Your crappy private college must die
COVID-19 will deliver a well-deserved coup de grace to a legion of mediocrities
For decades, too many of America’s crappy private colleges have been chasing the Holy Grail: an endowment large enough to make them feel like they work at a “real” college, the kind that’s not 99% dependent on tuition to pay the bills.
Apparently figuring education is too important to be left to the faculty, their boards have lavished CEO-style salaries on University presidents (sometimes approaching $1 million), and tried to achieve cost savings by replacing tenured professors with overqualified but always contingent instructors, paid less and less to do more and more ($40K per year to teach four courses per semester, physics Ph.D. required), the quality of the instructional program be damned.
This faux academic corporatism sees luxe new dorms as profit centers, and “wellness centers” with climbing walls as bait, while the biology and chemistry lab budgets are on a starvation diet. Important curricular decisions are put into the hands of the vice president for strategic enrollment management (the department formerly known simply as “admissions and financial aid”) because “retention” and student satisfaction are what keep revenue flowing.
