Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

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

I imagine it’s particularly thankless when the university is one of the biggest in the country with more students than residents and everyone knows who really calls the shots on a lot of things

the football team?

https://www.ab-inbev.com

I never had any illusions about a career in academia-- tbh I just sort of fell into adjuncting at several places when I first got to the city where I live, and I've kept being asked back...

But let's just say I'm glad I can still work digging graves or working at a grocery store.

Also apologies if that didn't make much sense, I've had a few.

it made good sense to me. you define yourself as able to fit comfortably in many working milieux. I've worked as an ad copywriter, clerk in a tool and die retailer, a technical writer in an obscure high tech field, and a school bus driver. I've also hawked ice cream at parades. It's all just stuff one does for a paycheck.

Yeah. I admit that I really *like* teaching, and get rave reviews from students no matter the class, but adjuncting is also totally unsustainable.

the uk has decided to charge EU citizens at international rates for uk universities going forward, instead of the home rate. my boy was thinking of applying to cambridge but at 20k pounds that's not happening. even at 9k pounds it was probably silly when it's free here. I wouldn't expect many eu citizens to be willing to pay anymore, and certainly not for anything less than oxbridge when if all you want are english-speaking courses you can go to ireland or even the netherlands.

Wow, that completely passed me by.
Been anticipating some fee changes ever since the Brexit vote but sort of forgot about it.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/eu-students-lose-home-status-and-loan-access-england-2021

Will be interesting to see the effects.

Some cartoon villain shit here, it seems.

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/06/30/desantis-kills-online-learning-program-amid-virus-resurgence-1296178

I thought this was OTM (h/t j): https://www.chronicle.com/article/When-Academic-Solidarity-/249086?key=hsZMErKIgGC276GPIxqHkdtWpPJPmTDez0sVEOxaQSBEq2np2vOTiSg-ZL1RCw7NeVlJQUlXMG1NWV9ZYXpHU005dlBQSm9EX3VycWFVcVBHTHJQZFh1bmRoYw

Haha, I see that he was actually a bit critical - I was OTMing it on the assumption that by letting go of adjuncts (who are handling a massive amount of the teaching rn) and requiring f/t faculty to take on heavier teaching loads, the inevitable result would be an increase in the # of f/t teaching positions that would be created, many of which would go to those erstwhile adjuncts. There was briefly a move towards doing this at the two big local universities and under the previous provincial govt and a number of sessionals did get f/t teaching positions.

Not going to lie: if I could get even a full-time NTT position, I'd be overjoyed.

Yeah, the difference in working conditions and respect was so huge that it was impossible to go back to sessional teaching after leaving a f/t VAP.

For me personally ofc; lots of smart, accomplished people do it.

In my experience, the more elite the institution, the more it is the norm for research academics to consider teaching to be burdensome “grunt work.” The exploitation of adjuncts is the natural outgrowth of such an attitude.

i think she's one of those crypto-back-to-tradition-my-intellectual-life-is-apolitical types? but i don't know positively