Posted on 04/22/2020 7:00:25 AM PDT by C19fan
Most campuses in the United States are sitting empty. Courses are online, students are at home. And administrators are trying to figure out how to make the finances of that work. "The math is not pretty," says Robert Kelchen, who studies higher ed finance at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. "Colleges are stressed both on the revenue side and on the expenditure side." On one end of the equation, colleges are spending money to take classes online, in some situations purchasing software, training professors or outsourcing to online-only institutions. That's on top of refunds for room and board and parts of tuition. On the other side, money isn't coming back in, in the form of expected tuition and revenue from events such as athletics, conferences on campus and summer camps. College endowments, which can sometimes offer some insulation from hard financial times, have also taken a hit.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Cry me a river!
Most programs at most universities are costly wastes of time! College has become party time with tenured staff and football games.
Speaking of illiquid endowments, the champ has to be the University of Texas.
The good old days...
If this continues, they won’t be just fine. Online courses are not going to cover fixed overhead costs. Just think of the costs associated with maintaining the physical plant with sprawling grounds and many buildings.
The next move is to allow private student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, and ban most Federal loans (only allowed for STEM degrees/degrees for National Security and requires a high minimum GPA). Private lenders would then have to issue loans based on the likelihood of being paid back, which wouldn’t be too frequently.
But I would bet (rhetorically) they won’t just burn all that up. After a couple years they will go “online”.
They don’t need to survive....they have morphed into a academia/finance complex that defraud students...and many new graduates I see don’t know sh** from shinola....aoc cum laude????...smh....
I work at a community and technical college and I am expecting drastic cuts when we go back. We have the usual academic classes but we also have a lot of real world programs that do work: nursing, radiology, respritory, surgical tech, HVAC, auto mechanic, CAD. A lot of these are not conducive to online classes and require physical facilities.
We had deep budget cuts for 10 straight years before all this virus stuff hit so we are already pretty thin in all areas except administration. Apparently it takes 8 VP’s to run a community college of 3000 students, who knew!
If there is any good that can come out of this pandemic, it is that resources need to be husbanded and good management is necessary to keep these institutions afloat. Colleges must decide what is their primary/core mission and what is fluff. Esoteric courses and the politically correct must be measured against the survival of the institution. Waste must be eliminated.
It won’t be just the universities themselves that will take a hit. It’ll also be all the condos/apartments built for off campus housing sitting empty, plus the lenders who financed them.
Trying to generate sympathy, before the public starts demanding to know why the university was involved in foreign biological weapons research.
There are some really large graders for strip mining. We could clean out that campus in a few passes.
Can Colleges Survive Coronavirus? ‘The Math Is Not Pretty’
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Think of all the Lefty footsoldiers disguised as "professors" smugly sitting out the Covid on full pay right now.
Their "jobs" are going to be smoking craters when this is all over...
God forbid they take a pay cut.
They have not received a single penny back on their tuition paid in full before their classes were cancelled.
Surprising they cancelled classes.
I have a son graduating from Pitt this week, computer science. Came home for spring break and never went back. All his classes went online without a hiccup. This weekend we’re going to go pick up his things from the house he was renting with friends.
Also have a son who’s a junior at Penn State, business. Same thing, came home for spring break, never went back, all his classes transitioned to online. He’s still on schedule to graduate this time next year.
Sounds like your grand kids’ schools weren’t ready to make the transition to online. They should issue refunds to the students.
Maybe the college administrators could travel to western China and learn a thing or two... The Chinese have not been forced to close THEIR re-education camps.
“Sounds like your grand kids’ schools weren’t ready to make the transition to online. They should issue refunds to the students.”
Our DIL is east coast Italian, and Wharton trained. She will make things happen. She has to tread lightly not po those in charge of these colleges.
First cut should be to Offices of Diversity. Eliminate them all.
I have long argued for minimum conventional classes and trust me the arrogance and resistance for cutting back on those is deep and strong. Telling professors that students want to get in, get trained in a trade or medical profession and get to work sends them into orbit. “I’m not here to train people to work, I’m an educator!” is the usual response. I keep telling them the technical side is where they can stay solvent and that someone in a medical profession at best needs a writing class to write and communicate I their job, they need a public speaking class in the long run it will be helpful and a basic math class matched to their technical professions needs.
The faculty’s heads explode upon me saying that! I tell them if you keep your technical/medical classes full you will get enough left over to do some of your traditional classes. We got hammered in 2015 with the worst budget cut and a new governor telling us he wanted technical/medical programs offered in the community colleges. What did the president of the system do in response, he told the presidents to cut technical/medical programs immediately. Our college closed a respiratory program and a funeral director program, both of which had 30 max-students ever semester. Which meant a solid revenue stream gone. Five years later they are trying to bring back the respiratory program, duh!
The entrenched traditional administrations and professors are stuck in 1989...
How true. Our educational system is stuck in the past. Classical education has gone the way of the Dodo bird. I say that as a liberal arts major. Colleges must tailor the curricula to the needs of the society and their students.
We must also provide more vocational education to train people who don’t go to college. Countries like Germany have good apprentice programs for those going into the trades.
In the meantime we continue to bring hundreds of thousands of foreign workers every year to take American jobs and depress wages.
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