2y ago

This public university just announced massive layoffs. Is all higher ed at risk?

therealnews.com This public university just announced massive layoffs. Is all higher ed at risk?

The new WVU budget slashes nearly 10 percent of majors and 7 percent of all faculty—but students and staff aren't going down without a fight.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/1806644

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This public university just announced massive layoffs. Is all higher ed at risk?

therealnews.com /this-public-university-just-announced-massive-layoffs-is-all-higher-ed-at-risk

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Higher Ed in red states is at risk. Of course, that’s the outcome that red states vote for. Oh no! It’s the completely predictable consequences of our very own actions!
- West Virginia was a reliable blue state until the 2000 election. Maybe if democrats focused on helping workers instead of bourgeois scum, they wouldn’t constantly be terrified (or even at risk) of losing elections?
- I’m fine with red states basically being the dumb manual labor slaves the US has always wanted.
  “Made in Oklahoma by children labor”
  Works for my blue-state-ass.
  VOTE!!
  
  “Slavery is okay as long as it takes place out of sight and materially benefits me!” — liberals

We are going through a demographic transition, a pinch in the hourglass. It will be temporary but painful, and the other side of the pinch might not be as big as it once was. Our population is aging.
It’s kind of crazy that our research apparatus is tied to how many students happen to be enrolling. World class universities is what makes the US economy so strong. From the tech to the biomedical industries, it’s not “the free market” that has boosted the economy, but being leaders in publicly available government funded research.
- Yup. R&D is a matter of national security, too.
- While I agree, the cuts need to happen and they need to be purely targeted at administration which exploded over the boom years.
  We had massive growth and very little of that revenue made it to either research or actual teaching.
  Fire the admin staff from education and healthcare, we need to make those sectors work again.
  
  It's the facilities costs that have truly exploded in the past couple of decades. Every university is in an arms race to build the biggest, most advanced campus possible. They've forgotten that their goal is to be a place of study and instead they're trying to have world-class architecture so they can woo students. Students would go there so long as the damn programs are well run and they have a good reputation.
  Just stop the gigantic capital projects and suddenly you've got plenty of capital. Hmm.
- The economics aren't really that tied. A lot of universities have research arms that are not tied to their undergraduate population. It might need a graduate student population to oppress, but undergrads are rather worthless.
  
  Undergrads are the revenue generating portion of the university

I finished my PhD in 2016. Since then I have shifted to industry, a move largely prompted by seeing the absolute shit state of academia at the moment (in the US).
It's no longer a meritocracy. It's all about who you know (or who you don't), and in that sense, it's no different from industry. But salaries are looking inflated given the differential between industry and academic workloads. It's only a matter of time for academic institutions to enshittify as if they were private-sector entities, because most are effectively run like private-sector entities at this point.
I did my graduate work at a top-tier public university in the US. Most of its funding is now from ridiculous tuition rates and other ways to nickel and dime its students. Its administrators make money like a private c-suite.
- When was it ever a meritocracy? It's always been about who you know.

Colleges act like Scientology in the states. Equating education with how much money you've handed them.
Meanwhile anything can be learned online, but it counts for nothing because corporations treat purchases credentials as the only legitimate form of "education".
- Ah yes, I'm sure the formal training received by doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, and engineers is just an over-hyped "education" that can all be replaced by online MOOCs.
  There are real problems with education, especially with the costs, but "anything can be learned online" is the worst take I've heard in a long while.
  
  Anything can be learned online, with enough drive and determination
  But if you're that powerful: why bother learning from others? You could simply leave and create your own community called name's Gulch.

Honestly, I think higher ed is more at risk because the people on the top keep skimming for more funds, leaving everyone below struggling. Pay your faculty, staff, and working students (grads and undergrads) well.
- Very few faculty and staff make high salaries. But the facilities costs are insane. Universities could do just fine without building another $50 Million dollar building. Growth for the sake of growth needs to stop. If that happens, then suddenly tuition costs would be under control.
- State subsidization has also dived off a cliff. Why would they when they know people will take out loans to make it up? (Neoliberal answers only!)

Yeah, but the pain isn't going to be universal. For profit universities aren't doing well already and I expect them to do worse over time. I expect a lot of non-profit private liberal arts universities to go bankrupt unless they turn into foreign student visa centers. There will probably be some consolidation of public universities, but nothing really bad.
I expect college to get a lot cheaper as the available student pool doesn't recover from the millennial echo boom.
- I expect college to get a lot cheaper as the available student pool doesn't recover from the millennial echo boom.
  “The market will self-correct,” I tell myself, despite all evidence to the contrary (the total lack of an incentive for monopoly capital to lower prices in a bourgeois dictatorship). “The market will self-correct. The market cannot fail us. Only we can fail the market.”

73 comments