Dead man walking: The small liberal arts colleges are in a death spiral

 Experts say that the Americans most at risk of dying from the coronavirus are elderly people with serious underlying health problems such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.

Something similar might be said about America's colleges. The schools most at risk of closing due to the COVID pandemic are small, private liberal-arts colleges that had severe financial problems even before the coronavirus forced most of them to close their campuses last spring. These are the little schools that were struggling with budget deficits and declining enrollments.

Common Application, an organization that processes a standard application form primarily for liberal arts schools, confirms this view.  So far this year, Common App received 8 percent fewer enrollment applications from first-year students than at the same time last year (as reported by Inside Higher Ed).

But some colleges suffered steeper declines than others. Colleges and universities in the Northeast and the Midwest, where the small liberal arts colleges are concentrated, suffered a 14 percent drop in applications. 

And small colleges lost more ground than big ones. First-year college applications were down the most among schools with fewer than one thousand students.  They also are seeing a 14 percent decline.

If next year's entering class drops by a corresponding rate, then a small college of 1000 students will enroll only 860 students, which would be an existential catastrophe.

But enrollments probably won't drop that much. Why? Because many colleges are lowering their standards to attract less qualified students---students who might have been rejected a few years ago.

Presently, a majority of colleges and universities do not require applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores.  They say they took this measure to offer more enrollment opportunities to first-generation and minority students.  

But I think they are lying. I think the colleges are abandoning standardized test scores to attract students who don't do well on those tests. By doing away with the ACT and SAT, the colleges can obscure that they are scraping the bottom of the academic barrel to get enough tuition-paying students to pay the light bill. 

Also, by giving applicants the option of not submitting a standardized test score, only people with good scores will provide them.  And this will cause the colleges' average test scores to go up--making them look better in the US News and World Report rankings.

In a way, American colleges in the age of  COVID are like the German Wehrmacht during World War II.  When the war began, Germany had plenty of healthy, young Aryan soldiers with blue eyes and blond hair--men who just couldn't wait to get their legs blown off in the service of the Thousand Year Reich.

But as the war wore on, millions of those ideal soldiers were killed in North Africa, the Western Front, or Russia.  The Soviets captured about three million Germans soldiers (mostly men but some women) and allowed them to starve to death.

By the time the Russians got to the suburbs of Berlin in 1945, most of those poster-perfect German soldiers were gone, and the Gestapo was rounding up young boys and old men to man the barricades.

Likewise, many small liberal arts colleges are willing to enroll just about anyone who can pay their tuition bill--whether or not the applicants are qualified under the admissions standards of yesteryear.  

Unfortunately, many of these unqualified students are taking out student loans that they will never pay off.  

In my view, many of these struggling little colleges should close their doors rather than stagger on for a few more years by signing up students who take out student loans for an educational experience that will do them very little good. 

Hey little guy, how would you like to get a bachelor's degree in gender studies?

"I've always depended on the kindness of strangers": An Athabaskan woman and six Mexicans saved me from freezing to death in Alaska's Copper River Basin

 "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers," Blanche DeBois said in Streetcar Named Desire. I know what Blanche was talking about. Several times in my life, I was saved from catastrophe by someone I did not know.

Many years ago, when I was a young Alaska lawyer, I was driving a rental car through the Copper River Basin on my way to a school board meeting in the little town of Glenallen. It was winter, and the temperature on the Richardson Highway was 20 below zero.

I wasn't speeding, but I was driving too fast for the road conditions. I hit a patch of black ice and rolled my car into a snowbank. I wasn't hurt, but I was dangling from my shoulder harness. I released the seatbelt and climbed out through the passenger side window.

It was about three in the afternoon, and dusk was falling. I had my so-called survival gear in the car's backseat  (parka, Sorel arctic-pack boots, heavy wool pants). I began putting it on as a heavy snowfall began, almost immediately obscuring my rolled car, which was white.

Before I got my cold-weather gear on, I realized I would not survive the night. The temperature would drop to 40 below, and no one was likely to travel Richardson Highway at this late hour.  My cold-weather gear was utterly inadequate for what lay ahead.

As my terror began to rise,  I saw a car creeping down the highway at about 20 miles an hour. An Athabaskan woman was driving, and she gave me a lift. I still remember the feel of her car's warm cabin with hot air blowing toward me through the air vents.

Improbably, the Athabaskan lady was traveling to visit her boyfriend, who was working on a seismic crew somewhere out in this frozen waste. Before long, we found him. He was Mexican (also improbable), one of a crew of six guys who spoke Spanish. 

The boyfriend and his comrades had some sort of enormous industrial vehicle.  I couldn't make it out in the darkness, but I recall it was so large that I had to climb a ladder to get into the cab.  We drove down Richardson Highway until we found my car.

Our little group pondered the car's situation. It was lying on its side with all four wheels exposed. 

"Anybody hurt?" the leader asked.

"No," I replied.

"Thanks be to God," he said and made the sign of the cross.

After diagnosing the situation, the Mexicans attached a chain to the car's underbody and pulled it out with their behemoth machine.  Then they pushed it over until it was upright on the road.  They cleared the snow out of the engine compartment and told me to try to start the engine.

I turned the ignition key, and the car started. All of a sudden, my near-death experience became an amusing personal anecdote. I told them I would buy them a case of beer, but one of my rescuers demured.  "No, no," he said. "Jack Daniel." 

I was not Catholic at the time, and I found the Mexican's sign of the cross to be charmingly childlike. I did not realize that the Athabaskan woman and the Mexican seismic crew were angels dispatched by St. Joseph to save my life.

But why did St. Joseph bother with me? I still don't have a clue.

Richardson Highway in winter

Guilford College, a liberal arts school, cuts some liberal arts programs: Does that make sense?

 After 12 years of declining enrollments and a massive budget deficit, Guilford College is taking drastic action. President Carol Moore proposes laying off 15 tenured faculty members and cutting undergraduate programs in chemistry, physics, political science, philosophy, economics, history, mathetics, sociology, and anthropology. 

In an unsigned statement, Guildford announced that it would maintain 23 programs, including African and African American Studies: Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Exercise and Sport Sciences.

Naturally, Guildford's statement did not list the programs it was cutting. I had to find that out by reading a story in the Christian Science Monitor.

Was this a good idea?

Not in the view of some faculty members. Thom Espinosa, chairman of Guildford's Physics Department, had this to say. "This plan does not reflect on the school's philosophy in any way," Espinosa told a reporter.

Historically, Gulford has maintained a peaceful balance among science, arts, humanities, and social sciences, as is appropriate for both a Quaker school and a liberal arts institution. If this plan represents any philosophy or vision, it must be [President Carol Moore's].

 I am in total sympathy with Professor Espinosa, but President Moore had to make some difficult decisions. It is not tenable for a small college to lose enrollment over a long period of time and operate on unbalanced budgets.

In a way, Guilford College is in the same position as the German army when it invaded Russia in 1941. The Germans captured 3 million Soviet soldiers before the Russians rallied and cleaned the Germans' clock.  But the Wehrmacht had no ability to care for all the enemy troops who surrendered and basically allowed most of its prisoners to die from starvation, disease, and exposure in open fields surrounded by barbed wire.

The German army's position was that someone has got to eat, and it will be us.

I don't mean that as harshly as it may sound, but it is now clear that hundreds and perhaps thousands of tenured professors are going to lose their jobs at struggling liberal arts colleges.  I think that is inevitable.

In my view, colleges in financial trouble should spend at least some of their dwindling resources to help laid-off professors find other jobs or at least provide them with decent compensation as part of their termination packages.

Declining enrollments, a barrage of Title IX litigation and now COVID 19 lawsuits: Weak colleges will succumb to multiple woes

 How many times have we seen those nature programs showing thousands of wildebeests thundering across the African plains, trailed by hungry lions just waiting for a chance to pull down a sick or injured animal?

Many beleaguered American college presidents must feel like those wildebeests--desperately hoping to outrun the hungry lions of financial reality.

First of all, enrollments dropped precipitously at many colleges and universities over the past few years due to various reasons, including demographics. There just aren't as many college-aged individuals as there were a few years ago.  In Pennsylvania, for example, enrollments in the state's university system have dropped 20 percent in the last few years. 

Small, private colleges have suffered the most from this demographic downturn, which has forced some of them to close. Their situation hasn't been helped by a declining interest in the liberal arts and the humanities.  These little colleges' mission is to prepare students for adulthood by providing a sturdy liberal arts education. Now the kids don't want a degree in history or English.  They elect to become business majors.

Secondly, universities across the United States have been hit with a spate of lawsuits brought mostly by male students who were suspended or expelled for sexual misconduct.  These students have charged colleges with kicking them out of school without giving them a fair hearing, and several federal courts have responded sympathetically to that argument.  Quite a few of these cases have made it into the federal appellate courts.

In a 2018 scholarly article, Diane Heckman listed fifteen federal-court decisions in 2018 involving claims that a college mishandled its sexual assault hearings. Five of these opinions were at the federal appellate court level. I haven't seen the numbers, but I feel sure this litigation has accelerated. 

And then the coronavirus pandemic showed up.  The universities spent lots of money to keep their campuses safe, but a new COVID outbreak seems to break out every day at one college or another.

Students who test positive for the virus are being quarantined in their dorms, making them unhappy campers. After all, the whole point of going to college for many young people is to drink beer and party in the new hook-up culture.  Can't go out at the weekend?  That's a bummer, man.

Parents are understandably leery about putting their sons and daughters in a college dorm where they live cheek to jowl with peers who engage in risky behavior. Consequently, fewer students are choosing to live in the residence halls. This is a huge problem for the universities because they need dorm revenues to service their student housing debt.

And now the colleges have been hit with a tidal wave of class-action suits brought by students who want a refund or at least a partial refund for their spring tuition.  They argue, quite plausibly, that the quality of their education deteriorated when the universities closed their campuses last March and switched instruction from face-to-fact to an online format.

How many of these lawsuits have been filed? According to a law firm that keeps track of this litigation, students have filed more than 160 lawsuits demanding tuition refunds.  If a college loses one of these suits, it will be required to reimburse all its students for part of their spring tuition and fees--a crushing cost for most schools.  In fact, a court order requiring a college to give students their money back will likely be a death sentence for a small, private liberal arts school.

Hardly anyone saw the coronavirus coming, so no one can reasonably blame the universities if they failed to respond perfectly to the pandemic. We still don't know a lot about this plague, and the nation must steel itself for millions of more cases before a vaccine becomes widely available.

Nevertheless, many weak collegiate wildebeests will be dragged down over the next 12 to 18 months.  A few professors who believed they had lifetime job security will learn that they can be laid off if their employer experiences a genuine financial emergency. And those small-town businesspeople who depend on college students showing up every fall with their parents' credit cards will see their standard of living drop.  Those people, too, will find they have become the metaphorical equivalent of a weak and wounded ungulate running for its life from a pack of hungry lions.

References

Diane Heckman, The Proliferation of Title IX Collegiate Mishandling Cases Involving Sexual Misconduct Between 2016-2018: The March to the Federal Circuit Courts, 358 Education Law Reporter 697 (2018).

Was the Good Samaritan a Cajun?

When I was a child, my family were 80-proof Methodists. Every Sunday, I would wriggle into my little plaid sports coat, adjust my clip-on bow tie, and head to Sunday School.  

Looking back, I think Sunday School was good for me. My Sunday School teachers were all women--mostly young moms. We sang lovely children's songs--"Jesus loves me, this I know"--and we listened to the same Bible stories hundreds of times. 

I especially liked the tale of the Good Samaritan. What impressed me most about this biblical character was his generosity. He spent his own time and money helping a stranger who got mugged out on some lonesome highway. I knew I would never be as good as the Good Samaritan, but he became my ideal.

Let's face it. We don't meet many generous people today. Very few people will stop to help a mugging victim. In fact, many Americans want to defund the police--the people we pay to protect us from muggers.

Indeed, a lot of Americans have become muggers.  I'm not talking about the hoodlums who lurk in dark alleys. I'm talking about the bankers who take a cut from every financial transaction. I'm talking about university professors who do no useful work but have lifetime job protection. I'm talking about the politicians who fly around in private jets and stir up racial strife. All these people are muggers.

But last weekend, I went deer hunting up in Claiborne Parish near the Arkansas border. There were nine of us at my friend's deer camp, and about half the group were true Cajuns.

No one shot a deer that weekend, but no one was bummed out. We spent time in the woods, and in the evenings, we shared fellowship and a meal together.

No one argued about who was entitled to sit in the best deer blind. In fact, everyone offered to take the worst blind. No one argued about how to split the ticket at the Mexican restaurant. A couple of guys just picked up the check. No one worried about who might be drinking someone else's beer.  If there was beer in the fridge--well, buddy,  that beer is for you. 

If someone writes another modern-day version of the Bible, I hope the Good Samaritan will be called the Good Cajun.  And instead of loaves and fishes, Jesus will hand out gumbo and jambalaya.

As we start the third decade of the 21st century, America is becoming a nasty place to live. Thank God, there are still a few good-hearted Americans, some cheerful Americans, and some generous Americans. A lot of these good people live in Flyover Country, and a good many are Cajuns.

Student-housing and meal plans at American universities: Another reason college students are taking out large student loans

College students take out more and more student loans to pay their tuition bills with each passing year because tuition has risen at twice the inflation rate for more than two decades. But tuition is only part of the cost of going to college.  

When you add in books, housing, and food, not to mention incidental costs like a cell phone, the cost of going to college for one year can be well over $30,000--even at a public university.

Let's look at Louisiana State University, located just down the street from me. LSU requires its first-year students to live on campus unless they qualify for an exemption. This means that most of the 6,400 students who enroll for the first time will live in a dorm.  First-year students must also purchase a meal plan.

According to LSU's own calculation, the typical first-year student needs to come up with 24 grand just to pay tuition, room, and board.  How many Louisiana families have $24,000 lying around to pay for their child's first year at college?

And students have other costs besides the money that goes directly to the university. LSU estimates the total annual cost for an in-state student is $33,590! How many Louisiana families have that kind of money sitting in the bank?

Of course, many families figure out ways to spend less than $30,000 a year for their children to attend college. Students with good high-school academic records and good ACT scores can qualify for a TOPS scholarship that covers most college-tuition costs in Louisiana. 

But even a first-year student who gets a "free ride" and pays no tuition must still come up with $12 thousand to pay for room and board.  And in most instances, at least part of that money will be borrowed.

Now stretch these costs over four, five, or six years. A typical student who graduates from LSU in four years will have spent $130,000 to finance their studies. But only about two-thirds of LSU students graduate in six years! A student who pays in-state tuition and spends six years living in an LSU dorm will rack up costs totally almost $200,000.

Obviously, that's far too much. And offering students free tuition at a public university (as Senator Bernie Sanders proposed) doesn't provide a total solution.

Of course, tuition must come down, but students need to spend less time hanging out on college campuses.  Spending six years to find oneself, financed with student loans, is a disastrous way to become an adult. And this is particularly true for students who spend six years in college to get a degree in art history, sociology, or gender studies.

How would you like to spend six years here?

Colleges of Education--Higher Education's Cash Cows--are Suffering from Malnutrition

Colleges of Education have been higher education's cash cows for more than half a century, but the cash cows have gotten sick.

 Fifty years ago, the education schools were packed with undergraduates--mostly young women--working on their bachelor's degrees in elementary education. Many of them wanted to spend their careers teaching children, and others chose to major in education because they knew it was easy. 

Graduate programs in education also attracted a lot of students. In most states, an educator was required to have a master's degree in educational administration to become certified as a school principal.  That requirement kept the educational administration programs well supplied with working-adult students. 

In the old days, school districts often gave teachers automatic raises if they obtained a master's degree. Many school districts would actually pay a teacher's tuition to get a graduate degree in curriculum studies or educational administration.  Most teachers said, "Why not?"  Free tuition and a pay raise were all the incentives they needed to enroll at a nearby public university.

Universities loved their education colleges because they usually carried large enrollments, and the universities didn't have to pay the education professors very much. Also, public universities often received additional revenues for their graduate programs, so all those enrolled in M.Ed. and Ed.D. programs generated extra income.

But in recent years, the cash cows have gotten sick. Enrollments in education colleges are drastically down at universities all over the United States. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, undergraduate degrees have plummeted over the past 50 years--from 176,000 in 1970-1971 to only about 83,000 in 2017-2018. Graduate-program enrollments have also dropped sharply.

What in the hell happened?  First of all, young people aren't going into the field of education. During the same 50-year period, when education degrees dropped by half, degrees in business more than tripled. In 2017-2018, more than four times as many people obtained business degrees than degrees in education.

Secondly, non-university certification programs proliferated at the expense of the education colleges.  Instead of sitting through a battery of boring college courses before getting a teaching certificate, people with college degrees found out they could immediately get a teaching job and work on their teaching credentials while drawing a salary. These programs were often operated by regional service centers and--in some states--even by the school districts themselves.

No wonder then that the University of South Florida demoted its college of education to a school within a larger college that included non-education programs.  Louisiana State University, where I first began teaching, took that step more than ten years ago.

Why have young people become less inclined to be teachers and school administrators?  Poor pay is one reason.  In Louisiana, teachers are severely underpaid, and the state doesn't participate in Social Security. Why would anyone invest their career in education knowing it will be damned difficult for them to retire comfortably?

Secondly, a public-school classroom is often not a nice place to be anymore--especially in the inner cities. Student discipline is a serious problem in some (but not all) schools.  Standardized testing has put teachers under stress to deliver good test scores. The bureaucratic maze of providing services to students with disabilities has made teaching a lot less satisfying for many educators.

My father was a cattle rancher, and when one of his cows got sick, he got out his spring-loaded "pill gun" and tossed a bovine-grade antibiotic pill down the ailing cow's throat.

But universities do not have an equivalent remedy for their sick cash cows.  For professors and students alike, the education business suffers from a malady for which there is no known cure.