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(1/14) While this article describes the American context, the Canadian one isn't much different. Decades of de-funding and de-prioritizing post-secondary institutions have led to the crisis we find ourselves in today. https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-specter-of-semesters-past?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_1943895_nl_Academe-Today_date_20210128&cid=at&source=&sourceId= #CdnPSE #Ed4All
(2/14) Pressured by lower state appropriations, the university needed to expand enrollment and reduce costs. But over the years, the conversations would sometimes spin out to extreme hypotheticals. What if students didn’t show up?
(3/14) That particular scenario was especially scary. By 2018, tuition and fees accounted for almost half of the university’s annual revenue.
(4/14) On a March afternoon in 2020, Walton was in his office when the campus police chief and chief health officer entered the room. They shared what they knew about Covid-19. […] South Carolina, like campuses across the country, soon closed. The Zombie Apocalypse had arrived.
(5/14) Just as the pandemic laid bare longstanding health and economic disparities in the United States, it has exposed the ramifications of choices made by flagship universities like South Carolina as they responded to years of state disinvestment.
(6/14) It is this very change in circumstances in recent years — the shift, as the saying goes, from state supported to state located — that has hemmed in public research universities as they respond to the pandemic.
(7/14) Out-of-state recruiting accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis, when the uni’s new president, Harris Pastides, saw a nearly 15% appropriations cut from the state, a reduction so impossibly large that he thought the fax that announced it was missing a decimal point.
(8/14) "First the university laid off adjunct and part-time faculty, warned students to expect bigger classes, and even cut the grass less frequently."
(9/14) “What you see with Covid is what happens when you build a model around the presence of students, around the presence of students as consumers,” said Kevin R. McClure, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
(10/14) Still, the episode gets at a central tension in modern university budgeting: Colleges are increasingly reliant on money paid by students, beyond just tuition, to underwrite and maintain campus infrastructure.
(11/14) They need international students to pay room and board for residence halls, commuters’ parking fees to cover the bonds for parking garages, student-recreation surcharges to build new athletic facilities.
(12/14) Quite literally, student revenue — revenue frequently tied to students’ physical presence on campus — keeps the lights on.
(13/14) This reality hasn’t gone unnoticed by students during the pandemic. A recent survey by the think tanks Third Way and New America found that 50 percent of students agree with the statement that “my institution only cares about the money it can get from me.”
(14/14) While the problems we are seeing today feel urgent and unprecedented, they are not new. It is time to re-start investing in PSE and achieve a more affordable, accessible, high-quality and publicly-funded PSE system. Join the campaign here: http://www.educationforall.ca #Ed4All
