(Alternate Title: Race Riots At Evergreen Cost 20% Of Student
Base)
By Professor Doom
One of the
clearest signs of a school’s convergence, takeover by Social Justice Warriors
(SJW), is the race riots. More accurately, it is the response to riots that
gives the situation away. The normal response to student rioters is to eject
the rioters from the school, while at converged schools, the response is to
yield to all rioter demands…which only promotes more riots.
Now, certainly,
sometimes there are justifiable reasons to riot or at least protest, but the
demands of SJWs at our schools are demands which further destroy the education
at the school. More diversity hires, for example, are demanded, and the school
loads up on these useless administrators, whose only job is to provoke the
students into causing more riots…it’s a death spiral.
When a school
becomes converged, the only quick solution is bulldozers. This, of course, is
never on the table, and instead the school can only die a slow death as future
students realize a school with incessant riots and no education is a poor choice
to attend at all, much less for $30,000 or more a year.
I’ve covered Mizzou’s
slow death already, but, on the off chance a gentle reader thinks this
is a mere fluke, I now turn my attention to Evergreen State college, which
became famous for its riots last year.
How’d those
riots affect attendance?
Now, this is a
publicly funded school, and that means every penny of the budget is already
spent a year in advance…a loss of this many students is basically a complete
disaster since the budget is based on future student enrollment. Administration
at every school I’ve been at has assured me a sudden 10% drop in enrollment will lead
to a school closing its doors. I’m sure this isn’t a perfectly accurate
characterization…but the loss of so many students is still a bad thing.
“… it spurred an anonymous call for
Bridges’ resignation by way of flyers recently inserted into faculty mailboxes
declaring “Please Resign,” among other disparaging comments…”
It’s quite
infuriating how these public institutions operate. Their business model is
“find suckers who want free checks,” and when they “somehow” manage to get
growth, the administrative caste grows, and awards itself huge bonuses for its
clever “leadership.” On the other hand, if the school doesn’t grow, faculty
take it on the chin; there’s never any talk of eliminating a few administrative
positions, except, of course, “anonymously” by faculty who have no power to
make this reasonable decision.
Even if the Poo Bah here resigns for his
horrible management, he’ll still get a 7 figure golden parachute.
I should mention
here that, according
to the Wiki, the number of administrators at Evergreen grotesquely
outnumbers faculty. They have over 550 admin, and the school estimates around
3100 students next semester. Using the enrollment projections, I feel the issue
deserves some large font, gratuitous capitalization, and excessive
exclamation points as well:
Evergreen Has MORE THAN 1 Administrator For Every SIX
Students!!!!!!!!
Time and again
we’re smacked in the face with how little money there is for our schools. Time
and again this lack of money is used as justification for courses with hundreds
of students in the class, as well as skyrocketing tuition.
Imagine if
instead of spending all the money on administrators, a school focused on hiring
faculty. How attractive this school would be if it advertised that its largest
class size was 6! Parents would be breaking down the door to get their kids
into such a school, especially a publicly funded one. Instead, we get triple
digit class sizes and faculty who report to a dozen or more different
overseers.
The student loan
scam has covered our campuses with money…but little of it goes to education, as
Evergreen and many other schools demonstrate.
I grant even if
Evergreen used the money wisely and kept their class sizes to 6, they’d still
have trouble attracting students because of the race riots, but I really feel
the need to harp on just how obnoxious it is that so much money is being wasted
on the administrative caste. Each admin makes 2 to 20 times as much as faculty,
incidentally. A fair assessment of the money pouring into higher ed today
reveals we could probably have class sizes of three and schools (at least the ones with government support) could
still be profitable at current tuition.
Realistically, we
should just return tuition to sane levels, fire 90% of the useless "leadership," and go back to class sizes in the
teens, but I digress.
Adding insult to
grievous injury is the extraordinary incompetence of the administrators. Faced
with such a disaster of falling enrollment, how are they responding?
This
“Mizzou Effect” is a known factor among college leaders, and the official said
Evergreen has been in contact with University of Missouri to learn from their
experience.
How incompetent do
you need to be to not figure out that “race riots” and “no education” could be factors in falling enrollments? Whatever level of incompetence that is,
compound it exponentially for a thousand years to get to the point where going to a
dying school to ask them for advice on what to do is a good decision. For what it's worth, I gave
Mizzou some obvious advice, but they won’t follow it. Instead, Mizzou will
double down on their sportsball programs, and use their empty dorms to rent out
as hotel rooms for the games. They’ve forgotten they’re supposed to be a f@&#ing
school.
I submit that
Evergreen also has forgotten it’s supposed to be about education. We can
establish this by taking a look at Evergreen’s ideas to address their problem
of race riots and lack of education:
…the
enrollment decrease will likely plateau and the college will in the coming
years grow its ranks again.
The first part of the administrative plan
to fix their problem is “insane optimism and simply make up numbers for future
enrollment.” This is pretty idiotic: our higher education system is massively
overbuilt, so prospective students have many places to choose from. Even if education is terrible at other schools, the whole “but no
race riots” is still going to make Evergreen a tough sell over any other school.
Any other ideas?
Evergreen
is “doubling down on efforts to recruit older, non traditional students, as
opposed to straight from high school.” This demographic includes adults outside
of traditional college age, as well as returning-to-college students.
Uh, if the kids
right out of high school aren’t stupid enough to go to Evergreen, why would the
adults be so easily suckered? Already, around 80% of US citizens go to higher
education at some point, so there’s not much room there for growth in scraping
up the remaining 20% of the population. The 20% not going now are probably too
intelligent or simply incapable of going under any circumstances, after all
(I’ll politely ignore the possibility that the 20% not going to college
includes much of the lower end of intelligence…).
To
that end, Evergreen officials have developed a mass marketing campaign…
--emphasis
added
Evergreen hopes
blowing money on marketing will address the issues of race riots and no
education? Does anyone else think we’re not exactly getting our money’s worth
for this legion of administrators?
And that’s where
Evergreen’s ideas end as far as how to address falling enrollments due to race
riots and lack of education. I really should emphasize I’m hardly alone in
seeing what the problem is, as a former employee of Evergreen says much the
same:
“A
fix, if even possible after the damage already done, will come only be
returning Evergreen to its roots as a college steeped in the concept of open
inquiry inherent in a true liberal arts education,”
This option won’t
be on the table, as only faculty could accomplish the above. At many
schools, admin outnumber faculty by a huge margin and strangle out any possibility of using education to improve a school's chances.
If the public
only understood how much of their tax dollars are being wasted at schools like
this, I believe my easy solution, bulldozers, would be enacted quite quickly.
Instead, we’ll get
to watch this school die a slow death; it might be a few years, it might be a
decade, but it’s inevitable. I imagine at some point I’ll get the amusement of
watching the school have only one faculty member (but still over 500
administrators!) teaching all 300 remaining students in one class on the last semester
before the school finally closes its doors.
The bulldozers will work much better if first, you chain each administrator to its desk and lock all the doors.
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