Bingo. Clearly, the macro trend is negative in VW, unless they can attract out-of-state students. If you lose 20+% of your students, you need fewer teachers & programs.
btw: nearby Pennsylvania has the exact same problem. They have fewer high school grads, and the trend is negative.
“College enrollment in West Virginia at the state’s public colleges and universities went from 90,899 in 2013 to 69,599 at the end of the 2022-23 school year, according to the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission.”
The #2 instate, Marshall, also has a huge deficit. But the President still has his head in the sand. (But I’m sure the faculty are supportive.)
"At the state’s second-largest university, Marshall University President Brad D. Smith told Eyewitness News before the start of this semester that Marshall faces a projected $28 million deficit for next year. He said the university has a four-part approach to get in front of the problem.
“We will grow students not fees,” Smith said in June. “We will invest in our team making sure we pay them market wages and incentivize them for out market performance. …”
Yeah, where is he gonna find those students? Where is he gonna find the money for to increase wages?
Hope is not a strategy. Making impossible promises is not leadership.
But the demographic cliff in many states is not the only trend.
States which put their flagships in a location which is not commutable from population centers; states which have invested in capital assets offering low return (professional level athletic facilities on campuses where the previous facilities were more than adequate), campuses which have been slow to recognize the appeal of profitable certificate programs for adults (a one year Data Science program) but has doubled down on labor intensive degree programs (Nurse Practioner… in an area where there is a glut of NP’s who are working as RN’s since they can’t find jobs), no investment in online classes (professor at a blackboard on a shaky zoom connection is no longer considered state of the art!), etc.
My read of Gee’s CV is that he’s a “tool” the Trustees bring in when they want to make changes – to build new infrastructure, get more wall street ties, etc. At some schools it worked and made him popular, and others it didn’t. Seems like he’s not that interested in sticking around for the real long term work on running a place and doesn’t value building relationships with the faculty and students to be beloved. But given that history, it seems like he did his predictable playbook and it didn’t work out this time.
It isn’t the problem, but it is certainly a very widespread problem.
The whole idea of running colleges “like a business” has been quite bad for the sector.
(Of course, the biggest problem for public higher education has been the pullback in state funding over the past few decades, coincident with the cultural change from viewing education as a public benefit to viewing it as a private benefit.)
I agree with you on the pullback and the cultural shift… but disagree that business discipline is bad for the sector.
Zero based budgeting- not that a college has to slavishly follow it, but it is a very useful tool to keep support costs from ballooning without justification. Best Practices- again, every institution doesn’t need to follow what’s going on in every single industry. But when other service-based organizations are consolidating and not expanding; when other service-based organizations are imposing hiring freezes, or asking vendors to lock-in prices to avoid volatility, or promising price lock-ins for THEIR customers, it is foolish for any college to think they can fly “above the fray”. Avoiding credential creep, evaluating compensation structure across job classifications AND up and down, costing out benefit scenarios to include when interest rates go down AND up-- these are business disciplines in human resources which are particularly important for an organization where the biggest cost is salaries. Having a designated team to evaluate ancillary revenue (so not research, not tuition and fees… but things like developing a vacant lot which the university owns but has no use for, etc. The fact that private developers own and build “private dorms”-- and make a profit doing so, is a strong argument for colleges to do a better job creating revenue streams out of underused assets.
A college which does not have a single expert in Tech Transfer on staff? That’s cash out the door. Recurring revenue. Professors who have to retain their own counsel to review a licensing deal? What a wasted opportunity. And it’s not just important for engineering. You have faculty who have created huge online and multi-media curricula with no guidance from their institution on how to maximize the profits long term- for both the professor AND the institution.
Business discipline- doing it correctly- could have saved a lot of institutions which have gone down the tubes in the last few years. Every time you read an analysis of a non-profit which has gone under which starts with “The land under their building is worth more than their entire operation” you know someone, somewhere needed MORE business discipline, not less.
Counterpoint: Not running colleges like a business ≠ not practicing business discipline
Budgeting for nonprofits and governmental entities is subject to different constraints than private businesses. I agree that there are best practices for budgeting, but the business model for higher education has resulted in things like (add the adjective unnecessary to all of these) top-down decisionmaking, pitting internal divisions against each other in pursuit of resources, focusing on short-term ROI over longer time horizons, and so on. These aren’t healthy for institutions of higher education.
But these aren’t healthy for ANY organization. You are citing pernicious practices which will bring down any formerly healthy institutions. From Kodak to Sears …there are dozens of case studies showing exactly what you describe.
The issue therefore isn’t adopting business practices…it’s learning from the weak and the wretched and not the healthy and thriving…
Smaller schools that don’t have huge endowments have a number of things working against them. They are very often tuition dependent, but they need to offer financial aid to compete,which means less tuition revenue. They still have to have staff to perform certain necessary functions, and they have to have faculty to teach a breadth of courses.
Right, agreed—but those are precisely the practices that get brought in in practice whenever people start saying that colleges need to be run like businesses. (Notice, f’rex, that much of that is what Gee brought to WVU.)
It sometimes feels like the people who want to run colleges like businesses failed out of running private businesses 20 years ago and have decided that they can do better with higher ed using the same methods.
(But I repeat, with emphasis, that the biggest problem has been the pullback of state support for public higher ed. But note that that is often done with the implicit or even explicit claim that doing so will force colleges to act “more like a business”.)
Fewer people are having children. Unfortunately, people who do not have children themselves are less likely to support taxpayer funding of education. I wish that were not the case, but since it is, I would not expect public funding for higher ed to increase in the forseeable future.
I don’t think that that is necessarily true—consider that a lot of people didn’t have children (or, more accurately, didn’t have surviving children) earlier in history, and yet public funding of postsecondary education was widely seen as an unquestionably good thing since the mid-19th century, and public funding of K–12 education for longer.
I would suggest that it isn’t a demographic change that has effected this, but rather a social change—whereas allowing anyone who was capable to achieve postsecondary education was previously seen as providing a benefit to the population generally, more recently postsecondary education has been seen more and more as providing a benefit only to the recipient of that education specifically.
But at the same time, a much higher percentage of the population do attend college, which you would expect to create a greater base of support. And a number of states have provided more funding for community college in recent years. Is unwillingness to provide additional support to four year colleges related to their much higher costs and voters feeling it is unreasonable to subsidize the “luxury experience” of being able to live away from home?
Very few parents lost all of their children, even in the 19th century-at least some survived and were often financial contributors to the family. In any event, subsidizing K12 education or even community college is far less controversial than subsidizing 4 year residential colleges when the majority of students now attend college. That requires a much greater subsidy by taxpayers.
As more young millenials forgo children and have their own student debt, it will not be easy to persuade them to pay increased taxes for other people’s kids, absent an overhaul to higher ed in the US. Bare bones academic institutions, as in Europe, might gain some support I suppose but I don’t see any public universities adopting that model
focusing on short-term ROI over longer time horizons
But these aren’t healthy for ANY organization. You are citing pernicious practices which will bring down any formerly healthy institutions. From Kodak to Sears …there are dozens of case studies showing exactly what you describe.
lol, name me ONE publicly traded company that looks at the long term.
I did a modified Buffet with my 401K and over the last 20 years it has out-performed every major mutual fund… I avoided some of his picks, doubled down on a few others, but am very happy with my eventual retirement.
We are not talking about the same thing.
I’m sure anything you did modeled on Buffett did well.
The point here is that short-term ROI is not a good strategy for a university over the long term.