US Higher Ed is a Polar Bear on an Ice Cube

Higher education is like a polar bear on a shrinking piece of ice. Many individual choices led to this bear getting stranded far from land on a piece of ice that continues to melt. COVID-19 and increasing political restrictions on the global flow of scholars and scholarship are turning up the heat.

Here’s the context that has slowly been melting and weakening the organizational glacier upon which US higher education has relied for the past fifty years.

Higher education’s historical context

State funding for public higher education — public universities serve two-thirds of those who attend college — has been steadily decreasing since Reagan was governor of California in the 1960s. Institutions have consequently been forced to increase tuition at an accelerating and, finally, unsustainable rate.

Cost-saving also hit the academic labor force. Three-quarters of faculty are not in tenure-track positions. Adjuncts are underpaid and do not receive health insurance. An essay by Adam Harris detailed how Thea Hunter, an adjunct with a PhD from Columbia, died likely due to lack of access to health care.

Moving on to graduate students. Their stipends have not kept pace with the high cost of living in many cities. This has led to ongoing strikes at schools including most of those in the UC system. The strikes were curtailed only by the pandemic. These strike actions started over a decade ago when NYU graduate students struck to reinstate their right to form a union and have rippled around the country.

Postdocs and research assistants funded on soft money have been somewhat less frequently discussed. They are persistently underpaid, a condition that may have been tolerable when postdocs were understood to be one-year appointments for recent graduates who needed an extra year to improve their publication record and their chance to land a plum tenure-track job. Now postdoc purgatory is extending for three, four, even nine years and into fields well beyond the life sciences. Postdocs are cheaper to support than grad students, more skilled, and more mature. What’s particularly troubling here is that postdoc salaries are about $45,000 — $52,000, comparable to the starting salary of someone with a bachelor’s degree, far lower than they should be. Economist Paula Stephan discovered one reason the salaries are so low: nearly 60% of postdocs in the US are foreign born. To them, the visa and opportunity to work in America carries meaningful value and allows the overall wage to be depressed. Stephan also found that foreign born postdocs do not land anywhere near 60% of the tenure-track positions. Foreign postdocs, it seems, are being used as highly skilled, affordable academic labor. That may end, spurred ahead by Trump administration immigration saber rattling and CV19 related cordon sanitaires.

With all of the cost cutting and tuition raising measures, academia also discovered a penchant for active fundraising and an appetite for big, revenue-generating sports programs. Of course, not all schools have deep pocketed alums and not all schools make money on their sports programs. Those that lean on sports are generally large public schools. Those that lean on deep-pocketed wealthy donors are largely private R1s. Schools that fit in neither category are almost solely reliant on tuition (if they are private) or a combination of tuition and state aid (if they are public).

Amidst all this cost cutting and creative fundraising, there has also been a well-intentioned call for universities to do more to level the playing field for students. America is the land of inequality; academia is responsible for addressing its many causes (but not TOO much). Students of all fields of study, political stripes, lifestyle choices, genders, sexualities, ability levels, learning modalities, religions, income levels, influencer levels, etc should be fostered and nurtured in their uniqueness. This is a beautiful, worthy, expansive project that can at times be difficult. Much good has come of it. But it is not cheap. The wounds of the world are already heavy on the minds and souls of students before they arrive. It is wise and worthy for higher education to show the way to an expansive, inspiring practice of inclusivity and whole person development. Almost nobody has been trained to do that — doesn’t make it bad or impossible but it does require real investment of time, money, and focus.

Some students enter bearing the weight of systemic and interpersonal racism. Demands for just treatment, for justice, for reform, for righting the wrongs of the past have not and will not simply fade away. The only redress here is actual, sustained commitment to ridding our institutions of systemic racism. Academia has proved itself capable of caustic capriciousness on this front, at times being a salve at others throwing salt on these wounds. These tensions have flared recently, even as campuses that typically act as loci of organizing work have remained shuttered.

Enter from stage left: the novel coronavirus.

On March 10th and 11th, universities across the US communicated to their students, faculty, and staff, that the spring semester would be conducted online. Students were told not to return to campus. Others frantically packed. Travel bans started falling like heavy curtains, first keeping foreigners out, then keeping the US in a diseased pod of our own making.

What has been wrought so far

Over the summer as students started to move into fraternities or practice for their athletic seasons, outbreaks occurred. In California, a state with widespread community transmission and positivity rates above 10%, UC-Berkeley and USC both had outbreaks at fraternities. Both schools will remain in an online-teaching posture for the fall.

Some economically advantageous decisions suddenly became justifiable.

Stanford announced it has permanently shuttered 11 Division 1 sports teams, including synchronized swimming, lacrosse, squash, fencing, men’s volleyball, and wrestling. These are expensive sports to run. Now they’re done.

The University of Akron consolidated departments and terminated 178 positions, including tenured faculty.

Many universities have implemented hiring freezes and wage cuts from 2–11% across the board.

The Trump administration saw that universities might choose not to invite students back and threatened to prevent international students from attending unless they would be able to take most of their classes in-person.

Other changes have been less visible, but are no less impactful

Conferences have been turned into online events. As yet, nobody knows how to host a great online event in the midst of a pandemic.

Most faculty have canceled sabbaticals scheduled for this academic year. International travel bans, high rates of community spread in many parts of the US, school-aged children who cannot attend school, lab animals that no longer exist because they had to be euthanized when campuses closed, faculty stressed out because they have lost colleagues or family: all of these elements slow the wheels of science.

Princeton University’s Department of Sociology announced it will not run an admissions program this fall for the graduate cohort that would have started in 2021. Other departments may quietly copy this strategy. Graduate students cost more to support than they generate in teaching value. Princeton did not pursue the strategy for cost-saving reasons, but because such a prestigious school has pursued and validated this option, other schools who do need to find cost savings may mimic the approach.

The University of Michigan, MIT, NYU, Georgia Tech, and many other schools have announced that they will have at least some students on campus this fall. Faculty and staff are stressed out and anxious that they may not be safe, that they are being asked to do far more for students than they may be able to afford emotionally or physically, that extending the tenure clock is not enough.

What now

The vast majority of universities totter on the knife’s edge, withholding their decision about the fall semester, trying to devise a way to deliver enough of the “college experience” to prevent students from taking gap years until campuses reopen. If colleges hadn’t cultivated the notion that the “college experience” is a deserved rite of passage, but had instead focused on academics as their main offering, studying from home wouldn’t be so difficult. Certainly, some concern here is more than crass capitalism. A fair percentage of rising freshmen may never matriculate anywhere if they take a gap year right out of the gate. They may get jobs or start relationships they will be unwilling to give up for college in a year. Those most likely to stay away forever, first generation college students, are also some of those who are most likely to benefit from getting a four year degree.

A huge problem is that university budgets rely on tuition. Schools with big sports programs rely on that income. Sure, some universities have large endowments, but most don’t. Universities need students to return this year or they may have to start layoffs. Some already have — just ask adjuncts. Not only do universities need students’ tuition dollars, they need students’ housing and cafeteria dollars. They need international students to feel welcome at US universities because international students always pay full out-of-state prices.

If rising freshmen and incoming masters student cohorts do not show up in the fall their absence will impact schools for the next five years and may do lasting damage to universities as organizations. (The average undergraduate does not finish in four years, a trend that is likely to become true for a larger proportion of students due to the pandemic.) Incoming students are, of course, the most vulnerable to attrition. They have very little sunk costs at this point. They’ve taken no classes, made no friends, joined no clubs, paid no tuition checks. With sports, international students, dorms, and cafeterias unable to generate predicted revenue, and with some students likely to go the gap year route and withhold their tuition dollars for at least a year, universities will have to do the unthinkable (at least in academia). Adjuncts are quietly disappearing. There will be further destruction of staff and tenured positions like those happening at the University of Akron. Tenure does not protect faculties’ jobs when entire departments are shuttered. Hiring freezes and salary cuts have already happened at most schools. In other words, the easier cuts have already been made. Faculty and staff layoffs are next. Getting laid off is bad, but it is preferable to death.

Universities with ambitiously optimistic plans to bring students and their dollars back to campus will undoubtedly have outbreaks. Those outbreaks could prove extremely costly. Wrongful death suits against universities are numerous, they have worked when students die of drinking too much, and they often result in multi-million dollar settlements. A legal case or two may prove even more disastrous than grinding out a stay-at-home semester or academic year.

The university system is often accused of being glacially slow. It turns out the problem with this glacier this time is less that it is slow, more that it has eroded so significantly the system may no longer be sustainable at its current size even as demand for university services typically increases. Receiving sustained, personal contact from several highly paid professionals runs counter to the way the US there’s-an-app-for-that economy is going. Schools on the financial edge are under existential pressure to bring some or all students back, even though they know they cannot protect the students, faculty, or staff. In the end, this is not just a problem for universities. There is no way to effectively protect such a large group of people, some of whom are seeking a college experience that is neither masked nor socially distant, from CV19. Opening schools will send CV19+ people back into homes and communities, perpetuating high rates of transmission that are sickening the US physically and economically. When universities reopen this fall, case counts will go up and the entire country will suffer the writhing, agonized choices made by a polar bear trapped on an ice cube.