My earlier posts in this thread were before I knew that engineering was going to get cuts. But as @ucbalumnus indicated, those departments are continuing and though there will be some mergers between departments (such as mining with petroleum engineering), the cuts are not nearly so drastic and the departments and coursework will continue to exist. Foreign languages will not.
The fact that engineering is receiving cuts is to me a cautionary warning (or alarm) to students and families that nothing is safe.
I agree that WVU’s administration caused most of their mess. West Virginia (the state), however, still needs a fully functioning flagship. Unless they decide to make a different university its flagship (and have all the associated costs of bringing that university up to the level of services/funding etc, that WVU currently has), then WVU still needs to get fixed.
I would start with reducing/eliminating much of the administrative bloat that was detailed in @MWolf’s link in post 29. And President Gee might not get to retire Jan. 1, 2025. He might be let go sometime soon and have an interim president brought in. Better supervision and accountability from the Board of Governors seems needed as well.
But there still appear to be structural issues involved with how the state’s higher education system exists as even that link indicates that the “demographic cliff” will start really effecting schools in 2025, two short years away. Rather than continuing to wait to face their issues, the state should start taking action to prepare (and not just go into significant debt, as Pres. Gee proposed and enacted).
For instance, Fairmont State is a 30m drive from WVU and is currently serving about 3200 undergrads and 300 grad students. Why have a state college 30m from the flagship? Consolidate the two and capture the savings. It doesn’t have to do with the fact that WVU’s admin screwed up (royally). It’s that such a situation shouldn’t really exist, particularly in a poor state with a declining population and a declining undergraduate population.
Bluefield State is a 31m drive from Concord University which itself is 41m from WVU Institute of Technology. Again, why? Having so much redundancy in a small area that is not that heavily populated doesn’t make sense. West Virginia State is 43m from Marshall. It doesn’t make sense for ANY state to have so many public universities in close proximity to one another.
So it wouldn’t be that these universities that are close to other public ones are being reduced to pay for WVU’s mistakes. They’d be reduced because they shouldn’t exist. The timing may be because of WVU’s and the Board of Governors’ screw-ups, but the issue would need to be fixed anyway, particularly in light of the 2025 demographic cliff. Higher ed in West Virginia should be thinking, “United we stand. Divided we fail.”