: UVA is an unusual situation. It has a pretty good endowment, and even considered going private a few years ago. It could survive without the the state. That’s not the case with most state universities
Honus
@burnspbesq: If the alternative was Duke, yes.
Kent
@Martin: People go to college for basically three reasons: (1) for credentials, (2) for pedigree, and in distant third, to actually study and learn things.
By credentials I’m talking about things like Teaching Certificates, accounting degrees, Nursing licenses, and so forth. Many careers are credential-based. If you want to be a teacher or nurse here in the Pacific Northwest it actually matters very little which school you went to. And, having an Ivy League degree is probably a handicap. As a teacher I sat on various hiring committees. When your principal and teachers on the hiring committee all went to Western Washington, Central Washington, and Portland State, walking in with a Harvard degree isn’t necessarily going to be a plus. And in nursing, your recommendations and practical experience are going to count for more than which college you attended.
Pedigree-based jobs are those in things like finance, consulting, and higher education. Where status is super important and there aren’t really good ways to measure candidates any other way. If you want to work for Goldman Sachs or teach at Harvard or clerk at the Supreme Court then pedigree is immensely important and I don’t care how smart you are, an online degree from WGU will not even get you into the door. The corollary to this is all the kids who go to college for the connections, sororities, etc. and to marry well. Your college is your pedigree.
A small minority of students actually go to college for the education. Because they want to study ancient Greek or research viruses, or whatever. Not because they have any particular career objective at the end.
I expect the credential-based careers and university programs will lend themselves much more to online and non-traditional forms of education. The pedigree-based careers are still going to require exclusivity because that is how they sort out the deserving from the undeserving. If the Ivy League didn’t exist they would have to invent it to do their sorting for them.
Honus
@Ohio Mom: Bethany, West Liberty, and Wheeling Jesuit, all within about a ten mile circle, and 45 minutes from Pittsburgh. And Stuebenville is right across the Ohio River.
Being close to Pittsburgh might save one or more of them, but Wheeling, a once pretty great small city, is a ghost town now. I was there for the family reunion last summer and drove through the heart of downtown Wheeling on Saturday at lunchtime and didn’t see anybody on the street, and hardly any other cars. Forty years ago the Plaza would have been packed. There would have been a line out the door at Louis’ hot dogs.
rekoob
Weighing in late to the thread, as usual, I’ll note that my undergraduate institution, St. John’s College, has roughly 800 students at two campuses (Annapolis and Santa Fe). We began a streamlining of many functions about four years ago, staff bearing the brunt of it. Fortunately, we reconfigured our funding model (lowered tuition, focusing on building the endowment to boost financial aid capabilities). Had we not done that, most of us believe the college would be in dire straits. As it is, we believe we can make a good go of it. It’s not going to be easy, since our pedagogical approach is small-class discussion of mostly ancient texts, but the students have apparently been okay with the adjustment. Time will tell, of course. We’re also in the middle of a capital campaign to support our funding model, and while successful, we have a long way to go. I’ll do what I can to keep our quirky, plucky corner of the world chugging along.
JAFD
THe American ‘going away for college’ tradition started because this is a big, and mostly sparsely populated, country, and used to be more heavily rural. Especially for the ‘denominational’ schools, few places had dense enough population to sustain a college.
Pennsylvania – there are many private colleges and universities, and, in the post WWII years until recently, their lobby tried to keep ‘the government’ from giving them lower-cost competition.
Rutgers – NJTransit runs 50+ trains a day from New Brunswick to Manhattan, about an hour trip. It’s simply not going to be the area’s main cultural or entertainment center. And college sports are not going to get profitable local TV contracts competing against the Iggles and Jints
But if you want to learn stuf, it’s a pretty good school.
OTOH, If you were commuting to school from downtown Newark, you could choose from Kean, William Paterson, Montclair State, New Jersey City State, Rutgers-Newark and NJIT, also Seton Hall and St. Peters
BGinCHI
@rekoob: We talked about SJC in a thread several weeks back. Not sure you were on it. Someone here is an alumna, and the Prez, Peter Kanelos, is a good friend of mine.
I’ve always loved that school and wish I’d gone there (fat chance). I’d love to teach there.
The Pale Scot
@burnspbesq:
A) Back in my time Jersies wanted to go to another state’s college because Jersey is small and the parents were at best a 1.5 hour drive away. WAY TO FUKIN’ CLOSE. And It was probably the only time in their lives they’d be living away from the NYC area. Because all the best non STEM jobs were in the City, be it lawyerin’, bean counting, museum running, arts etc. B.I. (before internet) you had to go somewhere to learn about it and other people. If you were from a blue collar town that wasn’t a worry. I only saw this attitude from the bedroom community types.
B) Nw Brunswick social scene? There were good cheap places to catch a band, but really Manhattan was a 8 dollar train ticket. David Johansen @ CBGBs, Slam dancing to Johnny Thunder at the Peppermint Lounge, No cover charge blues at Johnny Lynch’s, Salsa, Jazz. Or just hang in Washington Square Park with the international NYU students.
Kent
@rekoob: My undergrad alma matter, Reed College, is somewhat similar in its traditional humanities approach to education. And a bit larger and more wealthy. But since I attended in the early 80s to today it has gotten a whole lot more elite and expensive. We visited and my daughter loved the place. But we frankly can’t afford it as our income puts us above the bar for receiving financial aid and we just don’t have the $75,000/year it would take to send her. Especially when the UW in Seattle would be at LEAST $50,000/year cheaper. They assume every dime of our disposable income would go towards their tuition when we do have other obligations, including family we help support overseas. I would be sad to see Reed go, but if they can’t figure out how to make it possible for me to send my child then so be it.
BigJimSlade
@Uncle Cosmo: Fwiw, when I said, “I can’t imagine it any other way.” I meant my desire at 18 (and back in the 80s) to go away for college. Yes, I can imagine our current system changing, but haven’t given it serious thought. No kids :-)
Victor Matheson
@Captain C: Williams’ closest private school neighbor was Southern Vermont College. It closed its doors this year.
J R in WV
@Mai naem mobile:
The New Coke launch was a total success. It was never intended to replace Actual Coke. It was intended to allow Coke to convert their recipe from white sugar to high-fructose corn syrup without driving people away.
New Coke wasn’t planned to be a great taste… it was intended to die a quick death, being replaced after just a few months by Coke Classic, which was never the same as the original Coke flavor mix.
But Coke saved thousands of dollars on every giant batch of Coke Syrup manufactured with corn syrup sweetener instead of actual white sugar. All pure profit enhancement ~!!~
A diabolical marketing plan with advertising spending, a planned failure, a replacement with a recipe closer to original Coke, but cheaper by far. I almost admire how slick it was designed and executed, except for hating the flavor of all Coke products.
Martin
@The Pale Scot: California does a pretty large population swap from north to south with Bay Area students heading to SoCal UCs and SoCal students heading to Bay Area. Just the right amount of distance, and still in-state tuition.
frosty
@Kent: Then there’s the University of Pennsylvania that takes the state name but is private, just to confuse everything!
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Uncle Cosmo: That has been my experience, too. I should also note I have two friends with PhDs in physics and one with a PhD in biology who are now data scientists. I have a friend with a PhD in mathematics who works as a statisitician for a biotech company. I know people who have gone to work for pharma. I know a PhD in emergency management who works for a shoe company now doing product research. The research, stats, and writing skills have a lot of value outside of academia.
JML
The elite schools are going to weather this fine; they’ll have to lower expectations in terms of investment because alumni giving may decline for a few years, but they can be a bit ore tuition dependent for a while because they’re turning away students every year.
The schools that are in real trouble are: small privates with smaller endowments and regional publics who frequently serve as access institutions. The small privates have been getting marginal for several years and you’ve been seeing closures and mergers with other institutions because the decline in enrollments related to smaller high school graduating classes really made it problematic for tuition-dependent schools.
Regional publics have a similar problem in that they’re highly enrollment driven now and dependent on tuition as state governments divested from them. Even 25 years ago my school was still more than 60% state-funded; now it’s less than 40%. Moreover, many of them invested very little in alumni relations or their foundations because they were robustly funded by the state. But you can’t build a culture of philanthropy and build endowments in 10 years, these are generational concepts. Schools like mine are now highly sensitive to enrollment at a time when it’s declining everywhere.
And faculty are easily the largest cost: academic affairs still makes up 60% of the school budget and faculty are easily the largest segment of the workforce (more than 50%). Unfortunately they’re also the least realistic about things as a unit. We still have many many faculty who still think they don’t need to be active recruiters for the university.
We are facing a $23M operating deficit for FY21 on a budget of about $150M. That’s going to be catastrophic for us and layoffs are coming. I may get a layoff notice in a month. How wonderful to have to enter the job market during a depression.
My school generates over $650M annually in economic activity for the region. If we go down it will be destructive and we’re a mid-sized community
Gothmech
@BGinCHI: It sounds more like a euphemism for, found a job as Walmart greeter/Amazon warehouse guy If that. Who’s going to be hiring? I’m not optimistic.
wenchacha
I confess to a long-held resentment of my alma mater. About 1200 students were stuck in a small DRY conservative town, in what was surely the middle of nowhere. Obligatory chapel attendance had only recently ended. Dorms were single-sex, we had visitation hours, and you could be suspended for breaking the rules.
My friends and I still await seeing the campus turned into a golf course.
rekoob
@BGinCHI: It was I with whom you had an exchange about Peter/Pano. As I mentioned, I was glad to have him come to St. John’s since we’re both graduate alumni of the University of Chicago (he Social Thought, Booth for me). The tradition at St. John’s is to offer Summer Classics (a series of discussions in Santa Fe in July/August) to faculty and some select alumni, but perhaps you can persuade Pano to put together a Shakespeare week for the two of you. I’d recruit folks to join that, either in person or virtually.
The alumna, I believe, has the nym of an object that has been the subject of some debate about whether it’s a fruit or vegetable, combined with a title of senior nobility. We were not contemporaries, apparently, but we knew some of the same folks.
@Kent: That’s exactly the issue we are trying to address. As you can imagine, St. John’s graduates are well-equipped to do a lot of things, but we mostly fall into jobs that don’t necessarily make the kind of money that would allow us to send our children to our alma mater. By acknowledging that, we’re hoping to come up with a more sane way of making the college available to as many people as possible. Thankfully, there are some of us (again, we’re a small community) who are in a position to assist, and I’m gratified to say that we’re doing our part.