Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

one of my friends/hosts in Jerusalem took me there for part of a day, because his son has been a rosh yeshiva there, having married into the family (a Lithuanian family whose name I've forgotten).

and oh no no no, I just learned that that friend, who took me to Mir, died of the virus today in Jerusalem. He was a great philosopher of mathematics, trained at Princeton, then a longtime faculty member at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. RIP.

baruch dayan emes sorry such sad news

thanks Mordy. Here's a link.

My condolences, Euler. RIP.

Sorry to hear, Euler.

I know a lot of Euros with usa doctorates who get stuck in shitty small american towns but thought they'd end up in NYC, not understanding how shitty 99% of the usa is

tbh I know tons of US phds in this same boat - a lot of people don't realize when starting a phd program that you will end up living where you find a job, if you are lucky enough to do so. And the chances that you end up in a cool big city are close to zero, especially when a lot of schools in those places pay shit relative to local cost of living and have arduous tenure requirements because they know people really want to live there.

That said a lot of them get used to living somewhere small/shitty/cheap, can deal with it for 9 months if they can GTFO in the summer, or get some sort of stockholm syndrome where a bigger, less shitty place feels like a huge win in comparison (see: me, for example).

Not wanting to live in the middle of nowhere working for a shitty college is probably the main reason I gave up on the academic job search after school. My brilliant peers in grad school all managed to get good jobs in nice places but, uh, I was not my brilliant peers.

yeah that's a good point, I certainly didn't realize when I chose my doctoral institution in the midwest usa that that significantly increased my chances of having to take a job in the midwest usa, a region I wanted nothing to do with. once I ended up in kansass I mean of course I spent every summer out of town, usually in Europe, but it didn't help the sense of failure, of having trudged so hard only end up in a shithole where my students didn't give a fuck about the subject I taught & were ill-equipped to write a cogent sentence about anything. the teaching was the most depressing part, just that empty look in their eyes, with their neckbeards and beer tshirts. I guess that's why getting out of town never helped. and people who got used to living there only made it worse for me, because then we had nothing in common: they were trying to set up roots there, and I was just hustling to get out asap. & I did! but those were friendless years.

Ominous projections in the U.K., with some universities expecting to lose over £100m in revenue through the absence of foreign students:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/11/universities-brace-for-huge-losses-as-foreign-students-drop-out

Without a bailout, I can’t see them all surviving.

A friend, a prof at St Andrews, expects doom. International students, or at least Chinese students, pay 3x what home students pay! And St Andrews is a top UK uni! I gather UK universities at all levels are funded this way. Also St Andrews relies on fees from renting out its facilities to conferences and the like over summers, and at least this year that's gone.

Of course there will be a bailout. But still, that's a mad way to fund a university system. When I was on the faculty at a USA Big Ten institution, that institution also relied on international students, in particular Chinese and Brazilian students, who indeed paid more than in-state and even out-of-state students. In France the Macron government proposed last year upping the uni fees for non-EU students to about 3000 € per year for bachelors students and 4000 € per year for masters students. But this was strongly contested by universities, and most have committed to not apply those fees. Furthermore, one of the French "supreme courts" ruled late last year that fees, even for non-EU students, violate a constitutional commitment to free university access. It's thus unclear whether these fees will ever be widely charged to international students. (To be fair, since French university courses must be given in French, by law, our pool of international students is not as extensive as those of the US and the UK. Though I have (excellent, as usual) Chinese students here too.)

Does Ireland do it differently, as it's an EU country, or are they more on the US-UK model?

Ireland has negligible fees for EU students and higher ones for everyone else - not dissimilar to Scotland, iirc.

The U.K. model is driven by a commercial mindset focused on investment to fuel growth. Most universities will have ambitions to expand the number of students, spend heavily on recruitment, plan larger campuses, etc. A huge amount has been borrowed against anticipated earnings. That’s one of the main reasons his is so disastrous. You can’t just scale down operations.

only negligible in comparison to US and UK - by continental standards they are high iirc

first Google hit (from 2017) says Ireland has the second-highest fees in Europe: https://www.thejournal.ie/college-fees-ireland-3675177-Nov2017/

iirc Sharivari you said uk universities even borrowed off expected fees from the next term—ooof!

The government stopped giving any funding for most (all non-STEM?) students a while back, so that universities can stand on their own two feet, best education system in the world, etc.

In Ireland or the UK? The latter I imagine.

The whole thing is a nightmare. Universities, iirc, have taken on north of £12bn debt and the majority of that is to private lenders - only a handful are able to go down a public bond route and the banks are pretty restrictive. To compound things, there has been a dip in the number of domestic students and many universities, even those borrowing nine figure sums, are already running a deficit. There has been an underlying assumption that the government will bail out any universities that get into trouble, which just fuels irresponsible borrowing (and irresponsible lending).

The majority of the borrowing aiui is over a fairly long term but a £100m revenue hole at a university that has next to no surplus even under normal circumstances is going to make it impossible to meet payments.

What do you think the consequences of that will be for unis? And will it be different for Russell group unis? My sense is that even Bristol is vulnerable (I know several staff members there and in my area it’s quite good)

i don't claim this as fact at all but i seem to recall reading something about u.s. public universities having more difficulty reaping big international student $$$$ because of certain pressures by their state legislatures/regents to stop tuition growth and to not price residents out by throwing so many admission slots to international or out-of-state applicants (in a secondary version of the international student finance strategy, i guess publics have also been leaning harder into domestic but outstate recruitment because of the cost differential).

(not sure how this applies at the non-small non-elite public i do most of my teaching at, since i don't spend much time on campus to even have a sense for what it's like demographically, but i do get fewer international students in my courses than i used to at my r1 alma mater. i infer that more elite schools are more vulnerable to dropoff from international enrollments just because they have more to draw them in the first place.)

more concerning i think would be that the steady decline in most states' hs grad enrollment percentages / absolute student numbers over several years (the demographic dip) has been turning the screws tighter and tighter on budgets and staffing, and there is little give left. assuming a significant dip in enrollments and thus necessary tuition dollars this fall/next spring, plus probably associated financial crisis from not being able to milk other cash cows related to residential student support and athletics, i expect to see deep cuts, starting at the bottom where there are fewest impediments to them.

j do you expect those cuts to involve you? How has the disease changed your job so far?

I agree that smaller us public unis don’t rely as much on international students as r1s but I bet it’s generally a non trivial revenue source even at those institutions.

The government stopped giving any funding for most (all non-STEM?) students a while back, so that universities can stand on their own two feet, best education system in the world, etc.

― rí an techno (seandalai), Sunday, 12 April 2020 11:44 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

In Ireland or the UK? The latter I imagine.

― Joey Corona (Euler), Sunday, 12 April 2020 11:48 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, UK. In Ireland the universities are more directly connected to the state, in the UK aiui they're basically independent organisations that just happen to get some funding from the government.

I agree that smaller us public unis don’t rely as much on international students as r1s but I bet it’s generally a non trivial revenue source even at those institutions.

Yep - a number of smaller universities were badly hit when Saudi Arabia recalled most of the students they fund a few years ago.

What do you think the consequences of that will be for unis? And will it be different for Russell group unis? My sense is that even Bristol is vulnerable (I know several staff members there and in my area it’s quite good)

tbh, I’d expect the government to turn up with a wheelbarrow full of cash. The lending was predicated on the sector being too big to fail and that’s probably correct. Bristol had debts of close to £500m a few years ago but a lot of that is long-term borrowing structured over 30-40 years. No Russell Group universities will go under, imo, but they’ll be forced to go through brutal cost-cutting. Whether the government will see it as so critical to keep others open remains to be seen. The Office For Students suggested that failing universities wouldn’t be bailed out in 2018 - but 2018 feels like a very long time ago now.

Whether anything actually changes, in relation to behaviour, when things return to a semblance of normality, I don’t know.

My school is a massive flagship type place in big state, my department runs a critical university-wide program, my wife has tenure (not me though) so I feel pretty lucky right now.

But we have between 4000 and 5000 students from China alone and if a big percentage of them don’t return it’ll be pretty catastrophic, for the school and the local economy. There have been a number of “luxury” apartment buildings built in the last decades targeting wealthy international students, there are lots of luxury cars purchased and driven by young international students (like there is always at least one Maserati, sometimes three or four, parked at the Asian grocery store I frequent), plus markets and restaurants that cater heavily to students from China and India in particular. No way all of those stay open and occupied without the students coming back.

yeah when I was in urblanda the Chinese restos were ace! and similarly lots of luxury apts for the Chinese students. gonna change.

Sharivari: yeah I wonder how the cost-cutting will go at eg Bristol. When you cut contingent staff then you cut their courses too. If the number of students drops enough then that works out. Intro type courses are revenue drivers but inessential educationally imo (I’ve taught many of them). But does this cut into the core, to permanent staff? Tenure doesn’t exist in the UK.

And in the USA tenure only matters until they cut your department. In 2008 that was something relevant at the dumb big 12 university employing me at the time. I was still untenured then but my colleagues made it clear they couldn’t (wouldn’t?) do anything to save my job if it risked theirs (or maybe even just their salaries). This is going to be considerably worse than 2008.

yeah, since i moved to boston in 2013 my neighborhood (which is bordered by bu and bc to the east and west, and has a ton of other universities around it) has had a huge uptick in asian restaurants/snack shops/grocery stores. i wonder what that's going to look like now. already i think that at least four units in my 12-unit building have gone unoccupied.

on the bright side maybe rents will go down... lol jk

I don't teach at a university, I am member of staff - white-collar-working-class office bullshit. I'm on the executive board of the union local and we're glad to be ratifying our new memorandum of understanding right now because the modest pay raises that are contained within it will probably not be on the table for much longer (there is a cartel of public sector employees that sets how generous public employers can be with pay raises in their collective agreements here in BC, we got the maximum - 2% a year).

we expect redundancies. the membership is worried and all we can really say is "we have lay-off procedures in our collective agreement". i.e, "you might get laid-off but you'll get some notice and a bit of a severance".

"cartel of public sector employeRs" that should read, not "employees"

yeah, that just seemed wrong when I read it

Who needs philosophy anyway?

https://afterxnature.blogspot.com/2020/06/message-from-ian-grant-attempt-to-close.html

sorry to miss your q earlier, euler. i do expect the cuts to involve me. i've already lost work i was used to getting, because of enrollment declines (which had already been affecting the availability of work for me before the current situation(s)). it's pretty much fait accompli. the only opposing factor rn seems to be that fall shortfalls statewide are not nearly so bad as they had feared. one school's dean just finally reached out to the contingent faculty (because of their nature as a school, they've never had many permanent faculty, and run at about the high end of adjunct reliance relative to the whole industry, 75%) with a message to the effect of, if you're not teaching next year, don't take that to mean you won't be teaching the year after that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i was only teaching at one school when the virus hit, the one where i was already teaching online, so the schedule got screwed up by the extended closure (we added a week to spring break) and by the general disarray, but nothing was essentially different. the other schools i regularly teach at do offer some curriculum online, but not the courses i had been teaching, so those are encompassed by the schools' overall initiatives to prepare for fall, which vary depending on how much online teaching they'd already been doing. generally they're still wishy-washy plan-wise, like most schools i've read about, trying to get faculty to prep for offering courses 2-3 different ways so that they can adapt them at a moment's notice to being online. info about in-person measures has been misty and aspirational so far, but i doubt they'd even be able to afford niceties like purdue's plexiglass. faculty and (where relevant) unions have been pushing back on anything that takes the decisions about where to teach out of their hands, but otherwise their involvement in the planning processes seems as ineffectual as the admins' has been. naturally, adjuncts don't have much of a seat at that table.

sounds like we will be converging (with the 2-3 distinct branches of the public system, and regional slacs, taking cues from the flagship that is following trends set by other flagships) on a model that runs til thanksgiving and has pushed hard for on-campus, socially-distanced semester starts. more than one school has suggested its inclination to choose hy-flex type models where in-person courses could be offered/taken simultaneously online (e.g. by students sitting in their dorm rooms). sounds wack to me.

Ugh. That’s awful, j.

I’ll be starting at a new university this fall (as a consequence of the general requirement her, as in Germany, that to become a f u l l p r o f e s s o r you have to compete again for a position, that is, no internal promotion). That will involve a bit of a train commute on teaching and seminar days but I don’t yet know if we’ll be teaching in person or not.

Sorry j

eh

the Aussie government has decided to sort higher education into the worthless and worthwhile. Cutting tuition on courses it deems worthwhile (read training for known jobs) like Nursing, STEM, languages and raising them on its, humanities, economics, social sciences management and law; all while keeping total funding fixed. All this is, of course designed to encourage students to study these cheaper subjects. It, of course took the Econ departments of all these universities a grand total of 5 minutes to work out that although students may be incentivised to study the cheaper courses universities will be incentivised to pile as many students into the ones that are now more expensive.

Yeah I saw this and it's so dumb. At the big 10 university I taught at a few years ago, majors in engineering and the hard sciences paid more in tuition than in the humanities, ostensibly to cover the costs of the labs. That made things complicated for people like me who developed interdisciplinary majors between the humanities and sciences, since the tuition for such majors had to be worked out in some equitable way (thankfully CS was willing to be generous in this regard). But I don't think it ended up "incentivizing" students to choose the humanities.

It’s exceedingly dumb our dipshit in chief suggest that law students should take CS modules to lower their fees, which is good in principle, but that’s not how universities work or bill here.

Unis were also excluded from wage support schemes and I keep having to remind my wife it’s because she is a hotbed of dangerous socialism rather than part of One of Australia’s key domestic and export industries. She’s fine other than some extra teaching but adjuncts, admins are a thing of the past, and tenure requirement just got a lot stricter. Many other universities are a lot worse off, though.

Ugh, they raised your wife's teaching requirements?

Are tenure requirements set at a national level, or is this just relative to particular universities?

We don’t quite know yet, it was part of the deal with the union which the union rejected. She taught overload this semester which she may or may not get paid for but either way she doesn’t have to teach next semester. Basically a hot mess.

Tenure requirements are on an individual contract basis but the scope for granting extensions or being flexible just evaporated. Everything got very prescriptive.

haha liberal governments
haha endless online teaching
haha no research ever
haha optimism

I see. What a mess.

I'm at a bit of a low. After 20 years in this game it is one of those slow motion nightmares watching research starve and operating funding dwindle so we are forced to stuff the channel with students who either don't know why they are there or would rather be studying something else. And my 25 years of neuroscience is now reduced to teaching the absolute basics to postgraduate nurses, who are generally excellent people but not the people I should be teaching. But that's where the money is. On we go.

* or students who are there purely for their cash value to the Aus govt, who do not give a single fuck about them (cf post COVID treatment) or whether they're getting the actual education they pay dearly for

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3612467

Powerful article that really brings together all the threads about how Higher Ed. approach to re-opening for Fall semesters is so, so bloody wrong.

ugh.

my new university this fall will be doing the infamous "hybrid" format. French universities have relatively few on-campus residences and students don't have the Animal House aspirations of American students (I was one of those fwiw) so our outbreak fears are tied to classrooms.

The fear here, though, is that universities will use further distance education to move further toward it as a norm, thus reducing the number of full-time faculty. The LPPR law currently being debated, an initiative of the Macron government to move closer to a North American model of university funding, gives context to this worry. Administrators don't want to waste this health crisis in their neo-liberal push.

Everything here is so up in the air - like some in person classes, a modified schedule, vague reassurances about safety, hedging until the thousands of first year students commit and pay their non refundable deposits, etc. I can and will teach all my classes online though and my department has everyone’s back on this.

A local college bar reopened with all the right language about half capacity and masks and social distancing which were promptly ignored by all so there are now 50 cases tied to this one location.

In response this quote from the mayor is great - “The mitigation strategies won’t work because they ignore the behavior of unsupervised young people…. I am not saying one way or the other if the U should open. I am just tired of hearing that it can open safely”

"mayor of college town" sounds like a thankless job

I know universities are worried about students backing out of enrollment if they can't have the on-campus experience and have to take all their classes online, but what the hell kind of on-campus experience are they even going to be able to have? dining halls, gyms, libraries, common areas, all of these fancy spaces are going to be a hell of a lot less pleasant if they're open at all. and I just can't fathom college football happening this year. schools certainly aren't going to isolate players from the rest of the student body and so they're all just going to be living in the epicenter of that cesspool. I honestly don't trust some of these programs not to lie to their players if they did test positive and just send them out there on the field if they're not symptomatic.

"mayor of college town" sounds like a thankless job

― all cats are beautiful (silby), Friday, June 26, 2020 11:13 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's probably gonna pay off pretty nicely for 'ol Mayo Pete.

South Bend is not a college town