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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!
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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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!!
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.
Yeah, that's true throughout education, down to the local school level. Medicine too.
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
Not really. Universities make a lot of money off research and the research helps more with prestige ratings.
Grant money from researchers is a drop in the bucket. That money mostly goes to flesh out laboratories with fancy equipment and pay for research assistants.
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.
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.
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.