The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on virtually every facet of everyday life throughout the world. Curmie’s twin professions—as a university professor and an homme de théâtre—have both been clobbered, in part because governments don’t seem to think either is as important as supporting multinational corporations.
Thing is, in a complex economy, everything is inter-related. The owners of Amalgamated Widgetcorp may not need or deserve assistance, but their workers do, and if they don’t get it, they can’t afford to buy the new whatzit they’ve been coveting, damaging the whatzit company’s bottom line, causing layoffs, and… Well, you get the idea.
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True, there may be the occasional play or concert with drastically reduced admission numbers, and of course universities are notorious for prioritizing sports, especially football and men’s basketball, over trivial stuff like classes and stuff like that. But there isn’t a university (at least a reputable one) in the country that is even pretending to offer all the things that defined the undergraduate experience a year ago.
No one is surprised, therefore, that over 93% of college students, according to a poll this fall, think tuition should be lowered if classes are online. Hell, Curmie is surprised the percentage is that low. But university administrators primarily see the other side of the argument. Virtually every university in the country refunded literally millions of dollars in room and board fees (and often tuition charges) for the second half of the spring semester, and those revenues were significantly below normal again this fall even for those schools where dorms and dining halls were open.
Still, students expect that course in cell biology or the American novel of the 19th century that they need to graduate, and they don’t want it taught by an ornithologist, or a Chaucer specialist, or (God forbid!) an adjunct.
Universities also have a responsibility to their faculty and staff to retain them if possible. This would hardly be pure altruism, however: we’re all confident that something akin to “normal” will be within reach in a few months’ time, and still having that world-class sociologist on your faculty will be a good thing in even the medium term, even if her classes aren’t getting their traditional enrollment numbers in academic year 2020-21. So there’s a pragmatic as well as ethical element here.
Also, of course, enrollment is also down pretty much across the board: a function of declining numbers of the traditional student-aged population as well as the economic effects of COVID-19. That also means fewer people buying branded merchandise, parking permits, and other revenue generators. Ticketed events—athletic contests, plays, concerts, etc.—attract fewer people in multiple ways. Because of lower enrollments and limited travel (no real in-person Parents Weekend, for example), there’s a smaller potential spectatorship; those people are understandably reluctant to attend a two- or three-hour event where they’ll have to be masked for the duration; and even if the same number of folks wanted to attend, venues are operating with limited capacities: the space where Curmie’s late February production will be staged, for example, will operate at 1/6 capacity.
On the other side of the ledger, consider the costs of COVID protocols: the face guards, hand sanitizers, air purifiers, plastic shields, etc.,… plus all the classrooms that need to be fitted with cameras and all the other accoutrements of “smart classrooms,” and the extra expenses also run into the millions of dollars.
Moreover, and here’s where Curmie may have more insight that most of his readers, faculty workloads have increased significantly from pre-COVID days: not in terms of classes taught, but in terms of hours spent on the job. Lectures need to be geared towards an online student population, either instead of or in addition to the people literally in the room. The average professor has spent literally dozens of hours of unremunerated work adapting to just the classroom part of the Brave New World.
Add to that the time required to learn and implement the technologies required for distance learning: the simple act of taking attendance is no longer something that can be completed before class starts; it’s now a five-step process that takes an additional five minutes. That doesn’t sound like much, but that’s per class period: in Curmie’s case, multiply it by 11 class meetings a week for 15 weeks, and it added an extra 14 or15 hours of work over the course of the semester.
Writing a quiz takes three times as long as it did, and grading it takes perhaps 20% longer. Advising meetings take twice as long. The fact that faculty and staff are being laid off or simply not replaced when they leave means more advising, more committee assignments, etc., for those who remain. (Curmie retires in August and fears he won’t be replaced.) None of this affects the bottom line directly, but it does make cutting salaries particularly unethical… which isn’t to say that a number of places haven’t done so.
Curiously, mid-level administrators (provided they’re appropriately sycophantic) keep getting promoted into newly-created positions, and no university could possibly survive without an Executive Assistant to the Associate Vice President for Navel Contemplation. Curmie’s own university needs to make substantial reductions in spending, but axing the $45K salary of the assistant football coach for inside wide receivers (Curmie truly wishes he were making this up) is off the table. We’re an FCS (a.k.a. I-AA) school, by the way. And one suspects that no one on the top floor of the administration building is expected to buy their own printer ink. We’re all in this together… except for those of us who aren’t. Visions of Animal Farm dance through Curmie’s head.
But Curmie strays, and the foregoing is a rant for another day. Yes, many universities, including Curmie’s, are making remarkably stupid and ill-thought-out decisions about how to deal with the economic effects of the pandemic. This does not change the fact that those challenges are real, and that even intelligent, big-picture, responses are likely to have profound and long-term negative implications, especially since state university budgets in particular are already strained by feckless and anti-intellectual state legislatures (as usual, Curmie apologizes for the redundancy of this last phrase). Higher education is in crisis, and Curmie is both relieved and a little guilt-ridden for getting out now.
In other words, on the one hand, universities need to understand that they’re selling a product that isn’t worth as much as it used to be. Curmie isn’t talking here about the economic advantages of having a Bachelor’s degree; rather, this is about the actual experience, not just the piece of paper at the end of the process. Distance learning advocates claim that online classes are just as good if not better than the in-person variety. Students, parents, faculty in general and Curmie in particular all respond: Nonsense. (Well, that’s the PG-13 version.)
Quite apart from the social and quasi-social elements that universities have quite rightly touted for generations—and I’m talking here not just about the 2 a.m. pizza parties, but the opportunity to talk to a classmate after class about that interesting point she raised in class discussion or to discuss with that pianist who’s just a little better than you how he approached that difficult passage in the Chopin piece—in-person learning just works better. Curmie can’t see everyone’s face in a Zoom class; often their cameras aren’t even on, and there are lots of admonitions about not intruding into students’ personal spaces and so on… advice Curmie plans to start ignoring next semester.
The point is that any competent teacher at any level learns how to read the room. There are always those one or two students whose look of puzzlement can serve as a cue to explain a point further or to define a term. There’s the student who clearly wants to join in the class discussion but is a little shy, or otherwise just needs a nudge. If I can’t see that student to call on her by name, the opportunity is lost.
There’s a huge difference between “Does anyone have any questions?” and “Marie, you look like you’ve got something to say about this.” (It’s also weird to not know if anyone is laughing at your jokes.) I’m a lot better at my job in person than virtually. That goes for the classroom and the rehearsal hall. Universities need to understand that students aren’t stupid, and they know they’re paying for rib-eye and getting flank steak: still good, perhaps, but not the same.
Similarly, students need to understand that despite some pretty silly decisions, universities are just trying to stay afloat. It would be great to be able to offer tuition reductions since the experience isn’t the same, but cost-cutting can go only so far. Reducing income can’t be a viable solution. Moreover, any university worth a damn wants to return to in-person only instruction as soon as possible. Zoom works great for bringing in that guest lecturer without having to pay travel expenses, but it cannot be allowed to become “normal.”
Acknowledging the superiority of face-to-face learning is one thing, but establishing a precedent for de facto cheaper distance learning classes not only abuses faculty, it also makes it harder to cancel those less expensive (to students) options, as students and parents will see them as rather attractive, especially for general education courses they (ignorantly) think don’t “matter.” To continue with the earlier analogy: if you want to establish yourself as a steakhouse, you don’t put a hamburger with Grade B meat on the menu, even for a low price. You just don’t.
What makes this timely is that we’re now seeing some universities, especially the elite ones, cutting prices for online-only tuition. Well, that’s a lot easier for them. Many years ago, the development guy at the college where Curmie worked at the time said that a well-diversified and well-administered endowment would grow, on average, at 6% faster than inflation. Let’s just call it 6%, period.
At Harvard, that return on the endowment translates into about $110,000 per student per year, or roughly once and a half the cost of attendance. Even with no other sources of income (federal financial aid, for example), that allows a break-even budget of roughly three times that of Curmie’s university, where, with a little over half as many students and 0.2% of the endowment, the per capita endowment income would barely pay for 1 semester hour of credit, let alone fees, room and board, books, etc. Harvard can afford to be munificent. Most places can’t, and everyone needs to understand that.
Ultimately, of course, it’s neither university administrations nor students who need to be more cognizant of the realities on the ground: it’s the government. Curmie is so old he remembers when even the Republican party cared about access to higher education, when people like Nelson Rockefeller led the charge towards comprehensive, quality, state universities and university systems. It used to be, not that long ago, that a student could afford a college education by working at a minimum wage job during the summers and part-time during the school year.
Six years ago Curmie cited figures that showed that during the 1978-79 academic year (two years after Curmie graduated), a student who worked minimum wage jobs for 40 hours a week for 13 weeks over the summer and 10 hours a week for 30 weeks during the academic year would make 101% of the total cost of attendance at the average public four-year university. By 2011-12, that percentage had plummeted to 35.4%.
Now, those 820 hours of minimum wage work would generate $5945, or a mere 23.4% of the $25,396 total pricetag for a year at a public university. Some of the hugely disturbing trend seen here is attributable to demands for increased technology: the entire campus wired for wi-fi, that sort of thing. Some stems from the unethical practice of making students pay for crap like lazy rivers and similar non-essentials. Some comes from the utter stupidity of not raising the minimum wage in 11 years; inflation since the last minimum wage increase has meant that just keeping up with cost of living would make the current minimum wage $8.79.
Of course, that would cost money the capitalist overlords would prefer to be spent giving them tax breaks. After all, we can’t allow the future of the nation to interfere with that fourth yacht, seventeenth Rolls Royce, or third vacation mansion. But even with due respect to Richie Rich and his fam, there are easy answers, at least at the federal level.
Of the 14 countries other than the US who spend the most on the military, for example, ten are unquestioned US allies. The other four—China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil—spend about $415 billion annually. The US, $732 billion.
In order for the US and its allies to spend only (!) twice as much as even the potential adversaries, the US could cut the military budget by about $309 billion. Give higher education a quarter of that number: $77 billion, more or less. That’s about $3800 for every college student in the country. That would go a very long way towards making a university education within the reach of the population. It still wouldn’t be 1970s levels of affordability (yes, we’ve strayed that far), but it would make a huge impact.
Nor would it hurt anyone if the multi-billionaires chipped in a little. We hear about Jeff Bezos giving $50 million to help get people vaccinated. On the one hand, that’s great, and Curmie doesn’t want to belittle it. On the other hand, Curmie does, too, want to belittle it. Bezos’s net worth increased by $90 billion (yes, increased; yes billion with a “b”) in a little less than the first seven months of the COVID shutdown. That works out to just under $5000 per second. If you, Gentle Reader, earned, even pre-taxes, as much over those seven months as Bezos personally pocketed in 20 seconds, you’re doing well. The median net worth of American households (not individual taxpayers, entire households) is $97,300. That median family’s contribution of $25 to a good cause is actually more in terms of percentage of net wealth than Bezos’ $50 million.
Of course, if Bezos had a soul instead of a narcissistic desire for good publicity, he would have paid his workers, the ones really doing the work and taking the risks, a considerable percentage of those newly acquired billions. Amazon now has a little over one million employees. They’re not all full-time (then they’d have to get benefits, after all), but let’s pretend they are. One million employees times 40 hours a week times 30 weeks = 1.2 billion hours. If Bezos decided to give just 4% of his windfall to his workers, he could increase everyone’s pay by $3/hour. But, of course, he didn’t, and won’t unless he gets visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve. Amazon’s ads crow about their contributions to education… but mostly, they’re bragging about stuff they’ve sold at a profit, not really contributed at all. La la how the life goes on.
One of Curmie’s favorite plays for discussion purposes (it’s a mediocre play at best) is Euripides’ Orestes, which closes with one of the most implausible deus ex machina endings ever. But I have long believed that the awkwardly happy ending is intentional, that a play by one of the culture’s best-known atheists which relies on the intervention of the gods is not bad structuring, but precisely the opposite.
The conclusion is so unbelievable that the spectator or reader is left with the feeling that it couldn’t possibly happen... meaning that the only solution to the problem is to not get to the point where civilization relies on this kind of incredible (literally, not credible) eventuality. Ultimately, we’re asking the wrong questions. This isn’t about whether online courses should be cheaper than their in-person cousins: it’s about preventing that choice from needing to be made.
If the government actually cared about the future, if the billionaire class actually cared about literally anything but themselves, if the movers and shakers would think about outcomes beyond the immediate, the solutions to a lot of problems would be easy. Of course, those are massive, even delusional, “ifs.”
But we need to remember one simple fact. No one cares what the pricetag says. They care about the actual net cost. People who can fix this, and you know who you are, even if you pretend ignorance, Curmie is talking to you: Make it so the students can afford school. Make it so the universities can offer an education. Make it so there’s still a middle class. In the words of the prophet Nike, just do it.
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