The new WVU budget slashes nearly 10 percent of majors and 7 percent of all faculty—but students and staff aren't going down without a fight.
  • SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca
    201·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
      143·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml
        2·
        10 months ago

        It’s the facilities costs that have truly exploded in the past couple of decades. Every university is in an arms race to build the biggest, most advanced campus possible. They’ve forgotten that their goal is to be a place of study and instead they’re trying to have world-class architecture so they can woo students. Students would go there so long as the damn programs are well run and they have a good reputation.

        Just stop the gigantic capital projects and suddenly you’ve got plenty of capital. Hmm.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      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.

        • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Not really. Universities make a lot of money off research and the research helps more with prestige ratings.

          • WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml
            1·
            10 months ago

            Grant money from researchers is a drop in the bucket. That money mostly goes to flesh out laboratories with fancy equipment and pay for research assistants.