Reddit's "AskReddit" subreddit had a question recently hosted with a title something along the lines of "How did your college financially screw you over in this crisis?" The answers were varied and often ... "shocking" is the wrong word, because I have come to expect a kind of compulsive money-grubbing from many universities ... perhaps "flinch-inducing." Certainly the local subreddit for my city discussed similar money-grabs, nickel-and-diming, and general high-handed behavior interspersed with a general lack of competency.
Even universities with some staggeringly large endowments will cry poor and point to the endowments being tied up in various investments, which did take a turn down at the start, but looking at the Dow I see that the numbers are nearly back to what they were in May of 2019.
Many universities are staggeringly bloated, yet squeeze their faculty via adjuncts, then squeeze the adjuncts in turn. Why pay tenured faculty rates when you can throw in an adjunct? And then why pay the adjunct well? After all, we have these enormous administrative budgets. Having had access to some historical employer data and performing general tracking as part of a "make sure that the input is within historical limits" sanity check, I noted that staff, "important" staff, had grown massively over a decade.
Now the on-campus college experience, for which so much is subtracted from student accounts in funding various events and facilities, is largely remote, well, that "value-add" is now a "where's the beef?" moment.
Even universities with some staggeringly large endowments will cry poor and point to the endowments being tied up in various investments, which did take a turn down at the start, but looking at the Dow I see that the numbers are nearly back to what they were in May of 2019.
Many universities are staggeringly bloated, yet squeeze their faculty via adjuncts, then squeeze the adjuncts in turn. Why pay tenured faculty rates when you can throw in an adjunct? And then why pay the adjunct well? After all, we have these enormous administrative budgets. Having had access to some historical employer data and performing general tracking as part of a "make sure that the input is within historical limits" sanity check, I noted that staff, "important" staff, had grown massively over a decade.
Now the on-campus college experience, for which so much is subtracted from student accounts in funding various events and facilities, is largely remote, well, that "value-add" is now a "where's the beef?" moment.