OT: University of Akron eliminating 178 positions
U. Akron cutting 178 positions, including 96 faculty. Looks like an addition 84 faculty/staff accepted buyouts. Their athletic department recently announced they are cutting 3 varsity sports.
Anyone familiar with higher ed in the region know if this is an Akron-specific issue? Or just the first in a wave of similar cuts at MAC-type schools?
They were one play away from eliminating Brady Hoke’s position with Michigan back in 2013.
I think this is good content...you and I are the only ones apparently.
Losing to them would’ve been worse than losing to App State. At least you could say App State was an extremely well-coached team that was the Alabama of the FCS. They’d won a ton of FCS titles. Akron was one of the worst programs in America and I think had lost like 20 of their last 24 games or something similar to that.
Lost to the defending FCS champs in the opener, beat the defending FBS champs in the bowl...what a year.
Yeah they were awful. I think they were like 1-11 the prior year and I was having flashbacks to the post-App State embarassment I felt. People afterward were like 'well people Akron is a lot better this year'. Nope, they were trash and so were we. Rough times
Hate to link to the Freep - but back in December, this well written article highlighted the enrollment struggles of Central Michigan and Western Michigan. And that was pre-COVID. Was really surprised - I always thought both were growing universities.
Does anyone know any what might be causing this, beyond the info in the article? My one thought is that schools like Oakland University and Grand Valley State had been improving over the last 20 years, and may be cutting into CMU and WMU's "market share". But this is reckless speculation. Would be interested in the thoughts of others.
Overall - this doesn't seem to bode well for the MAC...
It's not just a Michigan thing ....... in Illinois, the enrollment at Eastern Illinois, Western Illinois, and Southern Illinois-Carbondale has fallen a lot in the last decade.
I wouldn't be shocked to see one of those 3 close within the next decade - WIU most likely. They call that part of the state "Forgottonia" for a reason ........
Anyway, I do think those schools can serve a purpose, but it's fair to say they are rural, non-first-tier regional schools that don't really specialize in anything in particular. They need to better define their purpose. For now, their perception is simply being blandly mediocre.
Further on the Illinois example --- I do find it interesting that (1) SIU-Edwardsville, which is in a St Louis suburb and (2) Illinois State ARE succeeding. Edwardsville is in the same system as Carbondale, so geography seems to matter. And Illinois State has built up a few programs to where they are legit very good (actuarial science, insurance & risk management, accounting, their education college).
Geography is something that works in GVSU and Oakland's favor, and against a CMU. WMU is a bit harder to explain, admittedly.
Informative post. I think your theories about "rural/geography" and "need to specialize" impacts are spot on.
And WMU not that hard to explain from geography standpoint - Kalamazoo's population is approx. 75k or so and stagnant, while Grand Rapids (home of GVSU) is 200k+ with a decent growth rate.
Good point on Kalamazoo - that area needs a shot in the arm.
After your reply, I edited my post to mention Illinois State --- I had to look up their enrollment numbers but they are increasing. Illinois State isn't the sexiest of schools, but they have found some things to specialize in. They probably benefit from State Farm Insurance being based in Bloomington too. They aren't UIUC, but they seem to have a niche.
I don't think people are aware of how bad things are in the Midwest in terms of school age population. We are in significant decline and have been for some time. Just look at the chart in the article.
"Between 1975 to 2000, Michigan roughly averaged about 135,000 births a year. That meant the public school population was fairly stable into the early 2000s. When the number of births began to drop in 2001, school enrollment numbers soon followed. By 2018, the state’s K-12 enrollment had dropped 16% in 15 years.
https://www.mlive.com/news/2019/10/record-low-birth-rate-puts-pressure-on-michigans-k-12-schools.html
So that means schools that don't draw from all over the nation (i.e., not UM or MSU) are fighting over a shrinking pool. GVSU and Oakland have grown by taking away students from the 3 MAC schools.
" this well written article highlighted the enrollment struggles of Central Michigan and Western Michigan."
When I was at WMU in the late 80s a credit hour was 10x minimum wage. It is now over 100x minimum wage. The idiots in charge have priced the school out of the market.
I'd also argue that minimum wage and median income hasn't kept up with any measure of inflation, college tuition or otherwise, but yes, higher education has really had a problem with cost efficiency over the past 40 years.
Also, in that time state appropriations to higher ed has stagnated or declined, in today's dollars. EMU went from being 70% of the general fund being funded by the state to less than 30%. This has been the largest contributor to tuition growth.
I've heard the school whine about lack of funding as well. As they were building new five-star dorms and cafeterias and a whole new campus (that they used eminent domain to take from the family that had owned it for generations), they maybe should have considered that they were going to price themselves out of the market.
Ultimately, costs to produce a product are not a relevant metric for selling price; it's all about what the market will bear, and some of the mid-level schools found the line.
Is missionary one of them?
I think Akron may be a bit unique as regards the depth of their troubles. I've read a couple different places that there is internal chatter within the school about a move down to D2 or even D3 athletics.
Akron, Kent State and Youngstown State are all "in a row" along I-76 down there, 3 public schools all within 50 miles of each other.
I think a serious argument could be made that the region only needs 2 of the 3. Kent State, from what I've read, is the best positioned of the 3. Less so for Akron and YSU.
Having moved to Canton last year, I would agree. Terrible mismanagement at Akron. Kent State is in much better shape, especially with its regional campuses. Given the new financial pressures on the university system, Akron isn't the lead domino - it's more the weakened animal trying to zip along with much healthier systems.
G5 schools are in for a reckoning this year.
They were already lucky if they could break even financially, despite million dollar payouts for getting their asses kicked.
Hate to say it, but their model needs to be completely revamped. They’re nothing more than D2 schools that spend too much money
P5 schools are also in for a reckoning. Even if there's a season, they are going to be short millions. And not their normal "fake short" where they just add a bunch of new expenses to make it look like they are short. A decade+ of lavish spending on absolutely everything is going to come back to bite them too.
Yeah but P5 schools can just cut their obscenely bloated admin costs and pause construction of new golden toilets and be fine. The G5 has a two fold problem: on the one side you have schools trying to run like a P5 without the revenue P5s have, the UCF/Boise/Houstons of the world. They want to be available if the Big 12 ever expands. Those schools could be in dire shape, because they can't just cut back a little and be fine as the TV revenue rolls back in. Their TV revenue already wasn't enough to cover the bills and a lot of what they were doing can be compared to a big VC funded start up that is burning cash to grow. What happens when you CAN'T grow and your VCs have suffering businesses? I'd hate to be Houston's AD right now.
But on the other side of the G5, you've got the MAC schools which have been FBS forever but have never been any good, most of them have never drawn any fans and you've got the southern/southwest schools that joined FBS in the last 10 years or so who also have no fans and haven't shown any sign they have a viable program. South Alabama/Texas State/UTSA/FIU/FAU/Old Dominion/Charlotte....none of these schools have shown they can win consistently, but worse than that, none have shown they have any kind of fanbase that can support athletics with butts in seats.
Most of these schools didn't make sense when they decided to start football teams out of nowhere, and they still don't. "Well, my school is located in a recruiting hot bed, all we gotta do is start a team from scratch and we'll be the next great underdog!" is an insane thing to think when your school is located in the center of extremely competitive ACC/SEC recruiting territory and you don't have any boosters.
Will they soon be down to Zip?
A bet a lot of high paying useless administration positions are still there.
....as opposed to those tenured profs that barely teach a class a semester???
Professors do research, etc.
The more interesting question, imo, is mandatory retirement at a certain age. There's lots of minimally productive scholars who are riding it out, to the harm of the institution / younger generations of academics.
Also a good class a semester is a lot of work! Say you're teaching 4 hours a week and have TA's to do all of the homework grading. You'll have office hours for one hour, meetings with students for another hour. Then you've gotta lesson plan. If it's the first time teaching the material, expect 2 hours of prep per teaching-hour. If it isn't, you can swing 45 minutes per teaching hour. That gets you to somewhere between 9 to 14 hours a week. You've gotta write a good midterm and final (10 hours a pop, maybe). That's a lot of time when you have numerous other responsibilities.
Some professors do research, not all. Some only teach. Most (in engineering and sciences) do both - although they don't necessarily do both well (I've encountered many as a student and later professionally that really should not be teaching and have no passion for it).
I agree that lots of professors don't teach well, but I don't know of anyone who doesn't have to teach as a service requirement -- I think the standard is 8 credits / 2 years? Similarly, where can you get tenure without getting published?
I apologize if you are not being sarcastic.
I know that this is intended to be exaggeration so I am not going to say F#$& Off. What you are describing is a parody of the teaching load at an R1, except maybe for science and engineering (and very rare Humanities and Social Science folks) who get grants that fund their research and buy out part of their teaching. A 2/2 load is standard in Hum/Soc and generally at least one of those classes is a grad class (which rarely if ever has a TA). Though there is, in fact, some tenured dead wood at R1s, most faculty also need to put in 25-40+ hrs/week on scholarship and service.
The teaching load at Akron is generally 3/3 for programs that don't have graduate students (so no TAs either). I don't personally know anyone who teaches in a Grad program there so I don't know.
Just down the road from Akron, at a small private college, my load (and that of my graduate and undergraduate faculty colleagues) next year will be a 5/5 because we are scared that we will not survive Covid 19 year and are trying to minimize adjunct and overload sections. In the twenty plus years, I have been here my load has always been a 4/4, though I have largely had some administrative course release as Chair or Program Director. I also need to be prepared to offer my classes in person or online or hybrid depending on how things look in August.
My situation is much more common than that of faculty who are privileged to teach at R1. I say this not to complain-I like my job and I am hopeful that it will survive long enough for me to retire. But when people whine about how little professors work, it pisses me off.
I think it is also common for people to assume that professors are paid handsomely for their work. Some faculty who are real stars, or perhaps in certain fields (law, business, medicine), may have high salaries. But many do not. If you have a chance take a look at the cars in the typical faculty parking lot. Not many high-end vehicles. It’s also good to remember that many faculty don’t get their first full-time jobs until their late 20s, so they really start saving money much later than others.
I like my job a lot, and I feel fortunate to have it. But I am pretty sure that people highly overestimate faculty salaries.
I'm not sure why you're replying to me on this one. I'm saying that teaching even one class a semester is a significant time commitment.
I was unaware that the standard R1 teaching load was 2/2. (Assuming each class is 4 credit hours.) That's easily more than half of your workweek on teaching. A 5/5 makes you a full time educator, full stop, without time to do scholarship / research.
As I've said before, these MAC schools (and similar) have each literally wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on athletics in recent years; for example:
"The general fund budget subsidized athletics by about $26 million last year, according to the university. The number includes debt service on InfoCision Stadium and the Stile Athletics Field House."
https://www.beaconjournal.com/news/20200706/university-of-akron-administration-faculty-spar-over-athletics-budget
and now they are encountering 4 huge headwinds:
- Loss of student population: while UM, MSU and the Top 100 schools have record enrollment, schools outside that group, particularly in the Midwest where student age population is declining, simply do not have enough potential students
- Loss of state/fed funding: state budgets have increasingly been focused on other things (e.g., health care; corp tax breaks), and money spent on higher education has been stagnant, while costs for schools have only gone up.
- Loss of competitive balance: schools like Michigan and Ohio State have increased their athletic revenues by $50 million plus in the last 10 years. That has led to an arms race which Akron, CMU, WMU try to compete with, but are woefully outmatched. That results in them spending millions on coaches and facilities -- millions they don't have
- Loss of revenue: this is primarily COVID-related, but cancellation of body bag games hurt their revenue streams.
They all need wake up and drop down to Div II, if not immediately, within the next 3 years.
Smaller schools have been struggling with attendance issues for years now (here in Boston I think 3-4 schools completely shut down last year and there are more expected), and so it doesn't surprise me that staff positions would be cut. It's going to be a blood bath out there for a long time. I feel bad for everyone who lost his/her job.
There are too many colleges and universities charging too much for a mediocre education. It wouldn't surprise me to see a lot of downsizing in the next few years.
I think this will only get worse because of COVID, but I think it was going to happen anyway nationally. A lot of younger people are opting to skip college as there are a lot of good opportunities to make a good living without sinking themselves with major debt.
Not just Akron - most Ohio schools outside OSU and UC are being hit hard. UToledo is being hit especially hard just now since they had a "pre-existing medical condition". Specifically, UToledo merged/acquires the Medical University of Ohio about 10yrs ago and turned it into the UToledo med school. Part of which was the hospital (UT Medical Center), which was a gaping financial hole and has only gotten worse (in part because the local medical behemoth commercial system, ProMedica, has been trying to kill it). Basically, the sickly medical campus and hospital has been slowly killing the rest of the university and has been causing a lot of acrimony - long before the pandemic hit.
BGSU has been having trouble, too, and they are smaller than UToledo.
Didn't CMU's athletic director just nope the hell out of there as well? Not a good sign
State funding is the biggest issue facing universities today. The percentage states' contribute is shrinking. The larger schools can make up some of the difference with good fundraising but the smaller schools face challenges with that.
For the underclass, college just isn't worth it anymore.
I've got to think that a lot of students have shifted to online programs as well. My wife got her b.a. and master's degrees in the last few years without ever setting foot on a campus. They were better value for the money vs any local Michigan schools.
The political games schools make have forced a lot of schools into swimming naked for the purposes of pretending they're not profitable, but there are a few colleges in FBS who genuinely have always been out there nude as the day they were born hoping the tide never went back out. Akron is one of them. There is no reason it should be an FBS program, and if it dropped down it would likely have a stronger fan support and a heckuva lot more winning.