From The New York Times:

Colleges Slash Budgets in the Pandemic, With ‘Nothing Off-Limits’
Liberal arts departments, graduate student aid and even tenured teaching positions are targets as the coronavirus causes shortfalls.

This is going to be good.

Ohio Wesleyan University is eliminating 18 majors. The University of Florida’s trustees this month took the first steps toward letting the school furlough faculty. The University of California, Berkeley, has paused admissions to its Ph.D. programs in anthropology, sociology and art history.

Oh no, not sociology and art history…

As it resurges across the country, the coronavirus is forcing universities large and small to make deep and possibly lasting cuts to close widening budget shortfalls. By one estimate, the pandemic has cost colleges at least $120 billion, with even Harvard University, despite its $41.9 billion endowment, reporting a $10 million deficit that has prompted belt tightening.

Aw…is the investment in David Hogg not paying off?  Is he not sharing his monetized social media money with Harvard?

“We haven’t seen a budget crisis like this in a generation,” said Robert Kelchen, a Seton Hall University associate professor of higher education who has been tracking the administrative response to the pandemic. “There’s nothing off-limits at this point.”

How about all those fucking Deans of Equity and Diversity and Deans of Student Life?  I bet there are a lot of six-figure administrators who never set foot in a classroom and could be shit-canned in a blink.

That’s the problem.  The bureaucracy always protects itself.  A bunch of professors get laid off but the worthless administrative staff keeps their jobs.

Even before the pandemic, colleges and universities were grappling with a growing financial crisis, brought on by years of shrinking state support, declining enrollment, and student concerns with skyrocketing tuition and burdensome debt. Now the coronavirus has amplified the financial trouble systemwide, though elite, well-endowed colleges seem sure to weather it with far less pain.

Maybe bankrolling an army of deans and administrators and their vanity projects while raising tuition to unaffordable levels was a bad idea.

Education was a bubble.  I’ve seen it said that COVID accelerates trends and bursting the education bubble was one of those trends.

Students and families, facing skyrocketing unemployment, have balked at the prospect of paying full fare for largely online instruction, opting instead for gap years or less expensive schools closer to home.

Abso-fucking-lutely!

I’m going back to school for a second Master’s.  The program is available both in class and virtual, but they shut down the campus for COVID.  So in-state students and distance ed students (like myself) were taking the same classes all online, but I would have to pay much more.  Then that got eliminated and I’m paying in-state tuition.  Once’s it’s online, does it really matter where you log in from?  No.  More schools should adjust to that reality.  Those that fail to evolve will face more budget shortfalls.

Scores of graduate programs, including some at elite research universities such as Harvard, Princeton and U.C. Berkeley, have temporarily stopped taking new Ph.D. students — the result of financial aid budgets strained by current doctoral candidates whose research is taking more time because of the pandemic.

Rice University, which paused admissions to all five of the Ph.D. programs in its school of humanities.

Most of the suspensions are in social sciences and humanities programs where the universities — rather than outside funders such as corporations, foundations and the federal government — typically underwrite the multiyear financial aid packages offered to doctoral students.

Ha ha ha ha ha, fuck ’em.  When money gets tight it’s not worth the money to train the next generation of Grievance Studies professors.

Engineering on the other hand, keeps on trucking.

As schools exhaust the possibilities of trims around the margins, what is left, administrators say, is payroll, typically the largest line item in higher education. Since February, when the coronavirus hit, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that colleges and universities have shed more than 300,000 mostly nonfaculty jobs.

Only after they fired all the professors, they will shed some of the administrative dead weight.

I know I’ve criticized school administrations a lot in this post, but I want to make it clear, I’m not really on the side of most of the professors either.

Take this bit from the Columbus Dispatch on Wesleyan University is eliminating 18 majors.

Ohio Wesleyan also announced it will consolidate the following:

• • Black World Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies to develop a new Department of Critical Identity Studies.
  • Music and Theatre & Dance departments to create a new Department of Performing Arts.
  • Classics and Modern Foreign Language into a new Department of World Languages.
  • Philosophy and Religion to form a new Department of Philosophy and Religion.

So it’s not like they totally eliminated the majors, they just sort of condensed them into larger departments.

I’d be more excited if they eliminated Critical Identity Studies all together… by demolishing the building… with the faculty still inside.

A lot of people this year were laid off because they were non-essential.

I feel bad for them, but at the same time, many of them chose to go into worthless fields.

I’m not talking about restauranteurs, salon owners, and others in that sort of service industry who are plainly essential to normal life.

I’m talking about people like this girl from a previous post.

Not just was she non-essential, but so is every professor she ever had.

Ohio Wesleyan University cut its journalism major.  Good.  We’ve seen little but bias, partisan hackery, and panic porn coming out of the Media for years.

When I want good on-the-ground reporting, I turn to the social media pages of independent journalists, most of who didn’t go to journalism school.

To pay $47,000 per semester to try and become a lying shit-spewer for a media network that has zero credibility left is a waste of money.  You’re better off with a GoPro and a YouTube channel.

Schools are hemorrhaging the useless humanities and social sciences, which have mostly been perverted into political indoctrination programs anyway.  Show me a classics program that actually teaches the classics and not Marxist criticism of the classics (other than Hillsdale).

Every gray cloud has a silver lining, and perhaps one of the silver streaks in the COVID cloud is the bursting of the education bubble, and perhaps tens of thousands of Grievance Studies professors left destitute and homeless, unable to corrupt young minds with their poison.