While I might agree with you, I do not live in West Virginia so my opinion is not relevant. btw: some states/academics view colleges themselves as jobs programs for the local community (in addition to the actual education mission).
Gee, the Provost and the other academics are smart folks, so I trust that they will not jeopardize their R1 standing if that is important to them. And if their Legislature wants them to drop to R2, so be it, as that’s what the “laboratories of democracy” is all about.
I’d bet if the FL departments come back with some data to show that they are a profit center, they get to stay.
“Profit” is determined by how many students (or credit hours x # of students) the department teaches in a given year and how much grant money faculty bring in, compared to how much the department pays out in salaries, resources, and other costs. Every student in a seat is worth a certain amount of money to the university. It’s relatively inexpensive to run a foreign language department (as opposed to, say, any lab science). At the same time, faculty do not usually bring in science-sized grants. But they also don’t command the salaries of scientific and professional disciplines, and their teaching staff usually includes a lot of adjuncts and grad students teaching intro classes. So there are a lot of variables at play to determine how profitable a department is.
Because lots of students take foreign language classes who are not necessarily majoring in a language, these departments tend to generate a lot of money for their university – beyond what one would expect of small majors (same goes for many humanities departments, which are equally inexpensive to run and tend to teach large general studies courses, so they teach a lot of non-majors, and their faculty earn comparatively low salaries). Last year, the foreign language department at WVU turned a profit of $800,000, which makes the decision to dissolve the department incomprehensible.
Isn’t that “profit” really just a subsidy from the state for each student? (That’s a genuine question. Where I live, each student enrolled means more money from the state.)
I hope that they Appeal based on real numbers. Of course, the other issue is that WVU is proposing to eliminate any FL requirements, so any students taking FL to fulfill a Gen Ed requirement will no longer enroll in the classes. (A real shame, but they didn’t ask me for my opinion.)
Keep in mind that subsidies from the state are at historic lows. So it’s not just that – not even mostly that. It could be money generated as a combination of public funding, federal funding, tuition, grants, and other sources. Think if it this way – if a department has x number of students in its classes for y number of credit hours, and students (or someone) is paying for those credit hours, then x(y)-(departmental expenses) = a share of the university’s income generated by that department. This is a really rough and overly simplified way to put it, but there you have it.
That makes sense, but you have to take the average net price students are paying for tuition/credit hours (so after institutional financial aid), not the list/gross tuition price.
Understood, which is why I said it was a highly simplified formula. But given that students across the university are paying some average net price for tuition that is not the gross ticket price, that’s not really a variable that distinguishes one department from another. In other words, Foreign Languages generated a net $800,000 regardless of what its individual students were paying in tuition.
But if the majority of foreign language students only took the classes because they had to, because WVU said take FL classes to graduate then that department’s “profit” seems artificial in a way. Those students will still need their 120 credits or so and WVU can say “hey now we want you to take one computer science class” and simply transfer those students’ seat time(and tuition!) to a department with more support and/or interest.
I think the fact that they have so few majors in FL means WVU isn’t going to hurt their bottom line by getting rid of the department. Kids will still need to take a class whether it’s a mandated one or an elective to get to graduation.
I have no idea whether they had a foreign language requirement. There are lots of reasons why students would choose to take language classes even if they didn’t have to. It’s hard to imagine how a university can make an argument that they’re preparing students for a global economy without language offerings, and perhaps students realize it and prepare themselves accordingly.
Worth remembering: WVU’s process only counted one major for double-majoring students—the one listed first in the computer database. A large proportion (I have heard well more than half, but nobody seems to have convincing data on this one) of foreign language majors at WVU are double majors, and by a quirk of the way majors are categorized by the university, the foreign language major is nearly always listed second.
Which all points out that the whole claim that WVU has very few foreign language majors is in question, even aside from anything else being discussed here.
(Also, saying that WVU could eliminate the foreign language requirement, so those students shouldn’t count—I mean, that’s kind of a weird argument, innit? A university can eliminate nearly any requirement. But basing academic cuts on that sort of hypothetical? Make the decision, and then you can react to it. But academic requirements fall under the purview of faculty decisions, not administrative ones.)
At my D’s state flagship, the majority of majors offer a choice of BS or BA degrees, so you either have to take 1-2 extra quantitative classes for a BS or pass the equivalent of a year of foreign language (you can even pass by oral exam without taking the classes, eg if you have an AP level skill from HS). Given this choice, even amongst majors that are not intrinsically quantitative like sustainability studies (not environmental science), 70-80% of graduates opt for a BS.
So I’d argue that not that many college students are interested in studying foreign languages if they aren’t required to. All three of my kids have been very happy to escape any language requirements in college, S23 even took AP Latin (one of only 3 students in his HS) just to avoid a potential foreign language requirement in college (Arizona was high on his list and is one of the few state schools he applied to that requires even science majors to take a language unless they have a 3 in an AP).
It seems many of the departments affected were actually on-board with the proposed changes, contrary to media reporting.
The dept of mathematics agreed to drop its doctoral program in math in exchange for starting a masters level program in applied math and data analytics, for example. The business school dropped a phd in management and proposed other changes based on established metrics of changes it had already implemented, or which were implemented at other schools, which showed cost-cutting.
The FL department was amenable to reducing the FL requirement at the school but failed to address the declining student interest ( and yes, student credit hours were considered).
The truth seems quite far from the reported attack on the humanities by a red state narrative that was reported by the media.
Counterpoint: Saying “We’ll give up part of our program if we can continue to survive” is not evidence of being on board with giving up that part of the program.
Fair. Perhaps the Board will look at the recommendations and restore some of the FL cuts in accordance with that department’s suggestions.
FL alone seems to have totally missed the mark in its response to the Provost, while frankly more controversial depts like gender studies understood how to garner support for its program. Such is life.
Thanks for the update on WVU. That article links to a different article that addressed the foreign language issue. The university is no longer going to eliminate all foreign languages but will offer in-person instruction in Spanish and Chinese (assuming Mandarin, article did not specify). These classes will be electives and could perhaps lead to a minor. The college is eliminating the foreign language requirement for any major.
Suffice it to say, it’s better than nothing, but still a terrible decision overall.
They do still, however, plan to “eliminate foreign language majors and master’s degree programs but to continue to provide face-to-face instruction in two languages.” (The languages are Chinese, by which I assume they mean Mandarin, and Spanish.)
And the headline should probably be that now instead of devastatingly deep cuts, WVU is only planning horrifyingly deep cuts. Forestry—which, lets be serious here, is an important field for the state—will still be gone. Public health, also desperately needed by the state, will still be gutted. Comp sci, kind of weirdly, still faces severe reductions.
And, of course, no negative repercussions for the administrators whose idiotic decisions these past several years—which were called out by faculty along the way, though those objections were totally ignored—led to these cuts being “necessary”.