6 ms·

I'm a professor at a regional university. Not a big name school, but we have about 5,000 students. We would be bankrupt if we told students we'd only be offerin

by jimmar 6y ago

I'm a professor at a regional university. Not a big name school, but we have about 5,000 students. We would be bankrupt if we told students we'd only be offering classes online this fall because students, by an overwhelming majority, want the in-person experience. We know we would lose enrollment if we went fully online this fall, and the drop would be significant enough for the university to declare bankruptcy. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and other big names have enough reputation and big enough endowments to weather a storm of a temporary drop in enrollment due to shifting instruction online. Many universities cannot.

jstepka 6y ago
businesses go through these challenges all the time. the fat that gets trimmed is what makes them better.
- jimmar 6y ago
  I agree that universities should do more to control costs. I'll push back just a bit that trimming all "fat" would make universities better. Where I am, the "fat" proposed for trimming is support for study abroad, music education, research conferences, and other things that enrich the lives of students and (hopefully) benefit society as a whole.
  - csa 6y ago
    That’s sad, since that seems more flesh that fat to me. The real “fat” is the admin bloat at most universities. Most schools will continue to be in a precarious financial situation until that fat is cut, imho.
    - mindslight 6y ago
      The fundamental problem is that music teachers tend to care about music, while administrators tend to care about protecting their own jobs. So any budget cuts tend to cut services, rather than reducing the overhead. This dynamic plays out everywhere with overgrown middle management.
      - yostrovs 6y ago
        Music teachers care about their jobs just as much as administrators. It's just that administrators make the big decisions and they care about their jobs more than the jobs of others.
        wwweston 6y ago
        This seems to imply that once managerialism metastasizes in an organization, it's chronic and likely fatal to any other mission.
      - dehrmann 6y ago
        As far as students are concerned, a bigger problem than administrator pay is professors who are more interested in teaching than research, and even when professors are interested in teaching, they might not be good teachers.
  - bgorman 6y ago
    My Alma matter, also a regional university charges 47k a year in tuition. Assuming I take 12 classes a year and my classes average 15 students each, that puts the cost of providing a single class at $58,750. What the heck is going on for universities to have such an insane cost structure.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      $250,000 per year administrators, $30 million dollar buildings and "lazy rivers". If we had a statistic for what percentage of your buildings were for academic usage, you'd find the amount is low. "Paying for the Party" is a neat book here based on real life information from colleges.
- trianglem 6y ago
  Not always, the fat that gets trimmed is what makes things enjoyable in the first place.
jmull 6y ago
Man, this is very tough. I think the problem is (and I very much hope I am wrong!) that an outbreak will occur and your university will still have the financial problems. And also some more sick and dead people. (All from a US perspective) There's been a crazy notion floating around from the start on this, that we can either keep our normal activities/economy (jobs, businesses, schools, etc) or deal with the pandemic. However, you can't have anything normal unless the pandemic is under control. Because until it is, so many kinds of normal activities will be hit by an outbreak, and then your normal activity will fall apart and stop. I think we could have had school this fall. But it would have meant much more serious efforts months ago, building up our fast testing capabilities, a commitment to ongoing mask, social distancing, and other mechanisms to control the spread (mandates, really).
- impendia 6y ago
  I mostly agree. But I have not sensed -- at all -- that there is any "we", that Americans have or will come together to reach a common decision.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Nope, even with 100% lockdown, it still spreads because we aren’t an island country. It even got to Auckland now, through freight! You can only delay the inevitable (unless a vaccine is developed in the next few months)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - darkwizard42 6y ago
    Yeah you aren't trying to get it to 0% rate... you are trying to reduce it to a traceable and manageable amount... Kind of missing the point of what it means to "get it under control"
    - monadic2 6y ago
      0% sounds pretty good to me....
jariel 6y ago
"Many universities cannot." "Most" cannot.
- impendia 6y ago
  I work as a professor at the University of South Carolina. I suspect that my employer, as well as similar universities, will be more-or-less okay. To be sure, there will be pain. Faculty hiring, for example, will take a huge hit -- I feel bad for everyone finishing up grad school and postdocs now, and who was anticipating hitting the academic job market. In addition, there might be layoffs of tenured faculty, and/or closure of programs like history which are deeply worth preserving but which don't generate the big bucks. You might see a lot of sports get cut -- think swimming, wrestling, golf, etc. -- not the sort which get broadcast on TV. This already happened at Stanford. But my estimation is that we, and similar universities, do not face an existential threat. Hopefully I'm right. The schools that are most screwed are small, non-prestigious liberal arts colleges -- most of which are not very well known. Indeed, there were already a number of such closures before the pandemic hit.
  - jariel 6y ago
    University of Michigan will be hit for $1B It's definitely an existential threat to the system. The reason unis might survive are 1) government aid direct and indirect 2) Unis have otherwise heavily incumbent positions and the banks will provide money, maybe on ugly terms. Most colleges are panicking right now, this is not the kind of situation they are in any way equipped to handle. [1] https://www.newser.com/story/289974/2/colleges-face-existential-threat.html https://www.newser.com/story/289974/2/colleges-face-existent...
  - DiggyJohnson 6y ago
    Definitely surprised to find another Gamecock on HN. I'm a recent grad myself - perhaps one of you students? I'm curious: under what conditions do you think the threat to Carolina (and other similar regional flagship schools) becomes "existential"? E.g. classes go online for the Fall semester sometime in Spring, with little hope of reopening the campus for Spring. Forever to thee.
analog31 6y ago
I have two kids attending college this fall, one at the state "flagship" school, and the other at a regional college. Both are dead certain, as are their friends, that college will last a couple weeks, then they'll send everybody home. It will happen just in time for nobody to be prepared for it. The kids are all signing up for online classes whenever possible. My dental hygienist, whom I spoke to this week, has a daughter at one of the community colleges, in a transfer program where she does 2 years at the CoCo and then gets admitted to one of the state colleges to finish her degree. All of her classes are online. She's delighted with it. She takes classes at home while also caring for her little sister, while Mom works.
- vondur 6y ago
  Honestly, if I were graduating and attending college this year, I'd just skip this semester, and possibly the year. Online education isn't the same, and most universities are ill prepared to offer online instruction at the same level as in class instruction.
  - ollien 6y ago
    I'm in my senior year of college. I seriously considered doing exactly what you're suggesting. I would much rather just suck it up and enter the workforce at this point. I don't know what I'd do with myself for the year, and I don't have enough credits to speedrun my degree in the spring. There's also some conflicting information about if I would keep my financial aid. I haven't taken the time to dig into it, because at that point I decided it wasn't worth it.
37r7rudjduj 6y ago
Something I feel isn't being acknowledged with online education is that brick and mortar schools are the worst people to be doing it. Traditional colleges have staffing levels geared around physical limitations after all. Assuming you can make online-only work even kind've well, won't it mean that staff who share course modules are suddenly redundant as a concept? I get that that's not bad in the efficiency sense but if you can run a college without the brick, mortar, and seating requirements, then why would anyone ever hire the same number of master and phd level academics when you could have people specialized in communicating the material following modules designed by a subset of the people in the mid and upper echelons of academia? It seems like if we ever get online-only working what we're going to see is a mass consolodation of high level programs.

by jimmar 6y ago

jstepka 6y ago

businesses go through these challenges all the time. the fat that gets trimmed is what makes them better.

jimmar 6y ago
I agree that universities should do more to control costs. I'll push back just a bit that trimming all "fat" would make universities better. Where I am, the "fat" proposed for trimming is support for study abroad, music education, research conferences, and other things that enrich the lives of students and (hopefully) benefit society as a whole.
- csa 6y ago
  That’s sad, since that seems more flesh that fat to me. The real “fat” is the admin bloat at most universities. Most schools will continue to be in a precarious financial situation until that fat is cut, imho.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    The fundamental problem is that music teachers tend to care about music, while administrators tend to care about protecting their own jobs. So any budget cuts tend to cut services, rather than reducing the overhead. This dynamic plays out everywhere with overgrown middle management.
    - yostrovs 6y ago
      Music teachers care about their jobs just as much as administrators. It's just that administrators make the big decisions and they care about their jobs more than the jobs of others.
      - wwweston 6y ago
        This seems to imply that once managerialism metastasizes in an organization, it's chronic and likely fatal to any other mission.
    - dehrmann 6y ago
      As far as students are concerned, a bigger problem than administrator pay is professors who are more interested in teaching than research, and even when professors are interested in teaching, they might not be good teachers.
- bgorman 6y ago
  My Alma matter, also a regional university charges 47k a year in tuition. Assuming I take 12 classes a year and my classes average 15 students each, that puts the cost of providing a single class at $58,750. What the heck is going on for universities to have such an insane cost structure.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    $250,000 per year administrators, $30 million dollar buildings and "lazy rivers". If we had a statistic for what percentage of your buildings were for academic usage, you'd find the amount is low. "Paying for the Party" is a neat book here based on real life information from colleges.
trianglem 6y ago
Not always, the fat that gets trimmed is what makes things enjoyable in the first place.

jmull 6y ago

Man, this is very tough. I think the problem is (and I very much hope I am wrong!) that an outbreak will occur and your university will still have the financial problems. And also some more sick and dead people. (All from a US perspective) There's been a crazy notion floating around from the start on this, that we can either keep our normal activities/economy (jobs, businesses, schools, etc) or deal with the pandemic. However, you can't have anything normal unless the pandemic is under control. Because until it is, so many kinds of normal activities will be hit by an outbreak, and then your normal activity will fall apart and stop. I think we could have had school this fall. But it would have meant much more serious efforts months ago, building up our fast testing capabilities, a commitment to ongoing mask, social distancing, and other mechanisms to control the spread (mandates, really).

impendia 6y ago
I mostly agree. But I have not sensed -- at all -- that there is any "we", that Americans have or will come together to reach a common decision.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Nope, even with 100% lockdown, it still spreads because we aren’t an island country. It even got to Auckland now, through freight! You can only delay the inevitable (unless a vaccine is developed in the next few months)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- darkwizard42 6y ago
  Yeah you aren't trying to get it to 0% rate... you are trying to reduce it to a traceable and manageable amount... Kind of missing the point of what it means to "get it under control"
  - monadic2 6y ago
    0% sounds pretty good to me....

jariel 6y ago

"Many universities cannot." "Most" cannot.

impendia 6y ago
I work as a professor at the University of South Carolina. I suspect that my employer, as well as similar universities, will be more-or-less okay. To be sure, there will be pain. Faculty hiring, for example, will take a huge hit -- I feel bad for everyone finishing up grad school and postdocs now, and who was anticipating hitting the academic job market. In addition, there might be layoffs of tenured faculty, and/or closure of programs like history which are deeply worth preserving but which don't generate the big bucks. You might see a lot of sports get cut -- think swimming, wrestling, golf, etc. -- not the sort which get broadcast on TV. This already happened at Stanford. But my estimation is that we, and similar universities, do not face an existential threat. Hopefully I'm right. The schools that are most screwed are small, non-prestigious liberal arts colleges -- most of which are not very well known. Indeed, there were already a number of such closures before the pandemic hit.
- jariel 6y ago
  University of Michigan will be hit for $1B It's definitely an existential threat to the system. The reason unis might survive are 1) government aid direct and indirect 2) Unis have otherwise heavily incumbent positions and the banks will provide money, maybe on ugly terms. Most colleges are panicking right now, this is not the kind of situation they are in any way equipped to handle. [1] https://www.newser.com/story/289974/2/colleges-face-existential-threat.html https://www.newser.com/story/289974/2/colleges-face-existent...
- DiggyJohnson 6y ago
  Definitely surprised to find another Gamecock on HN. I'm a recent grad myself - perhaps one of you students? I'm curious: under what conditions do you think the threat to Carolina (and other similar regional flagship schools) becomes "existential"? E.g. classes go online for the Fall semester sometime in Spring, with little hope of reopening the campus for Spring. Forever to thee.

analog31 6y ago

I have two kids attending college this fall, one at the state "flagship" school, and the other at a regional college. Both are dead certain, as are their friends, that college will last a couple weeks, then they'll send everybody home. It will happen just in time for nobody to be prepared for it. The kids are all signing up for online classes whenever possible. My dental hygienist, whom I spoke to this week, has a daughter at one of the community colleges, in a transfer program where she does 2 years at the CoCo and then gets admitted to one of the state colleges to finish her degree. All of her classes are online. She's delighted with it. She takes classes at home while also caring for her little sister, while Mom works.

vondur 6y ago
Honestly, if I were graduating and attending college this year, I'd just skip this semester, and possibly the year. Online education isn't the same, and most universities are ill prepared to offer online instruction at the same level as in class instruction.
- ollien 6y ago
  I'm in my senior year of college. I seriously considered doing exactly what you're suggesting. I would much rather just suck it up and enter the workforce at this point. I don't know what I'd do with myself for the year, and I don't have enough credits to speedrun my degree in the spring. There's also some conflicting information about if I would keep my financial aid. I haven't taken the time to dig into it, because at that point I decided it wasn't worth it.

37r7rudjduj 6y ago

Something I feel isn't being acknowledged with online education is that brick and mortar schools are the worst people to be doing it. Traditional colleges have staffing levels geared around physical limitations after all. Assuming you can make online-only work even kind've well, won't it mean that staff who share course modules are suddenly redundant as a concept? I get that that's not bad in the efficiency sense but if you can run a college without the brick, mortar, and seating requirements, then why would anyone ever hire the same number of master and phd level academics when you could have people specialized in communicating the material following modules designed by a subset of the people in the mid and upper echelons of academia? It seems like if we ever get online-only working what we're going to see is a mass consolodation of high level programs.