Cuts catch up with narcisstic colleges

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Monday 13 November 2023:

Here are the latest cuts, both definite and proposed, from the past week.

• The University of Arizona predicted “draconian” athletic cuts after officials found its cash on hand rapidly dwindling. Some sports programs could end because the athletic department failed to quickly pay back a $55-million pandemic-era loan. President Robert C. Robbins also said Arizona is spending too much on student financial aid, calling for an immediate end to a tuition-guarantee program that locks in rates for eight semesters, The Chronicle‘s Calli McMurray reported.

• Fresno Pacific University is dropping 16 programs and consolidating five schools to two. The Christian institution in California’s Central Valley said 11 faculty members will lose their jobs in June, and it won’t fill 12 open positions. It’s lost about a thousand students since 2020, although enrollment climbed this year, The San Joaquin Valley Sun reported.

• The University of Nebraska at Lincoln seeks $12 million in cuts. The reductions are proposed for instructional, administrative, and operational costs, according to KOLN.

• The University of Wisconsin-Parkside expects to slash its work force by 9.5 percent in the next year with a combination of voluntary separations, attrition, and layoffs. That includes about 50 full-time positions out of its total 525 employees. Parkside faces a $5.3-million deficit this year, joining several other campuses in the University of Wisconsin system that are making deep cuts in the face of budget gaps, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

My response

It was long clear to me during my two stints as a business dean, with some access to the inner workings and the costly -- not cost -- accounting of central administration, that the amount of money was never the real problem as much as it was the allocation of those funds, and those were mostly very good years for higher education, where enrollments and tuition revenues were expanding rapidly. That is, "We are rich enough to afford to be this stupid" approach to higher ed administration. Either that or it was the simpler, "greater fool" theory at work.

As the total number of college students decline, as the discount rates increase, as the enrollments of many flagship public and private schools increase (often losing money on each additional student, while the regional, unbranded and smaller private schools lose enrollments and net revenue), and as the woke administrator count balloons, the reality of cost accounting catches up with the less well funded schools -- with a vengeance.

The obvious villains in this equation are the overpaid administrators who keep their jobs (or leave with absurd severance packages) and the victims are the faculty and staff who either were not told of or just refused to see the looming cliff. Yet the real victims are those graduates with useless, unproductive degrees and almost two trillion dollars in debt, along with parents and society in general who trusted universities to do the right thing AND to do things right, neither of which seems to be happening.

And as I wrote on 9 November:

Almost as bad as business schools with faculty, courses and majors that despise or simply disparage capitalism and (economic) freedom — the right to own and the right to choose how you spend your money. The same capitalism that built and endowed these schools, and that keep their revenues and tuition rates flowing. 

And this, the same day, about the University of Arizona 'crisis' and the ignorant comments of a 'Middle Eastern studies" faculty member, who said, “This is a crisis of management, not a crisis of revenue,”  at the Faculty Senate meeting.

In response to the president, who said:

In addition, Robbins said, the university has been losing money from its generous financial-aid policies. It costs around $20,000 a year to educate each student, but in-state students pay an average of $5,000, Robbins said. And students with high-school grade-point averages above 3.75 pay nothing.“We lose money on everyone,” he said. “I have not really understood that as well as I should have.”

I wrote:

… while ignoring the obvious — spending or losing money on non-essential, mission-unrelated activities.

This is wider than the article suggests. Many flagships are trying to grow by using a business model that loses money on each additional student. That ignorant Arizona prof believes they have a profit problem; no, they have a loss problem. 

The first move in strategy is to decide what not to do. The last ditch answer is the old, when you’re in deep hole, start digging. 

It’s not the bad model or bad administration that’s killing education. It’s bad ideas dressed as social engineering and entertainment over education.