Culling the herd

And the cuts just keep on coming, again, from The Chronicle of (the Demise of) Higher Education:

"Battered by market headwinds and struggling with stagnant enrollment, numerous colleges and universities have cut jobs and academic programs in recent months. Cuts have become so common that Inside Higher Ed is changing its approach to covering them. Going forward, we plan to provide regular roundups of the institutions trimming back rather than covering each independently."

The Latest on Campus Cuts

McGill University in Canada could cut hundreds of jobs due to projected enrollment losses, while other institutions are weighing much smaller reductions.

My response, to colleagues:

You'd think that with all this "inclusion" and "diversity is our strength," that "loneliness" would be the last thing the woke would predict. Then, again, throw in Covid policies with tribal identity politics on campus, we should have expected this...

So on top of the hundreds of million being spent on woke "inclusion" we now have more demand for mental health counselors, student development deans, and "student success" coaches, pushing up costs and producing enrollment and budget cuts as "accessibility" and "affordability" have taken a back seat to social engineering, and to addressing the self-inflicted problems.

I once embraced the "go woke, go broke" projection, yet I think that there are two tracks operating here: The rich schools can afford to go woke -- at least for a while. As Mark Steyn would say, "They're rich enough to be this stupid." Meanwhile, the poor colleges will continue to go out of business, shifting enrollments to those rich colleges. I see that in Wisconsin and with other flagship state universities, bleeding the regional campuses to death, just as the richly endowed private colleges do the same to their impoverished brethren. And all of this shifts the even less-prepared and less-qualified students from third and fourth tier schools into the once higher standards of the elite/rich/branded schools. And all of this in the name of "equity," while achieving quite the opposite. Here, the rich truly get richer while the poor get poorer -- and die -- while embracing identity politics and rejecting science.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we are facing a widening gap between (1) the skills needed to succeed in life and careers and (2) the educational outcomes of woke education. Not enough STEM, too many faux "critical thinking" claims from the liberal arts, and an increasing number of useless majors and billions in (unpaid) student debt, leaving us with millions of job openings, even more millions of people leaving or not entering the workforce, and creating a disgruntled post-college demo that prefers communism over capitalism, in part because they are broke, unable to buy a home or a car, unable to afford to get married (although it's not as if they would want to), and eager to protest capitalism, entrepreneurship, merit, success, accomplishment and the inevitable diverse outcomes that result from this miasma of social engineering.