Elite colleges and universities chased each other to a budgetary precipice. Did peer institutions build a new building of some kind? You need one! Did they dramatically expand services to the student body? Do it too! Redesign the dining hall so that it was Chez Panisse East? Eliminate loans? Ratings and rankings drove a bit of this race (and without any need for the more overt kinds of Clemson-style trickery) but some of it was also just driven by the knowledge that highly selective admissions are a kind of self-solving achievement: the first guarantee of an excellent educational experience for students is being surrounded by other excellent students.
Now it’s going to be interesting to see whether the same institutions try to stay tightly packed when they jump off that cliff. A lot of them are already well past a soft-landing scenario unless the market has a sharp turnaround in the coming year. It doesn’t really matter how big the endowment was three or four years ago, because however big it was, harvesting the interest fueled the operating budget. Even if you increase the percentage of endowment spending, you’re not likely to make up the difference between the budget you had from endowment income four years ago and the income you’ll have next year.
This spring, there’s a range of short-term adaptations out there. Swarthmore and many other institutions have instituted a salary freeze; Brandeis (whose budgetary disaster is greater than almost anyone else) is suspending contributions to retirement accounts. Some institutions are doing what they can to improve things on the revenue side, but there’s not much to be done there except admit more students.
If things stay roughly the same next year, most institutions will have little choice but to undertake a big adjustment in some major part of their budget. I’m still on record as arguing for the kinds of strategies that I advocated when times were flush, at least at smaller institutions: draw faculty together around generalist practices, slowly erode overspecialized and excessively sequential curricular designs in favor of a loosely constituted core. Yes, this means eliminating a few faculty lines, but the idea is to do that very slowly.
Slow may not be an option any longer. Some temporary adaptations might be, and by that I don’t mean hiring lots of adjunct positions to sustain an overextended curricular design. Meaning, a lot of institutions might: a) suspend hiring in vacant lines for the next two years and b) if a suspended department complains they can’t support a program of study as it is designed with such suspensions, consider a temporary change in that program of study to make it sustainable with fewer resources. Similar short-term adaptations on the salary and benefits side might be to freeze hiring in non-faculty positions, suspend sabbaticals for a year, suspend course releases for administrative service. A lot of the other things that some will suggest aren’t big enough. (I’ve read of suggestions at a number of institutions that travel funds be cut temporarily, which at most places I suspect barely add up to one or two salaried positions, if that.)
The real crunch points will come from one of two major decisions: either cutting or amending need-blind admissions on one hand, or eliminating current positions on the other. I was really surprised to see Reed College taking the leap and committing, at least in the short-term, to eliminating need-blind admissions. Of the two big jumps, that seems to me to be the harder of the two politically for most selective private colleges and universities. Need-blind is very nearly gospel at most of the institutions that practice it. There are little ways to hedge against it, like admitting nothing but fully-paid students off the waiting list. But Reed, to give them credit, didn’t try to wrap up their decision in weasel qualifiers. They did it, they’re not happy, but that’s what they chose to do.
In a way, that’s easier to do, though. The students you lose when you give up need-blind are only potential individuals to you, in a way not that different in emotional terms than the students that you think might be potential admits but that you ultimately reject. What you give up with need-blind is a larger idea about higher education, meritocracy and social justice, but in various ways, most selective institutions already have deeply contradictory ideas about how those things mesh together.
Actively eliminating positions is in emotional and political terms a completely different matter.
First, the long low-level rhetorical sniping between administrators and faculty at most institutions is inevitably going to erupt into open warfare if there is a decision to cut positions. Faculty point out, justifiably I think, that the core mission of a university or college is instruction, that everything else is support. On the other hand, the premise of a residential college full of 18-22 year olds also centers on the idea that learning happens outside of the classroom, that the value of the education goes beyond formal learning. Faculty will point out that the growth in administrative ranks, especially at large universities, has well out-paced growth in faculty positions, particularly in tenured positions. Administrators will point out that higher education has become necessarily more complex to administer in a variety of ways, and that faculty have a host of hidden compensations to fall back upon.
Second, while everyone would like to imagine that positions might be eliminated by some rational, fair-minded selection criteria, it doesn’t usually go down like that in the real world. The best case scenario probably remains looking for retirements or vacant positions to shut down, but there’s no guarantee that those will come in sufficient numbers at the right time. In fact, given the hit to retirement accounts, their pace is likely to slow just when you might wish them to come in profusion. If the problem on the administrative side is disproportionate growth in the last two decades, I suppose you might look at the most-recently created positions and seek consolidations in them. That’s going to be a difficult way to go if only because that makes all those positions into a constituency that will defend themselves collectively. In fact, it’s hard to think of a scenario that involves actively occupied positions (faculty or staff) at any institution that won’t pit various constituencies against each other in some pretty vicious ways.
Given all that, Reed’s decision makes more and more sense. You can flip back to need-blind pretty easily as soon as you can afford it again. Reducing the size of staff and faculty is probably as long-term a project as increasing it was, especially if it’s to be done well, with philosophical and institutional coherence, rather than to be done by allowing larger power blocs to gut high-performing but exposed rivals in the academic equivalent of Thunderdome.
And once again the mythical wave of retiring boomers who will cause a mass of new hiring for recent PhD’s vanishes like a mirage…
You should photocopy this and leave them lying around campus for people to read.
Two departments enter! One department leaves!
I wonder if one answer might actually be to stop research at a SLAC for a couple years. Instead, faculty would be expected to carry out nearly all administrative functions instead. If faculty weren’t wasting time on research then perhaps they could carry more of the load currently filled by the administrative bureaucracy.
Well, I don’t really think research is wasting time. People may oversell this connection a bit, but some kind of research is what keeps many faculty intellectually alive and connected to their fields of interest, which then comes back into teaching. For a SLAC to distinguish itself as a great teaching environment, it has to really avoid the notion that pedagogy is about the rote communication of a fixed body of knowledge. Once you see teaching that way, why *not* have classes of 200 people listening to lectures?
Faculty also do quite a lot of administration as it is at many SLACs. I’m not sure it would do much for the instructional mission to load more of it on to them. I think it might be that we should look hard at which kinds of administration directly support instruction, and which kinds involve trying to manage the institution in other ways.
Thank you for that comment, Tim. It would be a complete disaster if SLACs were to call even a temporary halt to faculty research. What makes that type of job so unique and appealing is precisely that you can be a teacher-scholar. It unfixes a pie that seems ever more fixed elsewhere (either you’re a scholar at an R1, temperamantally inclined or otherwise under immense pressure to buy yourself out of the classroom entirely, or you’re a teacher with a 4-4 load and must essentially give up your vibrant research program and likely a large part of your professional identity along with it). So many schools have now a de facto two-tier system – researchers with tenure and teachers without. It may seem efficient to specialize jobs that way, but I absolutely believe that it’s a false economy. If you’ve got faculty who are good at both, and want to do both, then being able to do both keeps them sharper & better on both fronts. Hope I’m not ranting at this point… I know it takes resources to maintain a system like that – and that few places have/had those resources, even before the current economic issues – but I would be completely horrified by the shortsightedness of asking SLAC faculty to back off research!
Late2theparty, I entirely concur with your general point–that is, that teachers at small liberal arts colleges shouldn’t give up research aspirations in favor o simply taking over administrative duties–but I have to say that your comment…
either you????e a scholar at an R1, temperamantally inclined or otherwise under immense pressure to buy yourself out of the classroom entirely, or you????e a teacher with a 4-4 load and must essentially give up your vibrant research program and likely a large part of your professional identity along with it
…assumes a huge load of nonsense, perhaps unintentionally. I teach at a SLAC, I teach a 4-4 load, and I have a research program. Does everyone here also? No, it’s true, many have chosen the administrative route and haven’t attended a conference in years. But quite a few do keep up the research–even while teaching an overload schedule on occasion–and thus maintain their “professional identity” as you put it. As the crunch comes down for liberal arts colleges, particularly elite ones, I doubt that many will take seriously the option of going 4-4, or 4-3, or even 3-3, in their teaching loads, perhaps because many faculty are convinced their teaching quality or research agenda would suffer for it. But my experience suggests, at least in many cases, that concern is simply incorrect.
I also appreciate Reed’s honesty – I think a lot of private schools can still claim to be need blind, but tailor their admissions strategies to attract fewer needy students. As one admissions officer described to me, you can “fish in different ponds” in terms of time spent targeting high schoolers in Greenwich vs. the Bronx.
For comparison’s sake, Middlebury has been cutting staff via attrition & early retirement, but not freezing faculty hiring – in fact, we’re still committed to expanding the faculty and reducing teaching load/requiring senior work in 4 years. Staff reduction is tricky, but it’s forcing the college to look at inefficiencies & mission creep. As our CFO says, “never let a crisis go to waste.”
How is Swarthmore dealing with this? Or is there enough of a buffer that those decisions are getting deferred?
I think like Reed and a lot of other places, we’re hoping that next year brings enough of an improvement in the market that endowment income won’t leave us too big a gap in the operating budget.
Just annecdote here, but my impression from back when I was applying to colleges at the turn of the 1990s about Reed was that they were … less than honest about the need blind admissions. I was waitlisted there, but friends (from demonstrably needy families) were accepted but essentially told, “We can’t give you any money right now, but if you take out $30,000 in loans I’m sure that we can find something for you next year.” “Need blind admission” is a farce without sufficient financial aid to back it up.
Actually, I looked into this a bit more and Reed was not formally need-blind even before this year. It’s just that they’ve never overtly had to admit on the basis of ability to pay as they did this year. I suspect they’ve shaved and pushed before, but that wouldn’t have violated any commitments they’d made because they were careful not to declare themselves need-blind.
It’s also a cagey move on Reed’s part that will help them attract talent. At the independent girls’ school I teach at, really good students who would shine in public school, end up somewhat buried. These are really excellent students, but they’ve had trouble with top SLACs. Reed’s announcement would make the ones who don’t need aid more likely to apply there, figuring the math is in their favor. Being female is a big strike in the quest for competitive SLACs.