Are colleges at risk of closing?

[MWolf]

I have written this elsewhere, but I’ll repeat. Galloway has been living in his little bubble of theoretical economics at NYU for decades. He has little to no understanding of how academia works, and insists on pretending that colleges are for-profit entities which need to grow and make a profit in order to survive.

I’ll repeat what I wrote there:

Instead of putting the lives of students and staff at risk, Galloway says colleges need to do what other for-profit businesses have had to do during the pandemic: cut down on expenses and seek relief funds from state and federal governments.

Because for-profit models have always worked so well for academia, and because the state and federal governments have always been so generous with funds for higher education.

So his “plan” is that universities should use a failed strategy to run, using non-existent funds.

The only reasons that the for-profit “universities” have not all collapsed is that the federal government continues to allow students to take out loans to pay for degrees that they students never finish. It is the sub-prime loan bubble all over again.

Students do not graduate, and those who do have sub-standard training.

Yet Galloway says that the for-profit higher education model, which fails miserably in educating students even in the best of conditions, is the model which we should use for all academia in time of crisis.

For the past decades, the federal and state governments have been slashing funds for academia.

Yet Galloway behaves as though the federal and state governments are happy to increase the funds that they are sending to higher education by orders of magnitude.

I don’t know what world Galloway is living in, but it must be a parallel reality to that in which the rest of higher education exists.

I mean

The average salary of a professor with a PhD (before benefits and admin support costs) is $141,476, though some make much more, and roughly 50 percent of full-time faculty have tenure …

First of all, not only are most faculty not full professors - only about 30% of all tenure track faculty ever reach the rank of full professor.

Second, only 40% of all faculty are tenured or tenure track, and full professors are maybe 30% of all faculty, so that means that those $140,000 salaries are only enjoyed by fewer than 6% of all faculty. However, reading Galloway, you get the idea that faculty are all rolling in cash.

More than half of all faculty are part time, living on salaries of less than $40,000. Of the TT/tenured faculty, only 30% are full professors, and fewer than half make $140,000 a year or more.

So Galloway is also being dishonest, and presenting the top 6% of faculty by compensation as though they were representative of the hundreds of thousands of mostly underpaid faculty.

If that is quality of his “research” I feel that I can safely ignore his “conclusions”.