Heard about another university going under suddenly this week. Folks, if you are planning or know someone planning to go to college in the next few years, try to find faculty or staff at that institution that can give you the inside scoop, particularly if it’s a smaller or less wealthy school.
Things are so much worse at many of these places than it seems. There’s a whole bunch of R2 universities rn that have been mismanaged almost into the ground that are barely surviving, but you’d never know it from the outside. In some cases their US News rankings have actually gone way UP, bizarrely.
It’s not just that segment of schools, of course. But it’s those ones that seem like the ones that are about to fail. They’ve cut all they can, or more. And even if they survive they’re down to the bone, misrepresenting what they offer in their recruitment materials to fool students into going.
Whole programs gone but not taken off the websites, courses and faculty who no longer exist there but are still listed. Juicing the numbers any which way they can, somehow making less look like more to the “college rankings” people while students on campus are fighting for the most basic stuff.
And a LOT of this has been caused by an entire class of corporate-style administrators who hollowed out these institutions prior to the twin shocks of trmp’s first term & the ongoing pandemic, making the schools soo brittle as US colleges became less desirable destinations both globally & nationally
I know it sounds wild to think that a school w/tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in endowment can go under, but they actually can & do. Somebody who knows more about endowments can probably tell you why this happens but just know that, even though that seems like big $$, it’s not really.
I am very, very lucky (lottery win level lucky) to not be at an institution like this rn, but you would not believe what’s going on behind the scenes at some of those schools. The stories the faculty & staff could tell & are telling privately are absolutely outrageous, sad, awful, & infuriating.
It only took Union Institute and University's president 4 years to spend a million dollars into embarrassing destitution, and then to steal federal loan aid from their students and income from their faculty. A million dollars is no impediment to corrupt administration.
Similar problems here in the UK, except unis' fear of consequences of breaching consumer protection legislation disincentivises such misrepresentations. Introducing such legislation was a requirement of EU membership, but Brexit increases the likelihood of such protections being stripped away.
It really is. The shocks some folks thought were going to happen due to COVID didn’t turn out to happen quite as fast but in the next few years I think we are going to continue to see longstanding institutions that shouldn’t have failed (like UArts, etc.) fail. They’ve been hollowed out from inside.
UK higher ed seems to be crumbling as well. Forced not to rely on government funding, they started relying on recruiting students from abroad. The "hostile environment" toward immigration combined with variation in foreign economies makes this income unreliable. Lots of places losing money atm
Lots of efforts to diversify income streams (distracting from the core mission of education and research) also pretty much guarantees that universities won't be universities in the future (in my pessimistic opinion)
