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We clearly hit \u201cpeak education\u201d a few years ago, and overall college student population has been dropping for years now. The for-profits have taken the brunt of this, though that\u2019s more of a technicality\u2014those schools are being regularly closed as frauds. Amongst the \u201clegit\u201d schools (and bear with me on that classification), the community colleges are losing students despite remaining open. They\u2019ve lost around 20% of their student base in the last 5 years.<\/p>\n
Next on the hit list are the small liberal arts colleges. These schools were, historically, always in a fragile position. With only a few thousand students, they survived by having a good initial endowment and low overhead, keeping administrative costs down. Less historically, the student loan scam caused them (and every other school) to boom, in tuition if not in size. That huge influx of money could have been used to pay down debt, to focus on scholarship, to put them in a position to weather the incoming apocalypse which will occur whenever the student loan scam finally ends.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, their small size made these schools particularly vulnerable to both the major problems affecting our schools: plunderers and ideologues. Once only a few of these rascals get in, they open the door for their colleagues\u2026a century of quality work can be annihilated in a few short years as together they\u2019ll work to destroy a school for their own personal ends.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve covered a few such schools dying this way, but a recent article mentions other reasons for the destruction of schools which should have been able to last a few more decades, if not centuries. It\u2019s easy to see these other reasons are wrong, of course, but let\u2019s get to it:<\/p>\n
Why Liberal Arts Colleges Are Starting to Go Under<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Now, the title is general, but they focus on just a few schools, notably Hampshire College, established 1965. The article doesn\u2019t clarify, but this school is fairly close to four other very similar schools, all charging major bucks ($40k or more a year, at least on paper) to educate students. This is another problem with higher education today: we have a glut. In addition to internet schools (of dubious quality, to be sure) offering their wares to anyone with electricity, just about every population center has half a dozen or more 4-year schools within 50 miles of it.<\/p>\n The student loan scam has caused our schools to \u201cinstitutionalize\u201d growth of the pay and quantity of their administrators. That was fine in the past, but now that the potential student base is dropping, these schools are hitting a wall. The only way they can continue growth is to cannibalize students going to other schools, and that level of competitiveness just doesn\u2019t generate the kind of profits necessary to support a huge leadership caste.<\/p>\n Hampshire College<\/a>, for example, has about 1300 students..and 115 administrators\/staff. We\u2019re basically looking at one \u201cleader\u201d for every 11 students. When one considers that many admin\/staff are called faculty in order to keep the faculty\/student ratio down (hi all library staff!), we\u2019re looking at quite the excess of leadership there.<\/p>\n The school has the other problem I discussed above as well:<\/p>\n Not too long ago, Hampshire was the kind of place where the average student was a lesbian with blue hair. But recently, it became the kind of place where the average student is a BLACK lesbian with blue hair.<\/em><\/p>\n The Social Justice Warrior (SJW) takeover of our campuses is rough on the student base. If you love that stuff, you\u2019re set, but if not, you want to get off campus as soon as possible. Part of the reason for this is SJWs are never, ever, happy. Even if the whole school is infested, it\u2019s not enough:<\/p>\n In Hampshire\u2019s case, hilariously, the students condemned the place (which was already top 1% in SJWism) as a haven of racism and sexism and would approach kids on tours and tell them NOT to come for this reason.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cGet woke, go broke\u201d is a truism for a reason, as a school infested with SJWs gets hammered coming and going. Imagine being not interested in \u201cSocial Justice,\u201d going to this campus, and having one of the blue-hairs tell you what a horrible place this is. You\u2019ll leave and go to the next school down the road.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re into SJW stuff, well, now you\u2019re obligated to leave, because you don\u2019t want to go to a \u201chaven of RACISM,\u201d right? So, how fares recruiting on this campus?<\/p>\n Only 13 new students showed up at Hampshire this fall.<\/em><\/p>\n Wow. Even an administrator should be able to \u201ccrunch the numbers\u201d and see the place is doomed unless they scale back, and scale back sharply, eliminating every superfluous position (i.e., much of the administrative staff), consolidating as many positions as possible (e.g., having faculty with empty classrooms take over the remaining administrative positions), and prepare to dip into savings to weather the oncoming drought (I bet that money is already spent on palaces and golden parachutes, however). I honestly don\u2019t see how a school can lose 99% of its student base and survive without drastic action, although as yet the school hasn\u2019t decided what, if anything, is worth doing.<\/p>\n Have I mentioned how grotesquely overpaid admin is, considering how ineffectual they are?<\/p>\n Anyway, the article somehow skips over the obvious issues of having more than one admin for every dozen students, there being far too many schools, and only barely touches on the whole SJWs destroy all they touch thing.<\/p>\n On the other hand, the article mentions demographics: the U.S. just doesn\u2019t have enough upper class people producing kids who can afford the skyrocketing tuition. Yes, this ignores the fact that the only reason tuition is so high is because the schools blew all the money on palaces and vice-presidents\u2026tuition wasn\u2019t this ridiculously high 30 years ago, after all. Honest, there really was a time when the campus president didn\u2019t arrive in a chauffeured limousine, and was given a house on campus because that would save money on his salary. Now campus presidents have private jets\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n The article uses demographic projections to \u201cpredict\u201d many school closings in the next decade or so, but honest, demographics aren\u2019t nearly as core to what happened as the edu-fascist takeover. Many of the schools which will close opened in a time when the US population was much smaller.<\/p>\n Strangely, the article says perhaps the schools can save themselves by importing \u201czillions\u201d\u2019 of Asians. While not as clearly wrong as the demographics claims, it\u2019s still wrong. In times past, the \u201cChina problem,\u201d where it was known that country could theoretically overwhelm our system, has long since been solved. The Chinese aren\u2019t nearly so interested in paying a fortune to get into any school at all in the US, particularly schools which clearly care more about ideology than education.<\/p>\n They can get ideology in their own country, and China is already expanding their own educational system. I sure hope they can learn from our mistakes\u2026.<\/p>\n www.professorconfess.blogspot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"