In proposing last week to eliminate 169 faculty positions and cut more than 30 degree programs from its flagship university, West Virginia, the state with the fourth-highest poverty rate in the country, is engaging in a kind of educational gerrymandering. If you’re a West Virginian with plans to attend West Virginia University, be prepared to find yourself cut out of much of the best education that the school has traditionally offered, and many of the most basic parts of the education offered by comparable universities.
The planned cuts include the school’s program of world languages and literatures, along with graduate programs in mathematics and other degrees across the arts and pre-professional programs. The university is deciding, in effect, that certain citizens don’t get access to a liberal arts education.
Sadly, this is not just a local story. Politicians and state officials, often with the help of management consultants, are making liberal arts education scarce in some of the poorest states in the union. This trend, typically led by Republican-controlled legislatures and often masquerading as budgetary necessity, threatens to have dire long-term effects on our already polarized and divided nation.
Administrators at West Virginia University devised the plan to restructure the school with the help of a consulting company called rpk Group, which also works with the Universities of Missouri, Kansas and Virginia, among other schools. The stated purpose of the proposal is to address an expected decline in student enrollment at the school that will create a projected $45 million budget deficit.
But the projected deficit is the result of overly aggressive planning more than it is a financial liability created by the humanities. E. Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University, once promised that the school would have 40,000 students by 2020, but the figure is still well under 30,000 across three campuses and is projected to drop. Mr. Gee is now covering up his own failures at the expense of his state’s citizens, instead of putting his efforts toward recruiting and obtaining donor money to fund a broad education for West Virginians.
What’s more, cutting humanities programs — which make up a sizable minority of the majors slated to be cut, alongside pre-professional and technical programs — is not necessarily the best way to save money. There is substantial evidence that humanities departments, unlike a majority of college athletics programs, often break even (and some may even subsidize the sciences). In defense of its proposed cuts, West Virginia University has cited declining interest in some of its humanities programs, but the absolute number of students enrolled is not the only measure of a department’s value.
The finances aren’t the point, anyway. The humanities are under threat more broadly across the nation because of the perceived left-wing ideology of the liberal arts. Book bans, attempts to undermine diversity efforts and remodeled school curriculums that teach that slavery was about “skill” development are part of a larger coordinated assault on the supposed “cultural Marxism” of the humanities. (That absurd idea rests in part on an antisemitic fantasy in which left-leaning philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse somehow took control of American culture after the Second World War.) To resist this assault, we must provide broad access to a true liberal arts education.
The campaign to overturn the liberal arts is politically motivated, through and through. The Democratic Party has lost the working class, while the Republican Party has made electoral gains among the least educated. With the help of consultants, Republicans seek to gut the (nonprofit or public) university in the name of a “profit” it doesn’t even intend to deliver. The point instead is to divide the electorate, and higher education is the tool.
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The resentment fostered by cuts like those at West Virginia University won’t be aimed at the true culprits. The long-term effect will be bitterness toward those who have access to the liberal arts education that remains on offer in many blue states and at elite universities — what the scholar Lisa Corrigan calls a “two-tier educational system.” This outcome is likely to fortify many Republican voting strongholds.
Democratic politicians need to fight back in these culture wars, defending the humanities (rather than disparaging them) and loudly dissenting from the view that education is just job training. College presidents like Mr. Gee should promote and recruit rather than cutting and running. An unholy alliance of far-right ideology and mercenary venture capitalists has politicized the classroom. We must reject their vision of America and insist that a liberal arts education accessible to more than just the elite is one of the great foundations of a democracy.
The article says that Democrats should “loudly [dissent] from the view that education is just job training.” I think that’s the attitude that leads people to end up with college debt they can’t repay. Paying tuition in order to learn simply for the sake of learning is an expensive luxury. Unless you’re already rich, education should be primarily about job training.
Liberal arts majors do get jobs, and I don’t know the details about their post-college earnings vs the earnings of people with other degrees. Maybe there’s parity and then there’s no pragmatic reason to cut back on liberal arts education. But I suspect there isn’t parity, in which case maybe it’s best for universities, especially state universities in relatively poor states like West Virginia, to direct their students to better-compensated specialties.
College has never been a job training program and was never meant to be. Job training programs should be a hell of a lot shorter.
Job training should either be on the job or paid for by busniess taxes
This is the real solution. Businesses hate training new employees and then complain that no new employees know what they’re doing. There is a first mover problem where any company who invests in training can be cherry-picked by a second company who simply raises wages (because they save money on the training budget).
This can create a so called “skills gap”, where you need skills to get a job but no one is willing to give you a chance to practice those skills. Certifications try to fill the gap but do the bare minimum. We need job training schools funded by each industry. Ideally larger companies would also be forced to hire each graduate above a certain skill level.
College is a funny thing. Historically it has not been a job training program (except for a few specialties) and it claims that it’s still not a job training program. However for the last few decades (since the original GI bill?) most students have been going to college so that they can get a good job once they graduate. Thus college ends up being a job training program which is way more expensive and less useful than a job training program not pretending to be something else would be.
If I were in charge of everything, I would look into the option of cutting back on a lot of government subsidies for college students and directing that money to effective job training programs instead.
Education shouldn’t be as expensive as it is.
Practically speaking, I get why students look at it that way because, like you said, it is an expensive luxury at that price.
But, it shouldn’t cost that much.
That would help, but I’m not sure I agree it would really change much. Even if college is free, graduates still need to get a job afterwards. Getting a less well-compensated degree has an opportunity cost in addition to the up-front cost.
It would be less of an opportunity cost if education wasn’t as expensive as it is.
To be honest, if a person isn’t going to study something that will let him earn a lot of money, I’m not particularly inclined to subsidize his education with taxes. Money is apparently not very important to this person, but it is very important to me…
I think an educated populace is an invaluable resource. But, nothing is stopping someone from not going to free college if they want.
Exactly. The idea that people shouldn’t study other things like literature or art is just moronic. Yes we need better job training programs, but getting rid of majors that earn less is stupid. That’s the frosting on the “cake” of society.
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Subsidizing his success with taxes is a good investment. Once he becomes successful, he’ll pay more in taxes than it cost to subsidize him.
This person’s college education is probably not a good investment. I’m not making any other claims about him, including about his moral (as opposed to financial) worth as a human being.
If you aren’t able to go to college, I’m not sure how your personal experience is relevant here.