School in the 2020-2021 Academic Year & Coronavirus (Part 1)

Parent Cafe
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Colleges are businesses. They are subject to the laws of supply and demand, and right now there is not much demand for 55k dollar online tutelage. If the public won’t buy what you are selling at that price, you may have to lower the price, and the way businesses do that is to cut costs. There are many fixed costs at a college, but some of the labor cost is not fixed and thus a likely option for cuts.

The academic labor market is unusual in that they erect high barriers to entry but still have tremendous labor oversupply, with multiple qualified applicants per position, thus keeping wages down. It really isnt the emotional matter of posters not “valuing” what professors do, nor parents not “sharing in the sacrifice”. It is a business, and to survive colleges must run as a business. The econ professors would agree.

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Some people are looking for the experience, prestige, and/or social networking more than the learning.

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I don’t think that schools should make tuition cuts. They are already under tremendous financial pressures and it’s just going to get worse. Even my son’s school has posted a communication saying that they have continued to pay all staff and contract employees and will continue that up to Aug 31 (end of FY). After that, all departments need to plan on 15% cuts across the board.

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We stayed at the Williams Inn. Our older son, who was at school in Boston, rented a car and drove over to Williams. The Williams Inn had a wonderful Thanksgiving buffet. My kid slept in his dorm room, but spent his waking hours with us hiking and playing board games in the tavern at the inn. The inn was pretty empty, and the prices were low.

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@homerdog - I actually wasn’t thinking specifically of your comments. I believe you that you were asking in good faith. I’m not familiar with the amount of research/etc. required of professors in LAC, as my family/friends have been in larger public research universities.

I think the difference is, just as I don’t count up how many hours an airline pilot is actually flying that I see in front of me, thereby to judge that industry (which I know almost nothing about) - I also assume that colleges with evidently terrific product must also be doing something right. (I also have extensive knowledge about teaching as a secondary teacher, and am related/friends to/with a number of professors.)

We once had a thread on CC where some poster was saying that experience shouldn’t be compensated in high school teachers because it’s “the same job every year and there’s no new thought” and no matter how many people asked questions like, “do you want the surgeon who has done the procedure twice, or ten times?” he just didn’t get it.

My default assumption is that educators love kids and love thinking and learning and are arranging their careers to benefit all of the above. I’ve been a mother for over 22 years, with three very different children in school from daycare through grad school, and I think the number of teachers who did a bad job that I’ve observed, is maybe one. (This teacher had my son in middle school and facilitated homophobic bullying, among other ways by blaming the target for “acting that way and wearing purple”.)

I’ve been on several threads where there are snarky comments about educators (all levels) not really doing much work or not doing valuable work. It always strikes me as odd that on CC, there would be an attitude like this instead of the opposite assumption. I would have thought that in a community literally dedicated to furthering and maximizing education, that the inherent value of educational professionals would be a basic assumption.

To bring it on topic for this thread, my assumption is that every professor/teacher out there loves his/her work and students, and is trying to maximize what is best about any types of learning that will occur, in the context of this terrible pandemic.

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@Homerdog --I have to say, your contempt for professors is palpable. It’s amazing how you continually come up with new schemes for how they should work a lot more, in order to make your student’s experience perfect, without, by your statement, really knowing what they do.

Let me tell you about me. I have a contracted, full-time, nontenure track position. I teach four sections of Freshman Comp a semester. In the past, that was 19x4 students. Next fall, it will 25x 4. So I am already plenty “giving”. You know, cuz we’re all in this together.

So, 100 students. Writing three major papers each, plus end of the semester portfolio, plus numerous low-stakes writing. Each major paper goes through three drafts. Each draft needs detailed feedback–that’s where the most learning happens. People call it “grading” but the line by line comments are not what you probably think when you hear that term.

So, 100 students times three papers times three drafts. Well, you do the math. Now add in planning the classes, designing the materials, office hours, and yes, committee work which is the running of the department. Answering student emails. Writing recommendations. Traveling all over campus to get to these classrooms. Etc. ETc.

But you want to add twelve hours to that week. Cuz we’re all in this together.

I won’t even bother to list my salary. Let’s just say it’s in the range of what people on CC think that new grads should be making.

So your comparison to corporate jobs, or the idea of a forty hour week, are, actually, pretty insulting.

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At my daughter’s LAC, professors generally teach 2 courses a semester. That doesn’t seem onerous. But one additional job they do for which we are very grateful is they write letters of recommendation for internships and grad school. They also advise clubs relevant to their field, for which we are also appreciative.

That said, not all of them worked very hard to facilitate an adequate educational experience during the pandemic. I understand it was unexpected and tough for everyone, but when a professor whose normal style is lecturing with PowerPoint limits the class meeting time to the 40 minutes offered by free Zoom rather than the normal 1.5 hours, then we feel our student did not get our money’s worth. There’s no reason he couldn’t have sent out successive meeting invites if the college didn’t pay for Zoom Pro for the faculty (which it should have.) We accepted issues like that for this past semester, but we will not be too happy if this persists for fall. Kids who had taken multiple classes with him and done well in the past, did not do well this time due to reduced teaching hours.

COA is around $72,000. Our choice, but for an educational product we didn’t receive even apart from the extras

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Um, seriously, what?

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Since I live in LA , we are fortunate that we can and do host Thanksgiving meals in our backyard where we can pretty easily socially distance with a few immediate family members. I don’t envision it will be too much different this year than previous years.

Also, I think there will be pro football in the fall and on Thanksgiving Day like there always has been.

Lastly, it will be nice to have my D20 home for the holiday after not seeing her since August. I’m pretty sure the usual October family college visit for freshman will be axed this year.

Things will look a lot different and more positive in the fall as long as we don’t have some huge spikes in cases. Time will tell.

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Possibly. Less preparation, economy of scale. Even I can’t believe how far in advance our school tries to plan. Got email yesterday about the spring schedule, and how did I feel about course X at time Y. January is too far off to think about, and there is some question how many adjuncts can get contracts anyways. We carry the lions share of the load there, so good luck hoisting that all on the TT faculty.

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“These alum are the ones that give a ton of charitable giving and contributions to the colleges at a tune of 10s of millions of $$ each year. They want their football…”

You keep assuming that everyone runs their program like Clemson or Alabama, and they don’t. I think there will be football to with fans in the stands, but the first covid-related death is not going to go down well with the alumni.

It’ll be along the lines of “you lost lives because you re-opened without herd immunity or a vaccine for a football game?”

“Harvard and Yale don’t make money on sports, yet each school sponsors 30+ sports (and UT-Austin only sponsors 18 varsity sports). So yes, they are making money on sports. And a reputation. And a feeling of school pride.”

Well at places like Harvard and Yale, sports like rowing, fencing, lacrosse are ways to get wealthy, often white, applicants in the door legitimately, but that’s off topic. There is school pride of course, but as a Cornell alum told me, Harvard and Yale were the first two teams to pull out of their hockey conference tournament in early March.

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Do you think Harvard and Yale need a way to get wealthy white candidates into the school so they do it through lacrosse and hockey?

The Ivy League (a sports league) likes sports. Their students like sports. Their alums like sports. And they like to win at sports. The Ivy League may decide not to have conference games next year, but I doubt they will.

The NCAA was a leader this spring when it cancelled March Madness. They did it very early and people were shocked that such a big event could be cancelled. After that, events fell like dominoes and no one could believe we didn’t do it earlier.

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I wonder if I can ask a slightly different question…

For parents, and particularly for students, if some or all fall teaching had to be online, what would make the experience optimal?* Asking for a friend…

The types of ideas I am seeing are breaking lectures down into smaller chunks, and video recording these. Then, placing these within a structured module content with lots of context and interactive exercises.

One question is how much ‘live’ (synchronous, in the new lingo) contact students would find useful. Office hours, for example, could be be held via live interactive chat sessions. Webinars can be done to supplement recorded lectures.

For smaller, discussion-based classes, these could be done live via Zoom or an equivalent.

One-on-one supervision of research projects could be done with live Zoom meetings, and likely with regular e-mail back-and-forth for minor queries.

There are obvious upsides and downsides to online teaching. On the positive, it is flexible in terms of when students can engage with it. 8:00 lectures? A thing of the past. Parking? Not an issue.

A downside is the practicalities of ‘live’ streaming. When students are on campus, they are all on campus, in the same time zone. This isn’t necessarily the case when teaching is online.

(* My friend is at the coal-face, and has no say in what tuition is charged.)

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And there is so much veneration for LACs… people waxing poetic about this intense, personalized academic experience with small classrooms. With so little respect for the faculty that spent years of their lives preparing to provide this personalized academic experience.

I don’t get it either. But there you have it.

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I think you’re right. Of course, highly-ranked faculty is a big reason these schools can offer the experience, prestige and social networking… but, details…

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A pretty creepy fiction piece imagining a socially distanced campus: https://insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2020/05/27/envisioning-day-life-physically-distanced-classroom-opinion

I think no matter what happens, it’s important to realize that things aren’t going back to normal right away. Honestly, as a student, I’m not sure if I prefer the above scenario or staying home.

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Thank you for providing information in this area.

May I ask, do your colleagues who work for purely online colleges earn a similar salary to you?

To me, if the residential colleges where to cut tuition, salary for the academic staff wouldn’t be what was cut. Cut all the non income generating clubs and sports. Cut non essential dorm staff. streamline admission processes so that it’s just about the numbers since if there is no longer say the orchestra, then they don’t need to find musicians.

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I read an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that was a game changer for me. (Sorry I don’t know how to link, maybe someone can do that?). The author’s point was that they think that Covid will be endemic (here to stay), and we’ll have to learn how to co-exist with it.

I’d been operating under a totally different assumption. I have great faith in our scientific community, and thought that we’d have game-changing medicine within 6 months to help us get better if we caught it, and a vaccine within 18 months.

I’m still hoping for a breakthrough with medicine within 6 months. If that’s realistic, it’s not so scary for schools to be back in full in the Spring. (I’m predominantly scared for the people the kids could spread to, but I’d worry about diminished lung capacity for the kids).

But here to stay? Then assuming breakthrough medicines in 6 months, then don’t hold off on Spring sports or ECs. And Spring classes fully back in-person. And I think we’ll have to have a larger conversation about masks then, and whether we will always want people to wear masks in public settings (like a class room), rather than just doing this temporarily.

Boy do I hope this guy is wrong.

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No, not yet. There’s nothing on how they’ll enforce it for on campus students yet either. Lots more details to come.

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I work in K-12 education, however over the years I have been asked to teach classes at the college level and I have also worked in healthcare. My profession allows me to work in a variety of settings.

I work hard at my job and I treat every one of my students as though he/she were my own kid. It’s frustrating because other than my boss, who is an administrator, none of the other administrators have any idea what I do. Right now I am full time, but I always wonder if they will drop me down by a day…because they truly don’t know what I do.

Fast forward to the present, and I am now working from home. Every day I have to send in my schedule…a list of everything that I have done all day. Besides the meetings, phone calls, report writing etc…I am also doing 35 live virtual instructional sessions a week. It is not at all unusual for me to work weekends, yet I don’t complain or tell anybody. It’s my job and I do whatever it takes.

The other day my supervisor (an administrator) called me and told me that the other administrators now understand how much I do, what I do, how hard I work etc…because it’s finally spelled out for them each day when I send in my schedule.

My friend (same field as me) taught a class at a major NYC university. The class met once a week for 3 hours. The amount of work she put in to prepare for this one class was tremendous.

My point here is that it’s easy to judge. It’s easy to sit back and say that a particular teacher, professor etc doesn’t really work hard and that their job looks “cushy.” We really don’t know what goes on behind the scenes.

Yes…I am looking forward to getting back to school (who knows if or when). However…I already made it very clear to everybody that I expect a workspace that allows for social distancing, and I expect everybody to wear a mask (if they are at an age to understand). Wanting to return does not mean that we are willing to risk the health of our families.