My kids are that way about math. They would be very happy to never take another math class in their lives, but they like foreign languages. My oldest was using Duolingo to learn Vietnamese during the stay at home part of the pandemic.
Crazy that they would cut forestry. The timber industry is huge in WV.
It’s really a shame.
Yale and Duke both tried to eliminate their forestry schools. They survived but are now hidden within schools of “environmental science:”.
I could be wrong but I don’t think WVU got rid of forestry entirely. I think they cut one or two majors and combined several others. Might be in a different department too?
Correct, forest resources was merged with wood science to form a new major instead.
I expect it was a similar change in computer science, consolidating and renaming.
Frankly, the cuts arent that remarkable
Care to quantify that claim?
What surprised me the most is that the faculty and admin didn’t come up with these plans before they were forced to do so. Did it never occur to the Dept of Puppetry, with its one major, to merge into Theater? Or for wood science and forestry science departments to recognize their overlap?
It would not take an outside consultant to recognize WVU had no business offering a worthless phd in math and would be much better served with advanced offerings in applied math and data analytics-the math faculty knew those math phd’s were unemployable and their program bottom-ranked. Self-interest in the status quo is a powerful force against cost cutting or efficiency.
It is pretty clear that you have not gone through one of these exercises before.
In most cases—and WVU’s fit this—when university administrators decide that they’re going to have programs justify their existence in one of these, the programs are provided with the data to use (generally from the institutional research office), and are also provided a template for their responses.
If the template doesn’t allow for creative solutions (e.g., merge wood science and forestry), then the programs are not allowed to (let me repeat, getting a little shouty about it: are not allowed to) present those solutions. And even if, in the course of doing their self-review, a program come up with such a solution, the channels that exist to propose and implement it are effectively always slower than the crisis timing of an administratively-required review—so the solutions that are imposed are the administrators’ solutions rather than the solutions that those who actually, you know, deliver the programs come up with.
Sidebar: Filling out the template is a good way to find out if the exercise is being done in good faith or not, because the data that institutional research comes up with isn’t always going to be fully accurate, since modern universities are complex places where there are multiple ways of counting the same thing and where one thing can fit into multiple categories. If IR’s numbers are challenged but those challenges are rejected out of hand—as happened at WVU—then it isn’t really a good-faith exercise.
@roycroftmom, you keep saying that the faculty and programs and such “could have” done Z or Z. The thing you’re not seeing is that, because of the way the program reviews were set up, that is inaccurate. They couldn’t have done X or Z—they were channeled into a very restricted method of self-review that, because it was done with crisis timing, kept X and Z from being even considered at all. Seriously, for those of us in academia it comes across kind of like asking why a defendant in a Soviet show trial didn’t just protest their innocence, you know?
(Not to mention that the crisis at WVU was an artificially created one, caused by utterly stupid fiscal decisions made by administrators who set up a system for reductions in which they weren’t touched by the reductions being made. And that just feels wrong.)
One might think that is a problem with the narrow role academic see themselves in-in any company, managers are always concerned about costs, and often interested in cost-cutting efficiency measures, none of which appear to be on the radar of academics. It does help explain the current cost of higher education
Academia does not work like a business – nor should it, since its payoffs are neither immediately evident nor often tangible. That’s not to say that universities don’t need to balance their budgets, but rather that the rules they follow in doing so are not the ones that necessarily work in business. Sometimes these rules are inscrutable and in need of change. But whenever people have sought to impose business models on education at any level, they usually fail. You can’t make academia run like a business just because that’s how you think all institutions should work. It doesn’t work.
@dfbdfb is spot-on in explaining the problems here (and why business solutions don’t apply.)
Maybe, but since balancing the budget is indeed necessary at the end of the day, one should expect outsiders to come in and do it for you if you can’t or won’t do it yourself. Something to keep in mind with imminent demographic changes for higher ed lurking.
Well, the individual departments appear not to be the problem in WVU’s case. The administration spent wantonly, based on promises of increased enrollment that never came – and the admins refused to rein it in. So why are viable departments, and not the administration, paying the price?
There is one “business solution” which works- the inevitable laws of supply and demand.
Why do you think Yale now has a specific Divinity School- instead of an entire university devoted to the education of clergy, who needed fluency in Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Latin to perform their professional duties?
There was no mandate from heaven- but the laws of demand (the relatively few people who want a Yale type Divinity school experience instead of being trained by a religious institution of their own denomination) and supply (you don’t need an entire university to support one particular profession-- unless it’s a small and highly specialized place like the Coast Guard) forced the change.
I agree that some of the “we should run this like a business” efforts have failed. The entire takeover of for-profit education by private equity is exhibit A. But much of the pushback from the academy is illogical. I’ve heard “we can’t explain our program on a spreadsheet”. Of course you can. The spreadsheet is just a tool, not an end unto itself. If NASA can describe the entire effort to reach Mars and map the cosmos on a series of spreadsheets- a group of professors (intelligent, highly trained, eager to learn new things) can describe their college’s interdisciplinary program in ethno-musicology.
I’d say it’s not rocket science but then I’d be under-cutting my own argument.
There is another business concept which academics are loath to learn, at their own peril. There is a fundamental difference between a fixed cost and a variable cost-- and mastering that concept would likely “protect” many of the programs which are usually on the cutting block. And the nice thing about fixed costs- they aren’t “fixed” in perpetuity. Buildings can be sold, repurposed, renovated. An outdated lab which uses animals for experimental purposes but doesn’t meet today’s safety or ethical standards can be shuttered or torn down and turned into a boutique hotel.
If faculty would get on board with some basic accounting principles, they could be leading the charge to streamline and shed costly assets which do nothing for students, pedagogy, or intellectual inquiry but get tagged as “fixed costs” by administrators who are too lazy to look for strategic alternatives.
I agree the administrative cuts should have been first, but there is no excuse for the duplication of departments and unnecessary majors at at a place like WVU. See the thread on “colleges spending like there is no tomorrow.” It may be ok for a very few highly wealthy private schools; the rest need to be cost-conscious, even if that is a novel idea.
Sorry to bring it up yet again, but obviously some professors do have a clear understanding of how to budget. The professors at WVU Women’s studies department suggested administratively merging into the Sociology Dept, and cutting its operating budget by 63%, and planned how to increase section size and attract grants. Maybe the other professors could learn from them.
“What surprised me the most is that the faculty and admin didn’t come up with these plans before they were forced to do so.”
Everything’s obvious with 20-20 hindsight.
In the interest of avoiding future " surprises" , the faculty at other schools should learn from the WVU experience and make plans now for the demographic plunge, which has been foretold for a dozen years. I bet few are doing so, sadly, so more consultants will be hired to do it for them when the time comes
I know a number of faculty at WVU. At least many programs there (including those targeted by the cuts) had done precisely what you suggest.
You know what they didn’t plan for? Administrators creating an artificial budget hole by not doing what you suggest.
Departments which didn’t realize that having only one student major would be problematic werent the victims of an artificial budget crisis. Regardless of the current shortfall, that department was long overdue to be merged. As were duplicative departments. It was never a good idea to waste money to begin with
There’s some tension-- and I think attention must be paid- between merging programs and departments to cut expenses, and the VERY strong parental and student need to see very specific and narrow programs, whether necessary or not.
Some of the top neuroscientists in the world did not “major” in neuroscience. Ditto for robotics, International Relations, Marketing, Kinesiology. But parents freak out at the notion of their kid majoring in something that doesn’t sound “leads to great job immediately”, so departments have responded (whether appropriately or not) by slicing the bologna very, very thin, adding a department chair, some overhead in terms of administration, branding, signage, a nice website, and a devoted faculty advisor to make sure that the “wannabee neuroscientists” flooding the campus actually understand that they need to take bio and chem before they get to the sexy stuff.
How many kids do we have posting that their “dream college” doesn’t have an International Business major? (and the kid doesn’t want to even take a foreign language in college, let alone really understand what a global economy is all about). How many parents post that the only college they can afford is the state flagship but it doesn’t have the kids major?
So I am sympathetic. Adding made up majors costs real money; convincing parents that a kid can major in chemistry or history or poli sci and still be employable might be REALLY hard these days. As if a kid who took a rigorous course of study in poli sci, econ, and history, AND is fluent in two or more languages isn’t a terrific candidate for an entry level job in international relations?
A friend of mine is a Dean at a highly regarded university and was recently appointed to some big, big job in their School of Criminal Justice. Even SHE knows it’s insane-- the U has strong programs in sociology, poli sci, psych and applied math/statistics. But explaining to a parent that the course of study in CJ will draw from many disciplines- but especially these four-- became too difficult. So she got promoted (and a raise, and an increase to what will be her base for her pension), gets to hire “dedicated” advisors, has a marketing consultant, etc. She’s neither venal nor insane-- if she turned down the job because the U didn’t NEED another special program/school/department, someone else less qualified (or less cynical?) would take it so it costs the U the same. And who says no to more money?
But she knows that five years from now, the department will be on the chopping block and people will be asking “why can’t we have a concentration in the sociology department, with a heavy statistics requirement, for students who want to understand the pathologies of criminal behavior?” and it will be the right question to ask…