What makes you think that should be true? Even after taking as much as they can from unrestricted funds and tapping the endowments there still isn’t enough. That’s why colleges are furloughing some people and laying off others. I think program cuts will be next, then financial aid. Colleges that meet need are having to revisit that policy. It won’t survive the cuts at some schools.
@roycroftmom – Just to be clear, the interest earned from a directed donation is also covered by the legal stipulations of the donor. Funded scholarships and professorships, for example, are paid out every year by the interest earned from the donation – not the donation itself.
I don’t know the amount of a typical college’s endowment that is discretionary, but I think it’s surprisingly small.
So to really get more ‘liquidity’ a college would have to get commitments from donors (or their estates) to do so. And some colleges may well do that – just saying it’s a process and not something they can do ‘on a dime.’
@TexasMom96 It’s just such a complex problem and there’s so little time to prepare between now and August. Especially for bigger schools, it really takes a visionary leader to make decisions decisively and quickly in order to get kids back on campus and not every university is likely to have that type of leadership. Finding extra housing for hundreds or thousands of kids, setting up testing, devising social distancing rules and implementing them for all classrooms and cafeterias and libraries and gyms, changing up class schedules so that each class is now in a bigger classroom than originally planned…the list goes on and on.
I did not say there would be enough funds in the endowment to solve the situation, only to assist. Obviously different schools will have different situations. Program cuts were inevitable anyway, due to changing demographics and student interest. Colleges are notoriously bad at adapting to changing demand by consumer students. More schools will go need aware or not meet full need. That was inevitable too.
Au contraire, I appreciate that you are a voice of sensibility here. I also can’t imagine how the tracing thing will work, but I’m far from an expert on that sort of thing, so I’m hoping the experts have a clue.
FYI- I heard the President of Northeastern being interviewed yesterday. He said they had secured 2,000 extra beds for residential students
Anybody hear what Midd is planning? Would think they would have an easier time since Vermont has very few cases. I think they reported just 3 new cases in the state yesterday. A big issue though is getting kids back to campus who are flying in or coming from hotter spots.
@NJSue - I’m relieved that I’m not the only one who thinks this. I’m fairly dynamic in that I write on the boards A LOT, walk back and forth in the front of the room, project so that people in the back can hear, etc. It’s hard to breathe in the masks, especially if you are exerting yourself at all.
After all debts are paid and any donor restrictions completed (or returned to the estate), any remainder goes to the state (or at least it does in CA).
Northeastern has been pretty adamant about reopening. That seems a bit optimistic given their location but they sound confident.
It’s probably useful to remind people that this endowment argument began as a question: Whether colleges should draw from their endowments in order to provide tuition discounts (presumably to full-pay families - not sure who else would have standing to claim such a discount) based on the substitution of online classes for live classes?
I think it has been subsumed into a broader question of who should bear the brunt of the costs of the pandemic, the consumer or the service provider? Restaurants and bars (at least those that seem willing to abide by generally accepted mitigation guidelines) are grappling with that question right now.
Discuss.
But if it is a merger it is different. Wheelock College merged into Boston University. BU acquired the campus and the endowment and took on the liabilities. BU then terminated all employees except tenured faculty and the buildings and grounds crew.
The discussion of reaching into endowment seemed to go far beyond offering tuition discounts. The existence of some schools is at stake.
Because the country is over-colleged, consumers have the power. That is going to continue beyond the pandemic because of declining numbers of college age kids starting in 2026.
Did everyone see that U Delaware’s incoming frosh class is 700 below their target (norm)? 700 out of around a typically 4,500 or so. 700!
@Mwfan1921 wrote:
You’re correct. And, I’m sorry my post crossed with @austinmshauri 's at #3322 above:
That’s the answer I was waiting for.
Exactly. Most people don’t like to donate to ‘general operating funds’, i.e., unrestricted. They prefer to give to ‘something’, such as financial aid, scholarships, a building, a specific program, the hospital, a department,…
Yes, but that wasn’t the question.
So…yes? You would like to see people lose their jobs so your kid can have more fin aid? I can’t go with that. There are things that are more expensive now than they were two months ago; I don’t want people losing their jobs so I can get them cheaper.
Not future earnings: future self-judged ability to pay. Schools have not so far had reason to do it. We’ve been bursting at the seams, trying to figure out where to put all the kids, building new dorms so we can stop stacking them up in lobbies.
It’s also not simple self-interest that should prompt such a move this time. We’re talking about a generational crisis. This could go on for years, and you don’t want to lose that whole cohort of kids: what will happen to them? We’re not just businesses; we have a responsibility to educate people. In ordinary times, the Dept of Ed might be announcing rafts of accommodations, but we can’t count on that now. (There’s no reason to write off exist student loans beyond, oh, it’d be the right thing to do for a fat slice of them.)
Consider usual business models upended for the interim. We’re having to stitch together new ones daily.
This would come as a serious surprise to my friends who’ve left academia for industry in the last decade. Also, I will have to go back to the employers who waved money at me in the last few years and ask them why they were tempting me with figments. We all like ourselves pretty well, but I don’t think we’d class ourselves as superstars.
You’re reminding me actually of a Turning Point rep I talked to in our student union a couple of years ago — after I knocked down his baloney talking points for 15 minutes or so he got to the one about how we rip off students to pay ourselves fat salaries. So I told him what I made, and the guy’s face changed, and he asked the first real question he’d had the whole time. He says, “Can I ask you something?” and I say “Sure,” and he says, “Why do you do it?”
It was a beautiful moment. He was genuinely curious, and he was bored to death by the stupid propaganda he was getting paid garbage to go spread. So I told him, and for five minutes we had an actual conversation. It was very nice.
I think you misunderstand why people go to (and stay in) academia and how academia differs from most industry. Which also makes me wonder why you’re so interested in college for your kids, since you appear to think it’s full of people who just couldn’t do better elsewhere. It’s as wrongheaded an idea as the academic self-regard that leaves profs believing that people who don’t have PhDs just aren’t very bright, and couldn’t get in the PhD door.
Benefits in academia are often pretty nice, but not uniformly, and it’s less true than it used to be — like I said, we’re coming off decades of cuts already. The benefit situation’s usually better at schools with unions. There are four main things you get in academia that are very hard to come by elsewhere:
- quite a lot of intellectual freedom (I’ve been making up my job, my courses, my projects, my way of doing nominally assigned tasks for years, even though I wasn’t hired as faculty originally)
- quite a lot of physical and temporal freedom (I roam around a nice large campus at will to go talk to people, and most of the time it hardly matters whether I’m working there or at home, or when, so long as the work’s getting done and the classes taught)
- stability (universities operate on a geological timescale; it’s possible even now to plan things that’ll happen years away, and next semester is the equivalent of normal next week, so you can let ideas and projects cook for years and let them come to fruition)
- good and worthwhile work. My job is not to make or sell garbage that people could probably do better without (done that), or to convince them that they need it (done that too). My job is to open up the minds of young people, and some not-so-young people, until the world becomes a richer and much more interesting place to them, they see much larger possibilities for their own lives, they start asking their own good questions, and they stand a better chance of being housed and eating regularly in adulthood. And that is miraculous work to be allowed to do. Even more miraculous is that it actually works with fair regularity.
(There’s also the bit about having lots of smart people around, but there are other places you can find that, too, and not everybody there’s so smart anyhow.)
The catch is that in order to work in academia, you have to be suited to that kind of work, and most people aren’t. If you’re there to clock in and out, or to find personal glory and riches, you’re going to be very unhappy. If you need projects handed to you, likewise. A lot of people leave because it’s just too slow for them: they want to make things happen fast, and academia’s not built for that.
The best movie I ever saw about it is a doc called Naturally Obsessed, which ran on PBS several years ago. Follows some grad students in a molecular biology lab for three years. They and their boss have the money conversation all the time. In the end, the guy who’s cut out for academia stays, and the two students who really aren’t go off to industry. Anyone who’s interested in knowing what PhD students in science actually do, or who wonders why people become professors or don’t, should take a look.
For all that defense of academics, which chokes even me a little, the thing that you said that really got me was the disrespect you threw at high school teachers. These are people who work in crushing circumstances with shocking devotion with high school students who are there involuntarily. And teach them. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t work like that, I couldn’t stand the smell, I couldn’t handle the tsunami of grading and disrespect, I could not spend my life surrounded by 15-year-olds. Much less educate them. In an ever-tighter thicket of regulations, mandates, crazy legislative expectations, religiosity, and student poverty. These teachers are massively underpaid because their work is belittled. Don’t do it.
They’re digging in. They’re not telling you because they don’t want you to try to drive or to get used to it, and for other reasons I don’t know, but I bet there are other, stronger reasons. But yes, they’re digging in and breaking open piggy banks all over.
^^Standing ovation
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@xyz123a We just got an email yesterday with a survey saying that the three-semester thing is something that Amherst is considering (though it wasn’t what the entire survey was about; it just took up one question). Personally, I think (and really hope) they are just throwing ideas out there for fall; I don’t think they will do it because of how problematic it is. First, many majors (especially STEM majors) have some very rigid required classes that are typically only offered one of two semesters. For example, Organic Chemistry 2, Quantum Chem, P-Chem, and Inorganic Chem are all requirements for the chemistry major and all of them are only offered one semester. The thing is, many people carefully plan their schedule over all four years to meet the requirements of their major. They’re going to have to force some people to come in Summer 2021 for this to work, because everybody’s preference would be Fall 2020 and Spring 2021. Since it’s probably not going to be our choice which semesters we have in the event this model is selected, the only feasible way I can think of to manage classes that have to be taken for a major is to offer every class required for a major all three semesters (which would be a logistical nightmare). My dad suggested they could base it off of classes and your major requirements, but I don’t think this would work either, because what about double majors? What if you need pre-med classes at a different semester than pre-med requirements? For that to even partially work, they would need to have everybody decide all the classes they would take for the year before it even starts.
Also, many NESCAC colleges pushed back registration until June because they were unsure what fall classes would look like; Amherst was not one of them. I think if this was something that was being really heavily considered, they would have pushed back registration, rather than having us proceed with registration in April.
Not to mention it greatly disadvantages students in terms of internships.
I also think that it is problematic in terms of mental health, because the main struggle of this semester has been having to complete a full college course load without being with any of our friends. While this does guarantee that all people who come back get at least one semester, it is still bad because some best friends may not see each other until Summer 2021. I think if they adopt this, they would need to have some option of grouping with friends (like, maybe close friends could select to be in groups together that would be assigned to get the same two semesters together).
I just think they’re throwing ideas out there, and really hope they’re not actually going to do it.