Interesting, I wouldn’t have pulled that out. I would have said, look at how many art schools!
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Yet another merger!
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I remember when School of the Museum of Fine Arts merged with Tufts. It was a good merger. I think that well thought out mergers can be beneficial. Some of the merger proposals I have seen make little sense, though … they just seek to postpone the inevitable.
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There is a big difference between a specialized school merging with a large university and two colleges merging with each other. SFMA is now the art college of Tufts. Wheelock merged with BU and its existing school of education. Bouvé College merged into Northeastern and Sargent College merged into BU decades ago. They added new programs to the larger university. But merging two struggling LAC’s into each other is, as you say, postponing the inevitable.
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It doesn’t surprise me that smaller religious school have had to merge or close. In the past, most of these schools were supported by their religious orders and they were able to operate on tuition alone as staff and faculty may have received minimum pay as they were priests, nuns, ministers, lay people not needing much in pay. There just aren’t as many religious available to teach, maintenance costs have skyrocketed and they can’t just pass the hat to make ends meet. Not that many people want to go to a 500 student school.
This is true of elementary and high schools too. Justice Sotomayor has often stated that her parents scraped together enough for her to attend catholic schools - it was $5 a month for catholic grade school in NYC in the 1960s (now about $9k per year). It is now $18k at Archbishop Spellman where she went to high school.
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And Catholic high schools are often among the less expensive private high schools these days.
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But Catholic hs used to be very inexpensive because the teachers were nuns and priests and brothers. There just aren’t enough of those to fill the positions.
My kids went to a catholic grade school and that school still has between 5-8 nuns who teach there. The school has a contract with the Dominicans of Nashville to provide the principal and a few teachers, and the school pays but also provides housing. They’d love to have more nuns but there just aren’t any more available.
My nephew went to another catholic school in the area (but half the size with only one classroom of each grade) and I think they only had 1 nun as a teacher.
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Many K-8 Catholic schools were tuition free until the 70s or 80s. They were completely parish supported.
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In our town, 1-8 was $90/yr/family (there were 4 parishes that had grade schools). Didn’t matter if you had 1 kid or 8, the family paid $90. I think we had to buy books, but then you just sold them to the next group the next year (or passed them to siblings). The high schools were more, but they were not connected to a parish.
There are still a lot of parishes that support schools. In PA, there was a parish that got rid of tuition and asked everyone at the parish to tithe, and it worked to support the school. This was a few years ago, so don’t know if it is still working.
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A small K-8 parochial school in the town next to mine is closing at the end of the current school year. Declining enrollment, expenses WAY up (the lay teachers health care costs-- very costly) and the kicker- the diocese got an offer from a private developer for the site which is apparently worth more money than anyone could have dreamed of. So the decision makes sense- the money will help support the other schools in the diocese (and they need it) and why have many schools at sub-par enrollment when you can have a few operating at capacity, hire the teachers at the closed school and distribute them throughout the system… it all makes sense. And running a school below scale is just sticking your finger in a dike.
And yet- people are sad. It’s a charming little building on an enormous wooded lot so once the school closes and the zoning issues are resolved, I’m sure it will become McMansion townhouses or similar; there are families who have sent their kids there for three generations; the playground and playing fields were open to the community when school wasn’t in session so even the non-Catholics feel a sense of ownership for the place.
But time marches on. I had teachers in grade school (public) who were graduates of teacher colleges with 80 students in their graduating class. Many of them were fantastic educators. Just a model of education which no longer works…
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But after the houses are built and the families move in, will there be enough space in the schools (public and private) in the area for all of the additional students?
Considering that the US total fertility rate keeps dropping, my guess is that most places won’t have the issue of having too many students in either K-12 or colleges unless far more schools are closed.
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Or if higher ed can find a way to attract more nontraditional students, of if the US can ramp its pipeline of international students back up.
(There’s more competition from other nations who are capitalizing on the US’s relatively unfriendly immigration system these days, though, making the latter one a tough lane to take.)
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And international students are not necessarily cash cows anymore, the way they used to be. The internet has opened their eyes to negotiating net price, whereas they used to just pay if they were able … even the wealthy international students balk at paying these days. It’s a different world for higher education, and closures will continue. Some administrative staff cannot be pared down in a manner that matches the loss of tuition. Certain functions are necessary whether there are four students or four thousand students.
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Though I look at the rate at which administrators (who make better salaries than the rest of us) have increased in higher education while staff and faculty positions have stagnated or even decreased, and I have to think there have to be some very real possibilities out there to at least try…
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Yes, try. But reality is a tough nut to crack.
Back in ancient times (like the 1980’s) a university would have two lawyers on staff. One to handle employee relations issues, one to handle procurement, contracts, zoning issues, etc. Anything else- outside counsel handled.
Today? You need someone to lead the office of risk management (because every drunk kid who falls out a window- while drunk- is going to sue), someone to handle investigations of assault/abuse/etc, someone who may not be a lawyer but probably is to handle Title IX, someone to lead the compliance function overall (are the mice used in the psych lab opening the university up to litigation from a PETA funded group on the mistreatment of rodents; are disabled students being accommodated in accordance with the law?) etc.
Genie is out of the bottle. Who are you firing-- the person who handles all the slip and fall claims? Sure, get rid of him. But it won’t save you money, because the slip and fall cases keep coming, and then you’re paying outside counsel three times as much as you were paying the inside person. The Title IX manager? Sure, she’s extraneous. But then kiss all the federal money goodbye- so you save a nickel and lose $100. Is that a savings?
It’s harder than it looks.
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Those are staff. That’s an entirely different classification.
I mean administrators, like the fact that where you might have had one administrator in charge of student life in the past, now you have separate administrators for student organizations and for residence life and for commuter services. Or, arguably more pernicious, maybe you had multiple administrators in charge of various offices in the past, but now those positions have been elevated to the vice-provost or vice-president level with an accompanying (and often very large) increase in salary.
Yeah, it won’t solve everything, but (to adapt the old saying) ten thousand here, ten thousand there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
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I don’t want to go into detail, but I worked in a position of great responsibility at a very small school, so I know what it takes to run a small school. Overworked and underpaid (as in earning less than recent grads in entry level corporate jobs with little direct responsibility) describes me and my handful of coworkers. Call us administration, call us staff … it didn’t matter, because we were “it.” Those who don’t work in higher education have a sense of what it takes to run a school, but they truly don’t understand it. In fact, even many who work in higher ed don’t really understand. They only know what they know, which isn’t always the whole picture. Even my last boss, the Director, didn’t understand.
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I have close friends in senior roles at large universities- at one, you are either faculty or staff. Dean of Students? staff. Assistant Professor of poli sci? faculty. Period. The faculty thinks there are too many redundant staff people (why do we need both a CFO AND a COO? Can’t we hire a COO who has an accounting degree?) and thinks they are ALL over paid except for the janitorial staff who are believed to be underpaid (they are union and they got a great deal during their last contract negotiation so not underpaid. Maybe under-appreciated.) The staff thinks the faculty are great individually (wonderful scholar, inspirational mentor) but collectively, they whine too much and don’t understand “academia”.) And thus it shall ever be.
Your classification system is NOT universal!
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It is, however, very widespread in general discourse about higher education, no matter what the classification system at any particular college or university might be. If you look at reports on employment in higher education nationally, there’s generally a distinction of not just level but also type drawn between, say, department secretaries and vice-provosts.
So it doesn’t matter if it isn’t universal, it’s the normal way to talk about practices and trends at a national level.
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