Higher Education Becomes Just Another Labor Market: Law of Supply & Demand + Maybe Politics

It's been a perfect storm for higher education, resulting in, oh horrors: laying off tenured faculty, in addition to other classifications of instructors. 

The gale forces of change include:

Reform efforts by the Trump administration. On Wall Street, Apollo's Marc Roman is pitching in on that campaign. 

Demographic realities. During an era of fewer births there's a reduced pool of applicants for a college education as well as advanced degrees.

Disconnect between the knowledge and skills acquired during matriculation for a degree and what's marketable in terms of the ability to earn a good living. You might not know that in 1626 the Puritans established Harvard as a trade school. It was to train ministers. Nothing ivory tower about that place back then.

Cost. The average sticker price has more than doubled in the 21st century.

Debt. The average student loan debt is more than $42K.

Epstein files. How many star professors sucked up to the pedo for donations.

The New York Times, which has been producing juicy exposes including about Big Law, takes a look at this employment issue. The specific focus is the New School in New York City. That institution is beloved by so many of us creatives and free-thinkers. But the NYT probe also applies to much of current higher education.

Essentially, the meme is: This sector was once treated as a special institution in society. Members of the teaching staff, like medieval monks, were viewed as engaged in a kind of sacred mission. 

More recently the whole sector has mutated into just another labor market. It's subject to the same laws of supply and demand (how many students enroll as history or comparative literature majors) as well as snippets of politics (often the MO in most job categories). 

It's the latter - internal politics - which the NYT invests most of its investigative vigor. Tenured economics professor Sanjay Reddy had been terminated last June at the New School. Along with him also axed had been 18 other professors. Nine of them also had tenure. The reason given was the now-usual: financial distress.

This might not have made it into a major news story. After all, across the US, academic departments with low enrollment are laying off faculty. Some institutions of higher education like Lourdes University in Ohio actually have shut down. Everyone lost their jobs. 

This narrative is shaped by speculation that Reddy might have been a victim of politics. Over the years he perceived his tenure as protection for voicing critical opinions about how the New School had been managed. The economics department is holding up, not vulnerable as are some creative majors. He was the only faculty member in it let go. 

Whatever.

The real story is the paradigm shift. Professors in academia are no longer a "protected" group.  They are becoming no different from the rest of us non-academics who live in fear about employment security. A comment to the NYT article puts it this way;

"Academia is so isolated from the rest of society ... It's easy to feel superior and invulnerable in the bubble of the University. Tenure is nothing but a fantasy to the average worker. A few layoffs might improve the work being done in economics as well as other fields."

Could the whole thing come down? Perhaps much of it will. 

In coaching I guide youth and the unemployed about training options which have a documented better ROI in terms of marketability and compensation than higher education. 

Careers. Forget all that. It’s about earning a good living, no matter what.

Complimentary consultation with Jane Genova, StreetSmart Coaching (janegenova374@gmail.com)