Music; Music Business and Industry; Music Education; Music Therapy; Conducting; Acting; Dance; Musical Theatre; Theatre Design and Technology; Wildlife and Fisheries Resources; Natural Resources Science; Genetics and Developmental Biology; Plant and Soil Sciences; Natural Resource Economics; Women’s and Gender Studies; Philosophy; Health Services and Outcomes Research; Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences; Epidemiology; Social and Behavioral Sciences
These degrees are remaining with reduced staff:
Mining Engineering; Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering; Civil Engineering; Computer Engineering; Computer Science; Electrical Engineering; Software Engineering; Elementary Education; Literacy Education; Music Composition; Music Performance; Law; Agriculture; Design Studies; Fashion Design and Merchandising; Interior Architecture; Human and Community Development; Environmental, Soil, and Water Sciences; Chemistry; Communication Studies; English; Secondary Education; Professional Writing and Editing; Mathematics; Management; Human Resource Management; Communication Sciences and Disorders; Exercise Physiology; Health Informatics / Information Management; Human Performance and Health; Athletic Training; Occupational Therapy; Speech Language Pathology; Audiology; Physical Therapy; Pharmacy; Health Administration; Biostatistics
These degrees are remaining with reduced staff and getting merged together:
Theatre with Puppetry; Costume Design with Lighting Design with Scenic Design with Technical Direction; Energy Land Management with Environmental and Energy Resource Management; Forest Resource Management with Wood Science and Technology; Horticulture with Sustainable Food and Farming; Agribusiness Management with Environmental and Natural Resource Economics; Public Health with Health Services Management and Leadership
These degrees are remaining with reduced staff but with some specializations eliminated:
Art and Design; Art Education; Art and Design; Environmental Microbiology
These degrees are being eliminated entirely:
Biometric Systems Engineering; Higher Education Administration; Multicategorical Special Education; Art History; Jazz Studies; Jazz Pedagogy; Composition; Collaborative Piano; Acting; Environmental and Community Planning; Landscape Architecture; Recreation, Parks, and Tourism; Energy Environments; Resource Management; Creative Writing; MS/PhD Mathematics; Legal Studies; Public Administration; Chinese; French; German; Russian; Spanish; Linguistics; TESOL; Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences
---
Also note that these are just recommendations not final decisions yet.
Not to make an obvious boring comment, but: someone was offering a college degree in this? Yeesh. Bloat begets bloat, I guess.
I guess maybe that's overly cynical. Post-secondary education is important, and it follows that we would want people to figure out how to best deliver it. But hard not to judge that, just a little bit.
> Not to make an obvious boring comment, but: someone was offering a college degree in [higher education administration]? Yeesh. Bloat begets bloat, I guess.
1. This is a graduate degree.
2. Part of the degree is doctorate type of stuff (research methodology). This content is definitely needed. The other part is stuff that is unique to universities, and it is all over the map — finance (including fund raising), policy, governance, student development, campus culture, etc.
You can’t just take a random professor or a random business person and expect them to be a good university administrator. It’s a topic worthy of research and study, imho.
All that said, many of the folks I know who majored in this field absolutely drink the kool-aid and are mostly full of shit. I personally think that’s due to the folks who are shaping the areas of discourse in this field (mostly in a very near-term sort of way that lacks vision) more than it being an issue of the field being fundamentally flawed itself.
I worked at a university that offer a “PhD” in higher ed. administration. In theory I suppose nearly any field could be the valid subject of research. In practice, I saw this degree used to grant PhDs to existing administrators who didn’t already have PhDs. I’m guessing that this may be useful in gaming rankings.
Often high school principal jobs, school district administrator and university jobs require a graduate degree, as a gatekeeping credential. This degree was likely created to capture that tuition money by offering the necessary employment credential for a relatively low level of academic effort.
This is good as a first step. Better would be Higher Education Administration Administration, a PhD-level field dedicated to the theory and practice of administrating academic programs about higher education administration.
Maybe don’t judge it, then. At least not in such a condescending way. Especially since we need more people thinking deeply about how to make education work, not fewer.
You comment this on a website which has weekly threads about "how I burned out switching from dev to management" or "How I started a small business on an island because the switch to management fucked up my life" threads.
There is a lot of theory and practical studies involved in running a school or university. Also, many schools will require their admin to have a background in school administration, which tracks like this one help develop.
Acting is an interesting example. While it isnt an economicly good idea, a large percentage of successful actors do get their start there, paticularly make actors who generally "break" into the business at an older age than female actors. Jim Parsons is the classic example. He had a masters in theatre and was in his mid-30s before his breakout on the big bang theory. He became the highest-paid male actor on TV.
Compare Kaley Cuoco who broke at aged fifteen (Growing up Brady) and i do not believe ever finished traditional highschool.
I wonder how they did their selections. Some of the choices surprise me, such as reduction of staff on comp sci, software eng, electrical eng. I presume those departments would be where people want to go because of the big paying jobs.
They published their methodology, the metrics driving discontinuation of programs and specialties were:
- Enrollment in the major/program (as of Fall 2022)
- Enrollment trends in the major/program over a five-year period (Fall 2018-Fall 2022)
The metrics for reducing headcount were:
- Student credit hour (SCH) production trend from AY 2020 to AY 2022
- Full-time faculty headcount and trend from 2020 to 2022
- Full-time faculty-to-student ratio
- Net tuition revenue trends over 2020-2022 (Tuition revenue, based on SCH production, minus expenses)
- Total unrestricted expenses trend from 2020-2022
- Net financial position and trend from 2020-2022
Exceptions were made for:
- R1 research contributions - Doctoral programs and associated non-terminal master’s programs within a unit that has annual (FY 2022) external research expenditures of $1 million are exempted from review.
We don’t know about previous cuts, so it could be that unaffected programs were cut to the bone already. Also, they might not just be competitive in those programs to attract students and teachers needed to run them, so it’s better to focus on other things. Not every school can run a viable world class computer science program.
Yeah was surprised to see Computer Science and some other 'hot fields' in the list of programs getting downsized as well, wonder if there just wasn't that much demand for these majors in this particular college?
Barring significant open-source contributions or stellar leetcode skillz, the path to an entry-level tech job in the valley or NYC will be a challenge.
I went to a top-25 CS program in a flyover state without tech jobs, and only the top 5-10% of the graduating class made it to a major tech hub within 5 years. Granted, there a personal reasons to not leave, but still.
Maybe the computer engineering is vastly underpaid compared to computer science but, I guess they can’t attract computer science professors and or students ??? It seems very odd.
> Mining Engineering; Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering; Civil Engineering;
Energy Land Management with Environmental and Energy Resource Management;
Forest Resource Management with Wood Science and Technology;
Agribusiness Management with Environmental and Natural Resource Economics
That list is not what I would expect as having a hard time in West Virginia.
Most of these sound more like job titles than degrees. There are a few foundational disciplines that are buried in a sea of vocational disciplines. What happened to learning the fundamentals and gaining the rest through work experience? Most of these should not exist.
What does one do with a DEGREE in Chinese? As opposed to not getting a degree in Chinese but spending 4 years learning it while getting a degree in, I dunno, materials science or something.
Presumably the people coming through these programs are a drop in the ocean next to number of Americans fluent in Chinese and Spanish, and likely able to teach it at quite a high level without a specific degree for that language.
Legal studies seems most surprising for me. I thought that those were the expensive, but cheap to teach subjects. Which would make sense from cost perspective. Optimize the cost to return.
Probably because it's not a very useful exit. The most successful law school applicants have degrees like history, classics, or math. A degree in legal studies (1) doesn't rank for getting into law school (or if it does, it's clearly not the what law schools want), (2) Looks a little useless/incomplete if you stop after the bachelor and don't go to law school.
FWIW people with 2 or 4 year degrees in law or justice and no other education seem to become probation officers in my experience, so I'm all for WVU sending that one into the ocean.
Thanks for posting this list. Makes it seem like practical decisions from my point of view.
The list you provide looks to me like a college that believes anyone in arts can actual pursue their own path and ambitions. The way the arts work this could go unnoticed if the instructors do it correctly.
This looks to me like a college that is trying to break out of the traditional liberal arts idea into more focused instruction. This will work out for students that are focused.
I went to a four year art school and I would have loved the art history department being disbanded. I was talking to my freshman year roommate and his quote was something like this.
"They knew I choose this school because I can't do that work, so why do they make us take art history."
Biometric systems engineering cut huh? Looks like that play to the FBI to convert miners into biometrics staffers for CJIS in Clarksburg didn’t play out huh?
I'm from Canada so maybe this is more typical of the US, but does anyone else find these degree programs a bit odd? Like here, we get a degree in Computer Science, or in Biology, or in Life Sciences, or Health Sciences (I will say, those last three can get a bit weirdly specific) but I've never heard anyone say that they are getting a degree in 'Human and Community Development'. That seems so specific so as to reduce the value in getting a degree.
At some point I wants to say to these backward states: may it be as you ask. Fine, turn your back on the fruits of humankind's knowledge and development. But of course, they have children; even if they do not care for them, we must.
I recommend this website [0] for some details about how they got into this situation. Included are comparisons to peers (public Big XII schools), which are considerably better off. Hilariously, over the past 3 years, WVU was unable to generate actionable data on costs & revenues of their academic programs, though they spent over $1mm on consultants specifically for this purpose and pay $3mm annually on internal roles whose job functions have considerable overlap and include doing this type of work. Administration hired a second consultancy for the same purpose in 2023.
This is essentially written by bitter ex or current employees.
Professors often approach public debate by assuming everyone else is braindead, rather than puzzling through conflicting information.
For example, they immediately dismiss the president's claim that a demographic change contributes to this issue as "false" because the US birth rate may have been very stable. But that says nothing about parents in the WVU area, which we know are either older or moved to other states.
> This is essentially written by bitter ex or current employees.
I imagine if you worked at a place for over a decade, then saw it being run into the ground at speed by people earning 5-10x your salary, some bitterness may emerge.
The bitterness of current and former employees, alums, and many people around the state, does not detract from several excellent points made by the piece. To read it and wholly dismiss it is questionnable (especially with a birthrate comment).
Birthrate in the "WVU area" should be considered, but consider a couple datapoints: Total enrollment overall increased [0] year over year for both 2021-2022 and 2022-2023, and over half of WVU students come from outside WV [1]
I lived in a small Rust Belt city, dropped out of college, waited tables, built a restaurant management app, sold it, by the grace of God made it to a FAANG.
Everything I've learned and surprised me over 7 years there fits into exactly what you said, "[smart cloistered people without exposure to costs] often approach debate by assuming everyone else is braindead, rather than puzzling through conflicting information"
It costs so, so, much, especially when you throw in the rush everyone is in.
The enrollment cliff is well documented and real and does not impact all universities equally. A college that has a very high acceptance rate, such as WVU will likely feel the impact of the enrollment cliff more than others.
Initial enrollment is also not the same as enrollment at census. Colleges experience some level of "melt" which is the number of students who end up not showing up or otherwise leaving in the first couple months of their first year. Again, I would imagine that WVU with their high acceptance rate would experience outsized melt compared to their peers.
> though they spent over $1mm on consultants specifically for this purpose and pay $3mm annually on internal roles whose job functions have considerable overlap and include doing this type of work. Administration hired a second consultancy for the same purpose in 2023.
This style of consulting is usually a performative act because the people who should be making decisions don't have or don't feel like they have the authority to make decisions.
Paying $X million for an outside consultancy to come up with the decision, gives the decision authority. Of course, the consultancy is usually guided to the 'right' decision, either implicitly or explicitly. Although sometimes you see failures of guidance, where against incentives the consultancy delivers a good recommendation and then it's usually ignored.
Anyway, this is a grift, but who's going to turn down $1M to tell someone what they already know?
IMHO, the more grifty consultancy is systems building, where you set up a $10M contract over ten years to build a system that doesn't work and doesn't actually replace the old system. But maybe that's just performative too: nobody wants to say to just keep the old system, so spending time and money on something everyone knows won't work and won't be ready before you leave makes it look like you're doing the right thing?
There's also non-grift consulting. You might pay a real expert a reasonable sum for an engineering consult, etc.
I could see the point of consulting if what you were paying for was genuine expertise that you lack in house, but often consultants are just know-nothings fresh out of university.
So another layer to the consultancy grift is consulting agencies who scam and delude the consultants themselves. Consultants are often just glorified temps who end up doing same sort of of grunt work as employees, but have much less job security and therefore potential to unionise. Big companies like a workforce that can't organise, and pay consulting agencies this for precariousness as a service.
I wonder how much more of this "middle class" of colleges we will see hollowed out over the next few years/decades.
So many of these places are in really serious financial straits. Families are more and more unwilling to pay, and students are taking the possibility of trade/vocational school seriously.
Harvard will be fine. Stanford will be fine. Prestigious schools could last for quite a long while on their endowments alone, and besides, the Ivies have no shortage of eager customers. The brand value is too strong.
And I actually think 1) biiiiig state schools 2) small community colleges will mostly be fine. The government support is there, and the bang-for-your-buck is there.
But the middle-tier private university might be a dying breed.
In the US, community colleges general offer 2 year trade degrees. WVU is a typical public university offering 4 year bachelor (and above) degrees. It’s the kind of public school we want to keep around and well-run.
I mean they should hollow out, its the employer’s deficiency that it lazily began screening for college degrees over the past 60 years
All these colleges are grifts on that concept
The upper class higher learning of Ivy League and adjacent predate this prerequisite, are tone death to the reasons that students attend for job eligibility over actual higher learning or satisfying a clause in a trust fund, and will survive this time period where students are there for jobs. These things are 300 years old in the US, the last half century and the tailend pushes for inclusion will totally be a footnote in their dynasty
Much like Mr. Katz of the linguistics program I have bias because of the amount of time that I spent in the Linguistics department as well as the departments of multiple foreign languages in college. In addition to my linguistics major, I took classes in Chinese, Japanese, French, and German. It's also been quite a long time since then, and things have surely changed. So, with that bias out in the open:
I think that the discussions here generally underestimate how much these language programs contribute to university life beyond just a degree:
1. Will international students be attracted to this university with no program that represents their native language? My experience was that a lot of Chinese students spent quite a lot of time in the Chinese department, even if their focus was engineering.
2. In the same vein, what meaningful partnerships will WVU have with non-English speaking institutes of higher education in the future? Seems like not very many! Even if computers will do the translating in the future, we're still talking about a global economy and relationships are important.
3. What about students of all disciplines (history especially comes to mind) that are interested in texts that weren't published in English. jUSt uSe gOoGlE? I'm rolling my eyes. There's still plenty of knowledge for English speakers in non-English texts.
Provincial is the word that comes to mind, which I think of as the opposite of "Education".
This is interesting, Gordon Gee is their current President. He was the president at Ohio State while I was there he was well-loved by the students and would routinely make appearances at off-campus parties and pose for photos with students. He also had a razor-sharp memory for people and recognized me multiple times when I bumped into him. But that wasn't his strongest suit, he was a fund raising machine, that man brought a lot of money into the university from alumni and other donors. I'm shocked to hear that WVU is having financial issues under his leadership.
My freshman year at WVU was the year Gee took over as president. That was definitely his thing to ingratiate himself to the students. The whole frost couple weeks he would go up and down frat row, and through all the big house parties and shake hands, pose for pictures, etc. He quickly got this vibe as the "cool dad" with his cute bow ties. This won the student body over easily, so we were confused when our professors were really bummed about it. Apparently word gets around on your management style and spending habits.
The dude ripped through money he didn't have, hired a ton of bloat, and is now cutting staff in nearly all the programs I held dear.
While they have many skills, connections being one of the most useful to their employer, my theory is that the greatest skill of executives is the ability to gain credit and avoid blame. They hone that razor sharp and wield it constantly to achieve their positions.
Seemingly the president (a weird title, but okay) of that university brings in about US$750k / year - and is also noteworthy for being one of the highest paid public university presidents for some time[1] - netting US$6m for 2013 from Ohio, while stepping down from there after making some inappropriate comments.
My point is slightly tangential to the above - one might expect one of the most highly paid professionals in this role to be highly skilled, and to avoid this kind of oversight or blindsiding.
Are we even sure this is a bad thing for the school? Sounds like they are streamlining their business, just with a lot of the usual useless administrative bloat and incompetence slowing it down.
The administrative bloat and incompetence is why they're in the position to cut academic programs in the first place. You seem to think the tail is wagging the dog.
Medicaid spending-- driven by huge federal incentives-- is crowding out state dollars for higher education. Medicaid enrollment has increased 50% in WV in the last decade (while the state population has declined). The US is making a policy choice to funnel more of GDP into a wildly inefficient health care system to support obese and aging populations, instead of funding K-12 and higher education.
We are screwed on healthcare and most of the proposed "solutions" will only make things worse.
We need smart legislation to eliminate global free ridership on medication as well as less insurance, not more (combined with universal catastrophic high deductible insurance a la Singapore's medishield). We also need occupational licensing reform and to decouple healthcare from employment (ie. the politically impossible cadillac tax that Obama tried to push through).
Shielding people more from the true cost of healthcare is the politically popular option but does not improve health outcomes and drives utilization (and thus resource allocation) higher.
Medicaid enrollment went way up but federal spending growth remained relatively close to the trend. They didn't even overhaul the system to combat the price gouging that is going on. To me this trial run proves the opposite of your conclusion: the US would be able to afford public healthcare if it adopted an intelligent model. We need to set the bar higher as a society when it comes to social well-being, not pull back on our ambitions.
In a situation with declining proportion of working age population (and lack of sufficient automation to offset it), one will lead to the other, as more and more of the share of resources from the working population are reallocated to the non working population.
It's not so much a choice that we take pride in doing but a problem we have boxed ourselves into. Path dependency sucks. The benefit of a republic is that huge political shifts happen over a long period of time. Sharp changes only happen in response to an immediate crisis. Normally the system rewards grafting yet another patch onto the existing system instead of throwing it out and setting an entirely new set of rules.
Medical services became much more effective when physicians accepted scientific methods. Allopathic physicians used state licensing to restrict who could call themselves a physician. Due to post WWII price controls employers offered health insurance. Baby boomers did not grow up with the existence of all the drugs we have or neonatal intensive care units. People are still considered alive after their heart stops beating. Standards of care went up. Health workers' scopes of practice are carefully circumscribed by their license which does not transfer across state lines. The government agreed to pay for the medical costs of the elderly and poor, letting private health insurance skim profits from the lower cost working age population. Attempts to rationalize the system via a National Health Service, single payer financing, or heavy regulations on a universal private insurance market have failed. Instead the ACA just plugged the most egregious pitfalls for Americans and tinkered around the edges to try get everyone insured. Some states have chosen to not expand Medicaid to the detriment of their indigent population and rural hospitals.
If medical costs are to ever stop growing at 6% per annum the end result will likely be due to a combination of price controls, wait times and limits on care to hold down demand, lower health worker pay, free training for health workers, and rationalization of the system to incentivize population wide health. Switching from fee for service to per capita removes the incentive to treat more to generate more revenue. If universal eligibility is achieved that removes the incentive to refuse service to uninsured patients or discharge them ASAP. When outcomes are measured for the health sector as a whole, problems like hospital re-admissions or high co-pays that result in some patients not filling their medication orders get a harder look instead of being a perverse gain for one business and a bigger cost for the rest of us. Right now healthcare is run as a business. Each firm optimizes for the profitability of their link in the chain. The government tries to help those left behind by loading money into the top of the medical-industrial complex without ever making changes to the Rube Goldberg machine within.
Readit News
Music; Music Business and Industry; Music Education; Music Therapy; Conducting; Acting; Dance; Musical Theatre; Theatre Design and Technology; Wildlife and Fisheries Resources; Natural Resources Science; Genetics and Developmental Biology; Plant and Soil Sciences; Natural Resource Economics; Women’s and Gender Studies; Philosophy; Health Services and Outcomes Research; Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences; Epidemiology; Social and Behavioral Sciences
These degrees are remaining with reduced staff:
Mining Engineering; Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering; Civil Engineering; Computer Engineering; Computer Science; Electrical Engineering; Software Engineering; Elementary Education; Literacy Education; Music Composition; Music Performance; Law; Agriculture; Design Studies; Fashion Design and Merchandising; Interior Architecture; Human and Community Development; Environmental, Soil, and Water Sciences; Chemistry; Communication Studies; English; Secondary Education; Professional Writing and Editing; Mathematics; Management; Human Resource Management; Communication Sciences and Disorders; Exercise Physiology; Health Informatics / Information Management; Human Performance and Health; Athletic Training; Occupational Therapy; Speech Language Pathology; Audiology; Physical Therapy; Pharmacy; Health Administration; Biostatistics
These degrees are remaining with reduced staff and getting merged together:
Theatre with Puppetry; Costume Design with Lighting Design with Scenic Design with Technical Direction; Energy Land Management with Environmental and Energy Resource Management; Forest Resource Management with Wood Science and Technology; Horticulture with Sustainable Food and Farming; Agribusiness Management with Environmental and Natural Resource Economics; Public Health with Health Services Management and Leadership
These degrees are remaining with reduced staff but with some specializations eliminated:
Art and Design; Art Education; Art and Design; Environmental Microbiology
These degrees are being eliminated entirely:
Biometric Systems Engineering; Higher Education Administration; Multicategorical Special Education; Art History; Jazz Studies; Jazz Pedagogy; Composition; Collaborative Piano; Acting; Environmental and Community Planning; Landscape Architecture; Recreation, Parks, and Tourism; Energy Environments; Resource Management; Creative Writing; MS/PhD Mathematics; Legal Studies; Public Administration; Chinese; French; German; Russian; Spanish; Linguistics; TESOL; Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences
---
Also note that these are just recommendations not final decisions yet.
Not to make an obvious boring comment, but: someone was offering a college degree in this? Yeesh. Bloat begets bloat, I guess.
I guess maybe that's overly cynical. Post-secondary education is important, and it follows that we would want people to figure out how to best deliver it. But hard not to judge that, just a little bit.
1. This is a graduate degree.
2. Part of the degree is doctorate type of stuff (research methodology). This content is definitely needed. The other part is stuff that is unique to universities, and it is all over the map — finance (including fund raising), policy, governance, student development, campus culture, etc.
You can’t just take a random professor or a random business person and expect them to be a good university administrator. It’s a topic worthy of research and study, imho.
All that said, many of the folks I know who majored in this field absolutely drink the kool-aid and are mostly full of shit. I personally think that’s due to the folks who are shaping the areas of discourse in this field (mostly in a very near-term sort of way that lacks vision) more than it being an issue of the field being fundamentally flawed itself.
This is good as a first step. Better would be Higher Education Administration Administration, a PhD-level field dedicated to the theory and practice of administrating academic programs about higher education administration.
Looks like the former is about BFA Acting and the one recommended to be discontinued is MFA Acting, source: https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/28d9f865-8d36-4e55-a4d0-475c...
Compare Kaley Cuoco who broke at aged fifteen (Growing up Brady) and i do not believe ever finished traditional highschool.
They published their methodology, the metrics driving discontinuation of programs and specialties were:
- Enrollment in the major/program (as of Fall 2022)
- Enrollment trends in the major/program over a five-year period (Fall 2018-Fall 2022)
The metrics for reducing headcount were:
- Student credit hour (SCH) production trend from AY 2020 to AY 2022
- Full-time faculty headcount and trend from 2020 to 2022
- Full-time faculty-to-student ratio
- Net tuition revenue trends over 2020-2022 (Tuition revenue, based on SCH production, minus expenses)
- Total unrestricted expenses trend from 2020-2022
- Net financial position and trend from 2020-2022
Exceptions were made for:
- R1 research contributions - Doctoral programs and associated non-terminal master’s programs within a unit that has annual (FY 2022) external research expenditures of $1 million are exempted from review.
- State priority program (land-grant mission)
- Areas of distinction/differentiation
Barring significant open-source contributions or stellar leetcode skillz, the path to an entry-level tech job in the valley or NYC will be a challenge.
I went to a top-25 CS program in a flyover state without tech jobs, and only the top 5-10% of the graduating class made it to a major tech hub within 5 years. Granted, there a personal reasons to not leave, but still.
Dead Comment
That list is not what I would expect as having a hard time in West Virginia.
I don't have a hard time believing that mining is not as productive a field as it once was. It's a shrinking part of the WV economy.
Why subsidize job training with valuable shareholder capital when you can have universities teach the fundamentals AND teach real world skills?! /s
FWIW people with 2 or 4 year degrees in law or justice and no other education seem to become probation officers in my experience, so I'm all for WVU sending that one into the ocean.
The list you provide looks to me like a college that believes anyone in arts can actual pursue their own path and ambitions. The way the arts work this could go unnoticed if the instructors do it correctly.
This looks to me like a college that is trying to break out of the traditional liberal arts idea into more focused instruction. This will work out for students that are focused.
I went to a four year art school and I would have loved the art history department being disbanded. I was talking to my freshman year roommate and his quote was something like this.
"They knew I choose this school because I can't do that work, so why do they make us take art history."
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[0] https://wvufacts.wordpress.com/
Professors often approach public debate by assuming everyone else is braindead, rather than puzzling through conflicting information.
For example, they immediately dismiss the president's claim that a demographic change contributes to this issue as "false" because the US birth rate may have been very stable. But that says nothing about parents in the WVU area, which we know are either older or moved to other states.
I imagine if you worked at a place for over a decade, then saw it being run into the ground at speed by people earning 5-10x your salary, some bitterness may emerge.
Birthrate in the "WVU area" should be considered, but consider a couple datapoints: Total enrollment overall increased [0] year over year for both 2021-2022 and 2022-2023, and over half of WVU students come from outside WV [1]
[0] To see the increased enrollment, you need to get the '21-'22 enrollment from this site: https://www.thedaonline.com/news/wvu-continues-to-experience... and the '22-'23 enrollment here: https://www.wvu.edu/faq/how-many-students-are-enrolled
This year's enrollment was published (news claimed increase); traveling and didn't immediately find the source.
[1] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/west-virginia-univer...
Everything I've learned and surprised me over 7 years there fits into exactly what you said, "[smart cloistered people without exposure to costs] often approach debate by assuming everyone else is braindead, rather than puzzling through conflicting information"
It costs so, so, much, especially when you throw in the rush everyone is in.
Initial enrollment is also not the same as enrollment at census. Colleges experience some level of "melt" which is the number of students who end up not showing up or otherwise leaving in the first couple months of their first year. Again, I would imagine that WVU with their high acceptance rate would experience outsized melt compared to their peers.
Is consulting the ultimate late capitalism grift?
Paying $X million for an outside consultancy to come up with the decision, gives the decision authority. Of course, the consultancy is usually guided to the 'right' decision, either implicitly or explicitly. Although sometimes you see failures of guidance, where against incentives the consultancy delivers a good recommendation and then it's usually ignored.
Anyway, this is a grift, but who's going to turn down $1M to tell someone what they already know?
IMHO, the more grifty consultancy is systems building, where you set up a $10M contract over ten years to build a system that doesn't work and doesn't actually replace the old system. But maybe that's just performative too: nobody wants to say to just keep the old system, so spending time and money on something everyone knows won't work and won't be ready before you leave makes it look like you're doing the right thing?
There's also non-grift consulting. You might pay a real expert a reasonable sum for an engineering consult, etc.
So another layer to the consultancy grift is consulting agencies who scam and delude the consultants themselves. Consultants are often just glorified temps who end up doing same sort of of grunt work as employees, but have much less job security and therefore potential to unionise. Big companies like a workforce that can't organise, and pay consulting agencies this for precariousness as a service.
McKinsey always wins.
So many of these places are in really serious financial straits. Families are more and more unwilling to pay, and students are taking the possibility of trade/vocational school seriously.
Harvard will be fine. Stanford will be fine. Prestigious schools could last for quite a long while on their endowments alone, and besides, the Ivies have no shortage of eager customers. The brand value is too strong.
And I actually think 1) biiiiig state schools 2) small community colleges will mostly be fine. The government support is there, and the bang-for-your-buck is there.
But the middle-tier private university might be a dying breed.
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Given how absolutely awful the bang for your buck is on these overpriced private universities, good riddance.
All these colleges are grifts on that concept
The upper class higher learning of Ivy League and adjacent predate this prerequisite, are tone death to the reasons that students attend for job eligibility over actual higher learning or satisfying a clause in a trust fund, and will survive this time period where students are there for jobs. These things are 300 years old in the US, the last half century and the tailend pushes for inclusion will totally be a footnote in their dynasty
I think that the discussions here generally underestimate how much these language programs contribute to university life beyond just a degree:
1. Will international students be attracted to this university with no program that represents their native language? My experience was that a lot of Chinese students spent quite a lot of time in the Chinese department, even if their focus was engineering.
2. In the same vein, what meaningful partnerships will WVU have with non-English speaking institutes of higher education in the future? Seems like not very many! Even if computers will do the translating in the future, we're still talking about a global economy and relationships are important.
3. What about students of all disciplines (history especially comes to mind) that are interested in texts that weren't published in English. jUSt uSe gOoGlE? I'm rolling my eyes. There's still plenty of knowledge for English speakers in non-English texts.
Provincial is the word that comes to mind, which I think of as the opposite of "Education".
The dude ripped through money he didn't have, hired a ton of bloat, and is now cutting staff in nearly all the programs I held dear.
He did or urban meyer and the buckeyes did?
> I'm shocked to hear that WVU is having financial issues under his leadership.
He forgot to bring urban meyer and the ohio state football program with him.
My point is slightly tangential to the above - one might expect one of the most highly paid professionals in this role to be highly skilled, and to avoid this kind of oversight or blindsiding.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/05/19/the-highe...
That's what the title is all across the US.
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https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/62ea2c4f-99bd-431d-9e97-7199...
The head coach gets paid $4 million per year. Extrapolate that to the lackeys and you could probably wipe out almost half of the deficit.
We need smart legislation to eliminate global free ridership on medication as well as less insurance, not more (combined with universal catastrophic high deductible insurance a la Singapore's medishield). We also need occupational licensing reform and to decouple healthcare from employment (ie. the politically impossible cadillac tax that Obama tried to push through).
Shielding people more from the true cost of healthcare is the politically popular option but does not improve health outcomes and drives utilization (and thus resource allocation) higher.
In New York, 8 million people or 40% of the population are enrolled.
Medical services became much more effective when physicians accepted scientific methods. Allopathic physicians used state licensing to restrict who could call themselves a physician. Due to post WWII price controls employers offered health insurance. Baby boomers did not grow up with the existence of all the drugs we have or neonatal intensive care units. People are still considered alive after their heart stops beating. Standards of care went up. Health workers' scopes of practice are carefully circumscribed by their license which does not transfer across state lines. The government agreed to pay for the medical costs of the elderly and poor, letting private health insurance skim profits from the lower cost working age population. Attempts to rationalize the system via a National Health Service, single payer financing, or heavy regulations on a universal private insurance market have failed. Instead the ACA just plugged the most egregious pitfalls for Americans and tinkered around the edges to try get everyone insured. Some states have chosen to not expand Medicaid to the detriment of their indigent population and rural hospitals.
If medical costs are to ever stop growing at 6% per annum the end result will likely be due to a combination of price controls, wait times and limits on care to hold down demand, lower health worker pay, free training for health workers, and rationalization of the system to incentivize population wide health. Switching from fee for service to per capita removes the incentive to treat more to generate more revenue. If universal eligibility is achieved that removes the incentive to refuse service to uninsured patients or discharge them ASAP. When outcomes are measured for the health sector as a whole, problems like hospital re-admissions or high co-pays that result in some patients not filling their medication orders get a harder look instead of being a perverse gain for one business and a bigger cost for the rest of us. Right now healthcare is run as a business. Each firm optimizes for the profitability of their link in the chain. The government tries to help those left behind by loading money into the top of the medical-industrial complex without ever making changes to the Rube Goldberg machine within.