11–20 of 110 posts
More context: https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/stories/2023/08/11/wvu-announces-pr... and https://provost.wvu.edu/academic-transformation/academic-pro...
This is a sick path to be on. Keep the money, plug kids into some other university's classes remotely. To what end? A school full of nothing but overpaid administrators, and kids all taking remote classes at disparate cheapest possible offerings?
Higher education seems to be lagging the vulture capitalism of the 80's/90's by a couple of decades, but boy it does seem like it's here.
> In fact, on the same day WVU wrote to tell us our department is cancelled and we are fired, they ran a front-page article on the university website celebrating the NSF grant that Sergio Robles-Puente and I recently received, and lauding our innovative research and intensive student mentoring. I have a few close friends in academia and while IMO they're clearly underappreciated by their institutions (even the lucky…
The WSJ did a decent article about this a few weeks ago.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-university-tuition-increa...
It was hard not to see this coming. Everyone has been talking about how the benefit of a Bachelor's degree is not worth the tuition cost. Covid drove that home when students were paying tens of thousand dollars just to watch videos at home.
I could go on and on about this but it just breaks my heart to see how bad universities screwed this up.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enroll...
If their budget numbers are true, it demonstrates serious mismanagement.
Yeah, this was my first thought reading through this. It literally makes no sense to close a department that, after operational and administrative costs, is net positive while you are facing a budget crisis. Later on, the writer mentions an ideological split/decision on the chairperson's part. I wish they would delve into that more. Do the administrative heads feel that using outsourced labor will be more profitable?
If they think investment in another department will bring a higher ROI it makes sense.
If their budget numbers are true, it demonstrates serious mismanagement.
When I look at their actual numbers, his comments don't make sense: https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/bf3ef02f-e90a-4e43-a316-d295...
They somehow have 18000+ credit hours to their department in a year, but only 61 enrolled students in fall 2022 which, means an average student enrolled was taking 310 credits? Or ~150ish if the 2022 credit hours is for both fall & spring?
What I think is happening, is that most universities allow you to meet your "foreign languages requirement" by showing your High School transcripts, and then you get those credits applied to your transcript. That means you actually make $0 from those credits. The later part of the spreadsheet clearly shows how impossible this is - they did not make $6.7M with 61 students' tuition. Clearly the tuition is just a dumb excel formula multiplying by the credits.
So either they're somehow the most expensive foreign language school in the world, with 1 instructor per 2 students...
Or they're a wildly expensive department that almost no one major's with, and their research grants don't cover their millions in losses to the university.
If a university is just offering online courses at other schools, it ought to be treated as if it doesn’t offer the subject at all.
I dunno, is it crucial to teach languages? I find (human) languages very difficult to learn, to the point of unpleasantness. But still, it seems frankly bizarre that a public university might not provide instruction in them. Not providing this kind of instruction puts a school in the vo-tech/community college category IMO. (Which are important places of learning but I believe the U there stands for University).
> In fact, on the same day WVU wrote to tell us our department is cancelled and we are fired, they ran a front-page article on the university website celebrating the NSF grant that Sergio Robles-Puente and I recently received, and lauding our innovative research and intensive student mentoring. I have a few close friends in academia and while IMO they're clearly underappreciated by their institutions (even the lucky…
Are we related?
If their budget numbers are true, it demonstrates serious mismanagement.