Mizzou Pays a Price for Appeasing the Left

Wall Street Journal ^ | 8/20/17 | Jillian Kay Melchior

[Lockbox]

Enrollment is down more than 2,000. The campus has had to take seven dormitories out of service.

[Lockbox]

webpage capture at

http://archive.is/hZWHR#selection-2511.0-2511.20

[TBP]

Good.

[aimee5291]

wonder if they will leave the SEC..??

[Texan5]

Good-let their misery be an example of what will happen to colleges promoting idiocy-massive loss of income...

[JamesP81]

Well then. I’ll have a coke.

[grania]

Around here, there's an interesting phenomena. This is just personal encounters, so it's not a scientific proven fact. It seems that top-tier HS students who didn't go to college have found their way in to excellent jobs, with training programs when needed. They don't have those debts, and they seem to be doing quite well. Meanwhile, average HS students with weak college degrees and lots of debt are having difficulties.

I'm wondering if places such as the University of Missouri being an unlivable environment for decent young people will create a situation where college degrees become less necessary. In fields where a degree or license is necessary (for graduate school or skills) I'm wondering if ways to get a degree without an actual on-campus environment will become just as acceptable as an actual college degree.

[Junk Silver]

I’m waiting for more institutions of higher learning, corporations and television networks to realize what lousy business it is to appease the radical Communist minority who is trying to seize control of this country while pissing off the 63 million of us who actually work for a living and have disposable income.

I am looking forward to the Mizzou going-out-of-business sale, maybe I’ll get a cheap computer monitor or something.

[cradle of freedom]

The silent majority lets its dollars do the talking.

[georgiarat]

Missouri responded by laying off libray, maintenance workers and other staff. I do not believe they were the core of the proble. It was the faculty and diversity administrators.

[kearnyirish2]

Once a college is tainted as a playground for young people looking to extend high school for four more years, it is doomed. The degrees lose all value, and serious people want nothing to do with the school.

When you add in unqualified tokens “playing college”, physical safety is another disincentive to attending.

[wbill]

I consulted in Higher Ed, in the belly of the beast, for about 5 min.

The flagship state schools like Mizzou, also the topnotch private schools (think Stanford, Duke, etc) have an unimaginable amount of fat that they can burn through before things get tight.

Of course there will be much wailing and protesting and gnashing of teeth when the Associate Deputy Director of the Department of Diversity (along with all of her staff) gets the sack .... but those choices will be made, or the admins higher up the food chain lose their comfy, virtual no-show jobs.

Mizzou, and other colleges like it, aren't going anywhere for awhile. But - I do enjoy watching them feel some pain from their poor decision making. If anything, it's an excellent warning to potential attendees, might make them think twice before dropping the equivalent of a 30-year mortgage on a worthless "Fill-in-the-blank Studies" degree.

[deepestsouth1]

I was graduate in 1971. MU was a bizarre place even then with many rural ag school students like myself mixed with the let’s say less conservative students mostly from St. Louis

[bert]

drivel

[Lockbox]

1. Virtual College will have an impact, the old brick and mortar business model is dead.

2. Those running the schools are Kool-Aid drinkers and do not care about the financial impact. But one day as Margaret Thatcher said "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money".

3. Those not incurring $100,000 in debt plus losing 4 to 5 years of working are at an advantage in many jobs.

[Defiant]

I was from suburban St. Louis, and graduate HS in the late 70s.A huge number of my friends from HS went to Mizzou. All of them, to a man, spent their time going to frat parties and drinking. Most required 5 or 6 years to graduate, not because classes were hard to get, but because they had bad grades, took fewer courses and had to drop out of harder majors. After graduating, most of them had difficulty getting decent jobs for many years. Some of them were smart, talented, and they eventually found something they could do that they made money in. Many of them ended up back in St. Louis in jobs that required no higher education.

I thought it was a bad idea to go to Mizzou even back then, and instead left the state to go to an academic school. Now, it is probably 5 times worse. They probably still have the drinking and frat life, but it is mixed with fascist training, homosexual propaganda, BLM riots and fear that kissing a girl will get you kicked out. No thanks.

Those friends of mine, the ones that managed to succeed, not a one of them is sending their kids to Mizzou.

[RayChuang88]

I think the mess at Ferguson, MO scared away a lot of alumni from donating to “Mizzou.” And that college isn’t a public college with gigantic endowments like Ohio State, Michigan (Ann Arbor), or University of Texas at Austin.

[ransomnote]

” 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.”

Enrollment is down 2000 people so they “had” to cut 450+ staff? One staff for every 4 students lost?

[wbill]

If I can climb up on my soapbox for a min....

IMO, from what I saw while I was in the belly of beast, there are three kinds of colleges...

Diploma Mills - think, pretty much any college that you see frequent ads for on TV. They're largely dependent on gov't money, and as that dries up (which it is...) they'll go away (which they are). Not a bad thing, they're largely irrelevant, except to the thousands of people who are snookered into giving them money each year.

Smaller "safety" private schools and non-flagship state schools - think "State U at Podunk" ... Lots of these out there. Those that specialize - think "State U at Podunk has the best Abnormal Psyche program in the US", might do OK. For others, I was amazed at the number of faculty and staff who had no concept of "Zero Dollars" and for who a budget was something accounting complained about once a year. Those clueless schools will go into the brick wall like a dart, and wonder what happened.

Flagship State schools and Top Privates? I talked about those above. They'll be leaner and will suffer a lot of pain but ultimately will come out OK.

No matter what, changes will take a long time to see. Everything is on a four year cycle - minimum - and frankly, I doubt WBill Jr will even see major changes from the model that I attended. Change will come, but will be ponderously slow.

And you're right about the "not incurring 100K Debt...". Again, just IMO, people learning a trade will make more money, more quickly. The top end for people with four year degrees *in a valued discipline, not XXXXX Studies* ... might have a higher top end, but in a longer time frame and with more risk attached.

So, the question becomes, "Is it better to make 30-45K as a welder out of school right now with not a whole lot of movement up.... or *maybe* start at the bottom and wind up at 90-110K as an engineer in 10 years, provided you don't screw up, get outsourced, make good decisions, etc, etc etc...."

[kenmcg]

Thanks to the panty-waist liberal administrators and BLM, whites are fleeing.

[dandiegirl]

I think this is part of the reason that nut state legislator got booted off all her committees. They saw that people are getting sick of this crap and all these irrational demands made by blacks only because they are black. The caving in to the racists at Missouri was nuts and they have paid a price