- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/1806644
Archived version: https://archive.ph/nFSSK
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230823162005/https://therealnews.com/this-public-university-just-announced-massive-layoffs-is-all-higher-ed-at-risk
Higher Ed in red states is at risk. Of course, that’s the outcome that red states vote for. Oh no! It’s the completely predictable consequences of our very own actions!
West Virginia was a reliable blue state until the 2000 election. Maybe if democrats focused on helping workers instead of bourgeois scum, they wouldn’t constantly be terrified (or even at risk) of losing elections?
I’m fine with red states basically being the dumb manual labor slaves the US has always wanted.
“Made in Oklahoma by children labor”
Works for my blue-state-ass.
VOTE!!
“Slavery is okay as long as it takes place out of sight and materially benefits me!” — liberals
Hexbears need to be sure to explain “liberals” don’t mean left-wing, as it is commonly (and inaccurately) understood.
“Left-wing” is pretty vague. I’ve seen people say things like “now I’m as leftwing as they come, which is why I support sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukrainian Nazis! Slava Ukraini!” Under the capitalist mode of production, there are communists, liberals, and fascists. That’s pretty much it.
That’s a pretty narrow minded.
Not really. You either support capitalism or you don’t. And if you do support it, you’re either comfortable with its nastier aspects (genocide, slavery, the annihilation of the human species via climate change), as fascists are, or you find those aspects uncomfortable, as liberals do, though they aren’t an issue for you if they’re kept out of sight. Is there some other group I’m missing here?
I don’t like capitalism, but I’m not a communist. 🤷♂️ I must not exist.
We are going through a demographic transition, a pinch in the hourglass. It will be temporary but painful, and the other side of the pinch might not be as big as it once was. Our population is aging.
It’s kind of crazy that our research apparatus is tied to how many students happen to be enrolling. World class universities is what makes the US economy so strong. From the tech to the biomedical industries, it’s not “the free market” that has boosted the economy, but being leaders in publicly available government funded research.
Yup. R&D is a matter of national security, too.
While I agree, the cuts need to happen and they need to be purely targeted at administration which exploded over the boom years.
We had massive growth and very little of that revenue made it to either research or actual teaching.
Fire the admin staff from education and healthcare, we need to make those sectors work again.
The economics aren’t really that tied. A lot of universities have research arms that are not tied to their undergraduate population. It might need a graduate student population to oppress, but undergrads are rather worthless.
Undergrads are the revenue generating portion of the university
I finished my PhD in 2016. Since then I have shifted to industry, a move largely prompted by seeing the absolute shit state of academia at the moment (in the US).
It’s no longer a meritocracy. It’s all about who you know (or who you don’t), and in that sense, it’s no different from industry. But salaries are looking inflated given the differential between industry and academic workloads. It’s only a matter of time for academic institutions to enshittify as if they were private-sector entities, because most are effectively run like private-sector entities at this point.
I did my graduate work at a top-tier public university in the US. Most of its funding is now from ridiculous tuition rates and other ways to nickel and dime its students. Its administrators make money like a private c-suite.
Colleges act like Scientology in the states. Equating education with how much money you’ve handed them.
Meanwhile anything can be learned online, but it counts for nothing because corporations treat purchases credentials as the only legitimate form of “education”.
Ah yes, I’m sure the formal training received by doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, and engineers is just an over-hyped “education” that can all be replaced by online MOOCs.
There are real problems with education, especially with the costs, but “anything can be learned online” is the worst take I’ve heard in a long while.
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Just because you can get part of your education remotely or through self-learning didn’t mean “anything can be learned online”.
And if you were hiring a math tutor for your kid, would you prefer a self-proclaimed expert from watching YouTube videos or would you want someone who got a degree from a credentialed university? And even if you don’t care, why are you surprised that others would be skeptical of the YouTube expert?
Remote learning can be fine for some things, and self learning through informal channels are also fine, but it’s not a full on replacement for formal education in all cases.
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Because part of a higher education degree is actually talking with people.
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Lmao. Nope. I’ve done both. Online classes are a fucking joke. Maybe some schools do it well, but most treat online classes like a correspondence course.
Anything can be learned online, with enough drive and determination
But if you’re that powerful: why bother learning from others? You could simply leave and create your own community called name’s Gulch.
No sorry, that’s just fundamentally false. You can’t just learn titration techniques from watching a video. You can’t learn phlebotomy without an instructor watching you do it to a patient. Hell, you aren’t learning how to drive a car from playing a video game.
And I’m not sure where you are pulling the “if you are that powerful” from. You really have an ax to grind don’t you.
And I’m not sure where you are pulling the “if you are that powerful” from.
(The preceding comment was a parody of Great Man ideology)
Yeah, but the pain isn’t going to be universal. For profit universities aren’t doing well already and I expect them to do worse over time. I expect a lot of non-profit private liberal arts universities to go bankrupt unless they turn into foreign student visa centers. There will probably be some consolidation of public universities, but nothing really bad.
I expect college to get a lot cheaper as the available student pool doesn’t recover from the millennial echo boom.
Honestly, I think higher ed is more at risk because the people on the top keep skimming for more funds, leaving everyone below struggling. Pay your faculty, staff, and working students (grads and undergrads) well.
Very few faculty and staff make high salaries. But the facilities costs are insane. Universities could do just fine without building another $50 Million dollar building. Growth for the sake of growth needs to stop. If that happens, then suddenly tuition costs would be under control.
No, probably just in the US and other collapsing countries