Coronavirus-Caused Furloughs Hit Shuttered Colleges

All those Uni’s that made giant hospitals and medical campuses their main driver of income over the last couple decades are going to be hurting. Furloughs a plenty.

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@jwbuho I can think of one blowhard who should be put in charge of the hot air at a federal prison.

And, I have 2 kids. One’s a junior in college working his ass off to finish his semester with zero room in our house and no where to go. He definitely won’t “go back” in the fall if it’s online only. The other’s a junior in high school and their admin has been dithering for a full 5 weeks trying to figure out the best and shiniest hi-tech way to teach students who just need to be engaged. Plus, his college visits have been cut off and he’s looking at making a major decision without ever getting a feel for the places he’s thinking about going.

Young people are going to suffer this long after we’re dead and gone.

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Not just that. I work in IT at a university and we’ve had a huge amount of work bringing up everyone’s ability to work at home. Those with only desktops need to be equipped with laptops, the VPN had to be upgraded to handle an order of magnitude more users, we’re moving things off campus to “the Cloud” at an accelerated rate, we’ve had to rejig the phone system to allow distributed queues for every department, etc.

Oh, and all this while coping with the ongoing issues associated with all that deferred maintenance mentioned above, which affects IT as much as Facilities.

And due to the systemic and long term funding cuts from the state, we are graduating our students and watching them (and some of our best staff) go off to Silicon Valley at starting salaries that meet or exceed what we’re paying our senior managers. Yes, the pension benefits are better than in industry, and it’s better than being unemployed at this point, but the whole “Fat Cats Feeding off the Corpses of our Kids” thing does get a bit old after a while…

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Those buildings were started under better times. I teach at a university with a huge amount of construction and when it all started we just did not have enough space to accommodate all the students. While some construction at some universities are all about turning these places into glorified cruise ships a lot of construction is about quality of education. I see construction is continuing but that has already been payed for or at least budgeted off of a huge fundraiser specifically for construction. Those funds are obligated.

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“Dough!”

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Exactly right. Higher education has become a twisted big-money game. The worst of it is the egregious salaries for the upper-echelon administrators, delivered by themselves. This crowd sets the tone: it is not about love of wisdom or knowledge, but of administrative careerism. There needs to be a reckoning.

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“Stay in your lane, Mr. Von Holst.”

And Texas has the largest public endowment of any university system in the nation, perhaps the world.

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The “Trump Pandemic Cemetery.”

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I am really worried about these schools with 500-2100 students that were already struggling. New technology is part of a contemporary education in the developed world and these small schools don’t have the economy of scale and were already financially straining to keep up. I really don’t see how a lot of these places are going to open again after this semester.

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This is just so, so broken. Of all the people to get rid of, healthcare folks are not them!

As Mr Sandi likes to say, Capitalism Ruins Everything. I am very sorry your daughter is facing this (esp, as you say, for a totally predictable event).

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When I was a starving grad student, I noticed that big buildings could be built because big donors could name an edifice to aggrandize a family member, have a big ceremony. But the research inside the building would be starved for simple consumables & office supplies. [In the archeology lab we had to straighten & reuse those little wire surveyor flags, for example]. My when-I-get-rich fantasy was to donate a million bucks earmarked ONLY for daily operations!

@ralph_vonholst

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UT system. My school is not part of that system

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Thanks for your IT work! Kiddo is one of the seniors at home trying to finish her year online. It has been a struggle for the students & the teachers, but they are all trying. I know they appreciate what you (or your counterpart) is doing!

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UT, yes, by far.

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Same problem in healthcare, at least in the NFP where I hang out. My not-so-bright co-workers spend a lot of mental energy complaining about new construction instead of wage increase, and never want to hear that people who donate large sums want to see their name on something, not fund an extra $5 an hour for us.

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A worker at a small museum near me said that the way to raise money was to put up a new building. Donors like them.

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I work full time but have had a part time job for about 15 years working at a local university as a captionist for Deaf/hard of hearing students. I rely on our campus techs for online access, using laptops owned by the school. It’s been realllllllly difficult to get my system up and running, and I’m now at a disadvantage compared to other captionists whose equipment is running smoothly (they can accept work that comes in, whereas I can’t).

Not the best time to invest in my own equipment and software, but if the fall semester is still online only, I may finally bite the bullet and do it.

And P.S. thanks for all you’re doing! On behalf of staff, faculty, students, and admin :grinning:

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@bunnyvelour

Thanks, and my best wishes for your kid. It’s definitely tough for students and instructors, as well. I’ve two kids going through it myself, my son’s in college, and my daughter’s in Vet Tech school. At this point in her program, it’s supposed to be a huge amount of hands-on lab work, but they can’t even go onto the campus. She’s become the class spokesperson and had a long chat with the campus President last week helping him understand the frustration and some of the ideas the students have come up with, waiting to see how it gets sorted out. Her proposal is basically to allow her cohort to suspend for a term to see what can be done as things stabilize. Initially they resisted that, but are no longer ruling it out. As the newscasters used to say “Only time will tell”.

Son’s coping better but reports that his Public Speaking elective is up in the air. Everyone was supposed to have done a public presentation by now, but it’s basically a set of Zoom chats at this point. No worries for him, but not sure some of the more junior folks are getting everything they were supposed to from the new format. And of course, everybody thinks every instructor should be a whiz with the new technology on Day 1. Hint: Not everybody lives and breaths this stuff, so yeah some are definitely struggling.

“sigh”…

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Indeed. I remember hearing about Kansas State University during the Great Depression. Everyone there agreed to take a pay cut to keep the other employees. I thought that would not be necessary. But it looks as though we are heading into a depression, not just a pandemic, and I am waiting to be told I will be furloughed as well.