UVM was popular among prep school kids who had no shit at Dartmouth and weren't quite Bowdoin/Bates caliber or didn't want Colby. Also, Burlington is better than Lewiston, and it's an actual university. I expect that many of the kids who could do Bowdoin or Dartmouth in the late 80's to early 90's as the mini baby bust came of age, are now no longer competitive there, and consider UVM a first choice.
But also St. Andrew's was popular for a gap year for kids who could not get into a decent school in the US. Some of them probably stayed and did a full degree there. I'm sure that they were acceptable admissions, because they were paying full, international tuition rates.
I believe a similar thing is happening in a lot of UK universities. The fees for UK students are capped but those for international students aren't. That's either a bad thing because it's harder for UK students to get places at their own universities, especially for costly subjects like medicine, or it's a good thing because it means that universities are that rare thing, a successful UK export industry. Or both.
Scottish kids get their fees paid by the Scottish government, as long as they study at a Scottish university. The result is that it is almost unheard of for Scottish kids to go to English universities.
4: it was a particular thing with St. Andrew's though, more than other schools in the early 90's - when English students, and I think Scottish too paid no tuition fees.
So part of this has to be that states are supporting universities less, but that in-state tuition is expected to be low, because it's taxpayer supported. Also between Trump and COVID the international market dried up, too. It's also a lot easier for students to find information about out of state options.
Anyhow, the trend is certainly to make the regional comprehensives second-tier, because if those local students could get a cheap education and go places, they're never going to be content with a stackable certificate and a job at the Amazon warehouse. The fact that it tracks a diversifying Gen Z is probably a feature.
4: that's correct - until 1998 or so, no UK undergraduates paid tuition fees. But the fees were still paid to the universities (by the local education authorities), and it would still have been much more lucrative to have a foreign student than a UK one.
What I don't know is why St Andrews should have been so much more popular than any other. Possibly it was the golf?
Probably related, but I was surprised to see how much more selective Pitt is than before. Also how expensive it is even instate.
UNC-CH has gotten way more selective since I was an undergrad there in the (jfc) 1980s, and in-state tuition went from under $500 per semester to over $9000.
I mean, I'll gladly pay it if he wants to go there. But it feels wrong.
7: I'm sure that the college counselors had personal relationships with someone there. More like going away to a private liberal arts school in the US than an urban university would be my guess. As a kid I knew of Oxford and Cambridge as the Harvard and Yale of the UK. I didn't know about St. Andrew's, but the university has been actively recruiting from North America since the mid 80's.
I've noticed an increase in New England students going to the universities in the Canadian maritimes. They're set up to take US financial aid, and they are smaller and more residential than the bigger universities in other provinces.
I believe a similar thing is happening in a lot of UK universities. The fees for UK students are capped but those for international students aren't. That's either a bad thing because it's harder for UK students to get places at their own universities, especially for costly subjects like medicine, or it's a good thing because it means that universities are that rare thing, a successful UK export industry. Or both.
It's also contributing to our wonderfully toxic immigration discourse as a huge proportion of the net migration figure is made up of foreign students.
I was afraid that the visible implosion of WVU combined with the creepy dystopian version of Ohio would send more students to Pitt. But maybe not.
I suppose the relatively low weight assigned to creeping dystopia should be obvious given the number of Ohio schools the kid applied to.
16: I know someone whose kid is at Overlin this year. She asked the admissions officer, "what happens if my daughter needs an abortion?" Moot point now, but they had a thought-out answer which involved student groups providing resources.
Overlin is nice because there's a real Ven Franklin store across the street.
I recently discovered that I'm an Oberlin legacy of sorts, via a great great grandmother who was there in the 1840s.
This should give you standing to complain about the 'sushi' served at the cafeteria.
I have opinions about cafeterias in Ohio colleges, but I forgot them. Except that Kenyon has the most Hogwortsy of them.
20: Yeah seems like the fundamental problem was that it was crappy food, but "cultural appropriation" sounds more academic than "you call this shit sushi?"
The salmon sushi at Pitt used to be steelhead trout. You had to read carefully to learn that. I was afraid to read the ingredients of the Californian roll.
Nobody commented on it so I guess you all smoothly substituted the appropriate letter for the typo in 1.1, but it threw me for like two minutes until I figured out it was a typo. I am slow like that.
The real reason out-of-state rich kids go to some of these colleges: U. Vermont = skiing. U. Rhode Island = sailing. U. Delaware = tax-free shopping. U. New Hanpshire = Trifecta! skiing, sailing, and tax-free shopping, although none quite at the level of the specialized flagships.
I just thought "had no shit at Dartmouth" was some impenetrable East Coast thing, like "hero sandwich."
I went to a California Forward conference a while back and was shocked to learn that CSU Fresno had twice as many qualified applicants as it could accept (9,000 qualified, 4,500 class size) every year. I was horrified at the wasted potential. No one besides locals is trying to go to CSU Fresno and they likely won't go anywhere else. They won't go very far, anyway.
Someone in the house keeps listening to Noah Kahan, so my head is filled with "I love Vermont, but it's the season of sticks. New Hampshire can eat a bag of dicks."
It took me until 27 to figure out what we were talking about.
Speaking of the educational system, I have a ridiculous story. Last year, it came time for the high school to submit their 2022 stats to the state. They meant to submit that we had 500 seniors graduating. Somehow instead the stats incorrectly showed 99 seniors graduating, and those 99 were all 5th and 6th year seniors. So in other words, we turned in data saying that we had 0 seniors graduating on time, and 99 graduating late.
At some point someone recognized the mistake and submitted the correct data. I don't know the timeline for this. But according to our superintendent, the state's response was, "Thank you for the updated data. Your school's grade will reflect the original data, not the updated data, because you fucked up. Sorry!"
The superintendent and president of the school board and their lawyer set up a meeting with the person from the state. Apparently the superintendent specifically asked, "So when you submit data to the federal government, are you going to submit the wrong data that you're grading us on, or the corrected data?" They answered that they were going to submit the corrected data, of course.
School grades from 2022 haven't come out yet because they're tied up in the courts at the moment, se I don't actually know if the school will get an F for graduating no one on time, but it's far enough along that the superintendent met with the teachers to get out in front of any rumors. (But not far enough along to say anything to parents yet.)
Also, if your district fails a certain number of times, the state takes over, so there are high stakes consequences to all this malicious bullshit.
My favorite 17 y/o has been accepted at Pitt but hasn't decided whether she's going. She's waiting to see about her other options. She loved her visit there, though.
It did appreciably narrow down her college hunt that she refused to even consider visiting institutions in states that don't protect women's rights, much less applying there. Anecdotally, she is not the only young woman I know making those calculations. I haven't heard as much about young men (I presume nonbinary y.p. are avoiding those states due to anti-LGBTQ bias.)
Case Western made a late return to her list, though.
Anyway, I'm hearing good things about Case Western.
I am watching the Calabat take a ninja class.
I never thought to organize college decisions with switch statements but that's one way to do it.
I admit I was very surprised to learn that Case Western was a higher ranked university than Pitt. I hadn't heard of Case Western before I moved to Ohio.
I was afraid to read the ingredients of the Californian roll.
Let's just say the state is losing population for many reasons.
24 and 5: Is there a word for iPad typo? I was sad that there is no post-commenting edit feature.
It's also contributing to our wonderfully toxic immigration discourse as a huge proportion of the net migration figure is made up of foreign students.
This puzzles me because foreign students should add nothing to our net migration, unless they decide to become residents. Every September, 100,000 (or whatever) Chinese students arrive in the UK to begin their degrees. But every June 100,000 other Chinese students graduate and go home. Net migration that year, zero.
Looking into it, it seems that a lot of them do in fact stay on in the UK after graduating, and this number is growing. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/reasonforinternationalmigrationinternationalstudentsupdate/november2023
for students with visas ending in the 2018 to 2019 academic year, 35% successfully applied for new visas (such as for work, further study, or both) and remained in the UK.
As a kid I knew of Oxford and Cambridge as the Harvard and Yale of the UK.
Making Hull the Princeton of the UK.
Only two of those, however, are truly great universities.
Even for the ones that don't stay after graduating, they get included in the figures if they are here for at least 12 months, so if the number of non-EU students is growing, as it was ordinarily and especially in the post-COVID recovery, then the net figure will increase.
33 is horrifying. School administrators - what is wrong with them? Is this a general phenomenon? Our experience with them was awful in the worst sort of arbitrary, cruel and unusual way when our son was expelled. And they were completely unaccountable. 33 seems like the same thing on a much bigger scale. Can you get some sympathetic investigative journalist to throw some light on that situation?
44:well, Oxford and Cambridge are bigger at the undergraduate level. You joke, but I don't know if I had heard of Princeton as a little kid. I certainly didn't know anything about Stanford until I was in high school. And my aunt went to Stanford; it was her second choice. My grandfather would not let her go to Berkeley, because he thought she would get in trouble there in the late 60's.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKuHYO9TM5A
42: I can't imagine that the average UK citizen understands immigration policy and regulations any more than the average American, who in my experience don't understand that the "technical" part of "Canada is technically a foreign country" actually matters for, e.g., shiv's status.
43: That should still mostly even out over the very long run though, for precisely the reasons you covered; only a subset of that 35% is going to apply for indefinite leave to remain, so that's your net long term flux (plus any gradual increase in student numbers). Admittedly, for the purposes of this political debate, that long term might as well be infinity.
As for St. Andrews, apparently it's still has a 20% North American undergraduate body.
50: No, I don't think they do.
On the positive side, I just passed my Life in the UK Test.
Cassandane will be so hurt that UVM is top on this list and nothing in California appears at all. Our current plan for college for Atossa is to send her to a college in one of our home states, preceded by 12 months and one week of living with a grandparent to get in-state tuition. (Of course, if we do that, she wouldn't count as out-of-state and therefore this list isn't relevant, but anyways.)
Does that mean you can eat peas from the back of your fork?
It's not a very good test. I can't even do the thing where you keep your knife in your off-hand. I'm useless both at dinner and in a fight.
Our current plan for college for Atossa is to send her to a college in one of our home states, preceded by 12 months and one week of living with a grandparent to get in-state tuition.
Like a gap year? Or her senior year spent elsewhere?
Sounds like a fairy tale. "My child, you shall live with your grandmother in the Principality of Aptos for a year and a week, in order to be afforded entrance to the Kingdom of Berkeley."
I picked up the thing where you keep the knife in the same hand while eating. Much efficienter.
Does that mean you can eat peas from the back of your fork?
TikTok confirms that you didn't just make this up to fuck with me.
Over break, I was subjected to a higher and more prolonged level of college-admissions-parental-anxiety than I generally enjoy.
53: it does mean dalriata knows the dates of the Habeas Corpus Act and the Statute of Rhuddlan, how to book a meeting with your member of the Welsh Assembly, and that it is bad to be a terrorist.
59: The trick is to put something on the end of your fork to hold the peas.
60: There's a lot of that in this house, despite having more than one acceptance from a very good school with a financial aid offer that is affordable.
In and out in five minutes without prep besides a few practice tests on the train over. Very few hard dates came up, thankfully, and none of the really stupid questions like "How tall is the London Eye in meters?" (135m) I did goof when 21-year-old women got the vote; I knew it was embarrassingly late but I forgot precisely how embarrassingly. I also had to know what lower court judges in Northern Ireland are called (deputy...magistrates? Wow, that didn't last), that taking care of your family is a fundamental British value, and who wrote The Daffodils (Didn't know this, but it obviously was not Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton). I'm already forgetting how many members each of the devolved parliaments have.
Opinionated academic and I spent months quizzing each other from the book to prepare for hers, so some of it is forever burned into my brain.
The Northern Ireland stuff isn't going to be on the test for much longer due to the Irish Unification of 2024.
I just learned from a very credible source in Belfast that there is a very high possibility of a United Ireland 1 being created in the next 5 MONTHS. At least ROI + NI. This is HUGE. And no this is not a shitpost, I'm serious
To be clear, 67 was either a shitpost or a Star Trek joke.
It would be awesome if ST:TNG were driving events that were in the future at the time it was released but alas it's a little late to be starting now.
We have a bit of sibling rivalry, with one kid a freshman at highly selective school and telling his HS junior brother he should try to go there too but HS brother probably wants to go to different selective school that he says is "better" (really at that level admissions is all a coin flip) so he'll randomly pull up his transcript or SAT report on his phone and wave it in freshman brother's face since his stats are marginally better.
The context of the ST:TNG United Ireland thing was Data listing examples of when terrorism worked, so maybe it will be okay for them not to be prophetic.
Re out-of-state admissions, the University of Virginia says on its admissions website: "We have pledged to maintain a 2/3 majority of Virginia residents in our student population, but 2/3 of our applicants tend to come from out-of-state."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/flagships-prosper-while-regionals-suffer
Flagships Prosper, While Regionals Suffer
Competition is getting fierce, and the gap is widening.
LJ Davis
Some key numbers are moving in the right direction at the University of Oregon. The flagship institution enrolled 5,338 freshmen in the fall of 2022, its largest entering class ever. First-year enrollment increased 16 percent over 2021, which was also a record year. Meanwhile, Western Oregon University, a regional public institution an hour's drive north, just outside Salem, lost nearly 7 percent of its enrollment over the same period.
The good times/bad times dynamic is playing out elsewhere in the state, with total enrollment since 2010 at Oregon's regional public colleges down more than 18 percent, while it's up more than 17 percent at the state's flagships. In 28 states, flagships have seen enrollment rise between 2010 to 2021, while regionals have trended down, according to a Chronicle analysis of U.S. Education Department data. Across all states, enrollment at 78 public flagships rose 12.3 percent from 2010 to 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. Enrollment at 396 public regional universities slumped more than 4 percent during the same period.
Enrollment is perhaps only the most tangible and consequential measure of the diverging fortunes of, and increasingly fierce competition between, flagships and regionals. Flagships typically dominate the attention of elected officials and ordinary citizens in their states. They're the marquee institutions, the research centers, the academic powerhouses, the foundation of a statewide alumni base, and often the state's athletics brand, too.
But the workhorses of public higher education in most states are the regional public universities, the less renowned four-year institutions with teaching missions that exist in the shadows of the flagships' spotlight. And shifting demographics, reduced levels of state support, and hobbled state oversight have led many regional universities to suffer.
Losing even relatively few students can present challenges for a regional public college. Not only are many state-funding formulas based on enrollment, but with state dollars per full-time student effectively flat from two decades ago, public colleges are more dependent on tuition dollars than ever. "We're asked to support students who have historically been unserved or underserved," says Jesse Peters, Western Oregon's president, "while at the same time we're planning to reduce our spending, which in higher ed, is largely spending on employees." Many of the cuts are likely to come in student-facing positions.
Competition for students and resources between flagships and regional colleges is nothing new, but it's grown more lopsided than the jockeying that has gone on in the past, experts say. The divide between haves and have nots in public higher education is widening, making it harder for regional institutions to serve their mission.
In Oregon, the university system was dissolved in 2015 and the state's Higher Education Coordinating Commission has little ability to curb the growth of larger institutions and protect the interests of regional campuses. "It's kind of like The Hunger Games," says Andrew Koricich, an associate professor of higher education at Appalachian State University, in Boone, N.C., and executive director of its Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges. Left to fend for themselves, many regional universities are losing enrollment and subsequently being forced to cut employees and programs, making them less able to recruit and retain students, making them more likely to lose more enrollment. "How," Koricich asks, "are students supposed to be attracted to hollowed-out institutions?" (1/x)
(cont.)
Competition between flagships and regionals didn't matter as much when public higher education was booming, says John R. Thelin, a professor emeritus of educational policy studies and evaluation at the University of Kentucky, and a historian of higher education. During the long post-World War II boom of American prosperity, public higher education expanded with the population and the economy, and there were plenty of students and tax dollars to go around.
Even during the early years of the 21st century, flagships and regionals still operated in a growth mode premised on, and promising, a brighter future. "Not everybody's getting all that they want, particularly from, let's say, state budgets," Thelin says of public institutions in those years. "But they're all gaining, so you can live with the inequities, as long as your own institution is still growing and ascending."
The 2008-9 recession devastated state support for higher ed and flattened the curve of long-term financial growth.
In 2003, local, state, and federal governments spent about $9,300, adjusted for inflation, on education appropriations per full-time equivalent, including financial aid, according to an analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. In 2021, spending had only just caught up to the 2003 level.
The recession initially helped bolster enrollments, as companies shed jobs and students flocked to colleges to wait out the storm. But shifting demographics threaten the once seemingly bottomless bounty of traditional-age college students. Nathan D. Grawe, a professor of economics at Carleton College, has projected that more than half of the states will have 15-percent fewer collegebound students by 2029.
As public higher education grew during its long late-20th-century boom, it developed state-level organizing structures to help it grow and run -- whether state coordinating boards, university systems, or master plans, such as the seminal Master Plan for Higher Education in California, 1960-1975. "In the '70s, they actually had a pretty good mediating presence," Thelin says, but many have since been dissolved or grown ineffectual. And their powers always had some limits. Coordinating boards or system governing boards are typically appointed by legislators, and legislatures and boards alike are often full of alumni of their states' major public universities, beneficiaries of their activities, and fans of their football and basketball teams. "Flagships could always run over them," Thelin says. (2/x)
(cont.)
If the flagship is gaining big enrollments in a state that is not having an overall growth in high-school graduates, it's "poaching from the other institutions," he says, "because it's probably recruiting and enrolling students who probably were historically matched for the regionals." Many state coordinating boards used to keep that poaching under control by negotiating with all the public colleges to set enrollment goals. Leaders could be penalized not only if they undershot them, but also if they exceeded them, Thelin says. Coordinating boards could also keep colleges from duplicating programs that existed at nearby institutions and prevent public colleges from establishing branch campuses were they might compete with existing institutions.
A Chronicle analysis of federal data showed, for example, that in Michigan, a state being hit hard by demographic shifts and with no central higher-ed authority, the flagship University of Michigan at Ann Arbor saw undergraduate enrollment rise 16 percent between 2010 and 2020. Over the same period, it fell at 11 of the state's 12 other four-year public campuses. Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti, between Ann Arbor and Detroit, lost 31 percent of its enrollment. Central Michigan University, in Mt. Pleasant, near the geographical center of the lower peninsula, lost 39 percent.
In some states, heightened competition is also affecting flagships as they vie with each other. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, a 52-year old collaboration between two flagships that functioned as an open-access regional institution in the state's capital, announced last year that its partnership would dissolve, and Indiana University and Purdue would both maintain presences in the city more closely tied to their own brands and agendas. Some public regionals, on the other hand, are seeing the need to cooperate. Pennsylvania, for example, is combining six of its regional universities into two new institutions, in hopes of keeping institutions with faltering enrollments open while continuing to serve those areas of the state.
But using the competition for students as a reason for regionals' faltering is "a bit of a red herring," Koricich says. Bringing in more students wouldn't be so important to flagships or regional colleges if public higher education were adequately funded. With more public-college budgets dependent on tuition, increasing enrollment is the only reliable way to grow or, in many cases, innovate. (3/x)
(cont.)
Regional universities have contributed to the lopsided competition with flagships through their own hopes to be more like mini-flagships. Most regional institutions started out as teachers' colleges, with practical missions more akin to those of community colleges -- providing access and affordable degrees to local residents. Over the late 20th century and into the early 21st, many regional institutions have undergone mission creep, adding graduate programs and other attributes more common to research universities. The tighter academic job market of the past several decades has filled the faculties of regionals with professors, and eventually administrators, educated at more-prestigious institutions, says Thelin, which creates great faculties but also a more aspirational internal culture.
States also need to take a more active role in protecting, and reimagining, the mission of the regional universities, Koricich believes. "There are communities across this country, including small cities, that will never have population growth ever again," he says. "That doesn't mean we don't need a college. It just means we have to think differently about what kind of college we need."
While flagships and regionals might be competing with each other, the picture is more complicated. Enrollment dynamics don't play out solely within a state's borders.
Last fall, the University of Kentucky welcomed 6,120 freshmen, a record and about a 15-percent increase over the previous record in 2019. Eli Capilouto, the president, says he's "not so certain we made a heavy dent into our regionals" to achieve that growth. Much of the university's growth has come from nonresidents, he said. It has enrolled about 21,000 in-state students in the 2022-23 academic year, almost exactly what it enrolled in 2013-14, according to institutional data. The number of out-of-state students has grown, however, to 11,370 from 8,117 in 2013-14, an increase of 40 percent. Capilouto wonders if his institution isn't benefiting from flagships in other states becoming more crowded and selective: "Are we getting those students who couldn't get into Ohio State, but, gee, Kentucky's not such a long drive?" (4/x)
(cont)
Capilouto hears the concerns of his colleagues at Kentucky's regional universities about their enrollments. Four of the state's six regional institutions lost students over the past decade, according to a Chronicle analysis. The flagship enrolled about 6,100 freshmen last fall, and plans to enroll about that many this year, he says. And just because Kentucky hasn't hurt for new students in recent years doesn't mean that Capilouto and his administrators don't "sit around, waiting anxiously," wondering "what does our first-semester retention look like?" Serving more students these days means providing more supports and services, and hoping they help.
But Capilouto doesn't rule out future growth for the flagship so long as it's "smart growth," he says. "We want to know that we do have the people and physical infrastructure in place to provide a quality education."
The range of options afforded to Capilouto and the presidents of most flagships are broader than those available to the leaders of the nation's regionals confronted with drops in enrollment, especially since those drops make everything about their jobs harder. When Jesse Peters, president of Western Oregon, showed up in Salem last summer to assume his new job, he hoped that his institution would be doing better than it has. About 50 percent of the university's operating budget comes from the state, so last fall's 7-percent enrollment drop left it with an $8-million deficit for the current year, on an annual operating budget of about $70 million. "When enrollment declines at a smaller regional university, it seems like that pain is felt very quickly and very seriously," he says, "because we're so dependent upon tuition dollars."
A decade or more ago, regional institutions in a financial bind might have been able to economize on travel or nonessential positions. But after years of cutting and austerity, there's little fat to trim. At Western Oregon, as enrollment has dropped, inflation has driven up the cost of essentials like energy, food, and construction materials, Peters says. "Putting a roof on a building to maintain it is more than double what it was a year ago." The needs of the student populations that regionals often serve can also create additional expenses for these institutions, placing them under further financial strain.
Peters and other leaders at Western Oregon are considering how they might be able to build back their enrollment and educate more students. Recruiting more adult learners represents one possibility, but Peters says it isn't clear that the university could make up the financial difference with this group alone. Working students often require substantial advising and academic support, and since they have busy lives off campus, they won't help fill Western Oregon's residence halls.
And then there's paying to put new ideas into practice. "People can easily say, 'Well, why don't you pivot and do these other things?' And it's like, we would love to, but we're also trying to figure out how to survive financially," Peters says. "It's not as if we're not willing to do things differently. But what we need is enough funding to do it." (5/x)
(cont. I didn't realize this article was so long!)
And then there's paying to put new ideas into practice. "People can easily say, 'Well, why don't you pivot and do these other things?' And it's like, we would love to, but we're also trying to figure out how to survive financially," Peters says. "It's not as if we're not willing to do things differently. But what we need is enough funding to do it."
There is precedent for one-time funding to bail out faltering institutions and pay for innovation, says Teresa M. Brown, vice president for academic innovation and transformation at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, a membership organization for regional public universities. Most of the $76 billion dispensed to colleges through the federal Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund during the early phases of the Covid pandemic was intended to aid students and make up for the revenue colleges lost when they issued housing and dining refunds, but many institutions used some of the money to invest in upgrading their online programs or other improvements. Brown says that additional state funds to support colleges adapting to serving a new demographic or offering a new program -- even one-time dollars -- could pay off for states, colleges, and students alike. If the changes bring in new students, the investment supports itself.
Without investment or innovation, lagging regionals are likely to continue losing out to their flashier flagship siblings. And if more students bypass institutions like Western Oregon in favor of the flagship, Peters worries that an important resource for some of the state's most vulnerable students will continue to weaken. "If we really are serious about increasing the numbers of students from first-generation families and underserved communities who obtain a college degree and change the trajectory of their lives, then the regional universities are the place where that happens," he says. "Putting us in a position that makes us struggle to accomplish those goals is a sad thing."
As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is right now. In states where elected officials and higher-education leaders let their public colleges build up decades of dysfunction and redundancies -- as in Pennsylvania, where 149 public and private colleges serve a population of about 12 million -- it's too late to head off the current problems. Fixing them now will require mustering political will, says Koricich, and that means elected officials or coordinating boards refereeing the competition among institutions, and standing up to the flagships to protect the interests of the regional institutions. "The state has the responsibility to make sure that these institutions are not cannibalizing each other, they're not spending half their time fighting for resources against the others," he says. Unfortunately, "you don't see a lot of states doing that."
But maybe, rather than appealing to the referee, regional universities need to rethink the game. Before coming to the state-colleges group, Teresa Brown served as an administrator in the State University of New York and University of Wisconsin systems and has seen plenty of competition between public colleges. Given shifting demographics, she thinks regional public universities should be thinking hard about who they serve and how. "Do you, as an institution, try to compete with the flagship?" she says. "Or do you do what a lot of institutions are doing, which is to really be clear about what their mission is as a regional public, serving their particular region?"
Rather than looking to the flagship for cues, regional public colleges should perhaps look to community colleges for inspiration, Brown says. Focus on teaching and local work-force needs. First-time, full-time students are important, of course, but so are adult learners, a vital demographic to meet any state's work-force goal, and a largely untapped source of enrollment gains. "I don't believe that there's a shift from something to something else, like we're becoming something different," Brown says. "It's an embracing of the mission that has always been."
A good example of this embrace is the University of West Alabama, in tiny Livingston, near the Mississippi border. The institution sits in a swath of deep rural poverty. Its enrollment has fluctuated over the years, but it grew from 5,094 in 2010 to 5,734 in 2020, an increase of 13 percent, according to a Chronicle analysis of federal data. It did so, in part, by embracing a number of practices more typical of community colleges than of regional universities, according to Tina N. Jones, a professor of English and director of the university's division of economic outreach and development.
While some regional universities focus on the work force in their areas, West Alabama offers seven two-year programs for credit, such as a popular certified-nursing-assistant program, as well as noncredit certificates. "Many four-year institutions let go of those," Jones says, "and we never did." Not only do such programs provide a low-investment path to a job for students, she adds, "some of them do go on and decide, Hey, this is my first step, and now I see that I can actually maybe go on to our two-year nursing program. And then maybe they go on to a four-year program."
Sumter County, where West Alabama is located, and the surrounding region has lost more than a quarter of its population over the past 50 years, according to U.S. Census data, and shrinking rural communities often lack the kind of civic support that might help connect colleges and employers, to work on economic development in the region. "That's where my division steps in," she says. With six full-time staff members, the office does some of the work that the local or state government might otherwise do in courting potential businesses to move to the area. West Alabama participated in persuading Enviva, a company that produces pellets for wood stoves, to build a $180-million facility in Sumter County.
West Alabama also educates many adult learners. As flagships and regional institutions battle over new high-school graduates, degree completers and other adults looking for new careers or reskilling offer a huge opportunity -- even as some states consolidate campuses in hopes of keeping them open.
To Koricich, the potential market of adult learners should help college leaders reframe their thinking. "There may be fewer students in graduating high-school cohorts," he says, "but until your state has 100 percent of people who need a postsecondary credential holding one, you're not at a shortage for students. Not even close."
Brian O'Leary and Audrey Williams June contributed to this report. (6/6)
56
Like a gap year? Or her senior year spent elsewhere?
Either? Playing it by ear. The kids' opinions, our finances, and her grandparents' health can change a lot in that time. It's still at least 8 years away.
J Robot - I haven't read all of that, but in New England, Inwould say that the flagship is kind of poaching from people who would have gone to private colleges in New England before.
The regional state college in my city is in really bad shape. Enrollment has gone from ~5000 to ~3000. It was just starting to recover from the aftermath of the pumpkin riot when covid hit.
I would have figured a pumpkin riot would boost enrollment.
Lately, The Atlantic seems to be trying to either piss me off or see how much I like Adam Serwer. But, this is my favorite headline of the year.
Sometimes, the flagships cut into the regionals by radically cutting their admissions requirements. So now the student who couldn't get in can go! Are they prepared to teach less prepared students? No, but why would that matter?
85 is very true...
They merged a bunch of regional campuses here. Some of them had over-expanded and were in financial trouble.
The genuises in charge here made the regionals branches of the flagships. No longer Eastern Montana College, now it's Montana State University, Billings. It's still EMC to me . . .
Penn State put branch campuses everywhere on their own. Pitt did also, but to a much lesser extent.
I mean, there really isn't a "flagship" school in Pennsylvania. I just treat Pitt as if it were the flagship because it isn't in Philadelphia and has managed to run an athletic program without Big Ten levels of child molestation.
84: Hah. I was going to include some of my recent Quora "questions" as one element of a Guest Post I will probably never finish entitled: Is Our Fever Swamps Festering?
Some recent examples (for me they've mostly been weird RW political stuff)
* Why don't democrats read books and understand history like Trump supporters?
* How did today's liberals become liberal without CRT training and LGBTQ+ conditioning in kindergarten and elementary school?
* With the evidence from the video "2000 Mules" showing an army of paid vote harvesters filling drop boxes, will liberals continue to maintain the election was the most secure in American history?
* Why do you scumbag liberals always defend the criminality of the China bought and paid for Biden family?
* Why didn't Fox use Mike Lindell and Rudy's evidence to prove they weren't lying about the election?
* Why wasn't Al Gore arrested and sentenced to capital punishment for challenges to the election in Florida in 2000?
But also more quotidian concerns:
* I dined at a restaurant and left a 15% tip instead of a 20% tip. Upon exiting, the waitress looked at me scornfully. What should I do?
How did today's liberals become liberal without CRT training and LGBTQ+ conditioning in kindergarten and elementary school?
Nuns taught me what Jesus said.
||re: prior thread on Gay/plagiarism etc.:
Akman: My wife plagiarized Wikipedia before it sold out.
|>
To 79, the problem is that "regional universities should focus on the local market" means "we will gut anything that isn't immediately serving a local employer," so if you're a bright poor kid who goes to the regional, we're intentionally narrowing your world to stackable certificates and sales degrees. Couldn't have you competing with the flagship kids, after all; they'll get languages and physics and philosophy, and you won't, and I'm sure in fifteen years we'll get thoughtful think pieces from some journalist about how the humanities are so important to leadership.
Apparently the Torah doesn't explain the concept of load-bearing wall.
That story is so deliciously bonkers. It's still not clear why they dug the tunnel in the first place.
Also every Jewish person's reaction has been "oh, Chabad? Sounds about right."
I hadn't really appreciated the fuckedness until I saw the videos here. Which don't even show the tunnel.
Penn State's State College campus is definitely the flagship. I knew people who did two years at the local PSU campus followed by two years at main. Pitt main can be seen as a flagship of a smaller, separate system. But yes, the real state schools (not just the "state related" ones)--which merged universities, not just campuses, as J, Robot's essay also mentions--don't have a true flagship. It'd seem redundant with PSU, though.
97: the irrepressible urge of dudes building unauthorized, unstable tunnels in urban areas. Because they can.
96: basically AIUI the faction which physically controls the property isn't the one who legally owns it, and the occupants wanted to expand. So they can't build an extension or buy the building next door or anything. Nothing left to do but tunnelling.
The linked report is great and reminds me very much of the Times of India's political coverage - that general feeling of "here are people about whom you know nothing, doing very unusual and dangerous things described in a rather specialist vocabulary, for extremely strong motives which you do not share".
The cop-who-is-clearly-too-Italian-for-all-of-this serves as the stand-in for all outsiders.
I've seen a couple of tweets (one from Felix Gilman) characterizing the cop as a harried Roman centurion trying to adjudicate disputes he doesn't understand or care about in first century Palestine. Nothing changes.
99: Penn State isn't part of the state higher ed system (the PASSHE schools -- think Slippery Rock, California), but its own state-supported thing. Definitely main campus is the closest to a "flagship" but Penn State is a weird private-public partnership.
Pitt is more private than Penn State, but still state related.
103, 104: It appears both are now part of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education along with Temple and Lincoln. All but PSU were private before the 60s while PSU came in later from being more state-controlled.
There's Chabad-Lubavich stuff near me. Should I get a structural engineer on retainer?
There's Chabad stuff near everyone. Don't worry about it.
basically AIUI the faction which physically controls the property isn't the one who legally owns it, and the occupants wanted to expand. So they can't build an extension or buy the building next door or anything. Nothing left to do but tunnelling.
This is part of it, but the story is much weirder and it's not really clear to me who owns what in what sense. Chabad in some sense owns most or all of the surrounding buildings as well. Also one of the factions (the one that dug the tunnel) believes that the Rebbe who has been dead for thirty years is the literal Messiah and is either coming back or is still alive somehow. The other faction doesn't explicitly believe that but also hasn't chosen a new Rebbe, again, in thirty years.
It's probably hard to find someone because Millennials don't want to work hard.
I've seen a couple of tweets (one from Felix Gilman) characterizing the cop as a harried Roman centurion trying to adjudicate disputes he doesn't understand or care about in first century Palestine. Nothing changes.
Indeed, I think in a lot of ways Chabad is similar to Christianity in its very early years.
The weirdness of Chabad often gets obscured because it's by far the largest and best-known Hasidic group, but it is actually very weird for a Hasidic group to go this long without a Rebbe. Hasidism is a very charismatic and leader-oriented movement and there's a whole huge folkore about the various Rebbes. The Rebbe is a very important figure!
You can however see how a movement like that would tend toward messianism.
Has anyone mentioned Jesus to them?
It's interesting to compare Chabad and Mormonism, where as far as I can tell in the former case the leader was a true believer and who in at least some sense did think he was the messiah, and in the latter case the leader is clearly a scammer. For Christianity, who knows which model is closer, or if it's some completely different scenario.
Mormonism is the most American religion.
108: this is what state mine subsidence insurance is for. You're fine until they break into the abandoned mine under the neighborhood.
We did just buy that insurance last year.
|| There was a discussion a while ago about phonics and balanced literacy. There was an interesting article in the Globe this morning which suggested that some really well off school districts were actually doing a bad job teaching reading because of balanced literacy. The well off kids were doing ok because of parental involvement and tutoring, but the minoritized and kids w/disabilities were actually performing worse than in some "less desirable" districts. I bet once you know how to read, those districts have a ton of opportunities, though.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/10/metro/reading-skills-top-ranked-ma-schools/
|>
The Phonics planted colonies, one of which later became Carthage.
Someone on Bluesky made the joke "Torah Bora."
I feel like I don't understand the basic architecture. Why does busting down a wall help prevent a tunnel from being filled in?
I think the tunnel was to get access to the building, so knocking a hole in the wall does the exact same thing once you're discovered so hiding won't work. Except to the extent that the walls hold up the roof .
I thought the wall-breaking was for easier access to the hole? But yeah, at this point I feel like I understand everything except the actual hole.
My understanding is that "tunnel" is a misnomer, and they're trying to expand the building and that involved digging and eventually making the hole bigger?
This thread has a lot:
https://x.com/kilovh/status/1744884820780397015
I just hope at some point someone said, "It would be irresponsible not to swing a sledgehammer at the wall which is holding up the roof above us."
Is it irresponsible to excavate?
"Let's just do it and be legends, man,"
Part of the deal is that the synagogue is in the basement of the building, so the "tunnel" is actually at the same level as the walls, not below them. The thread in 128 is good and I was just going to link it myself. It includes a map showing the adjacent buildings (also Chabad-affiliated) that they appear to have been trying to connect to.
I assumed it was something weird with the pseudo-power lines they run that count as being inside or whatever (Eruv) but I think that's the wrong scale.
I was very confused when I first heard about this because it was in the context of some random NY guy pointing to previous posts where he claimed he heard Hebrew coming from underground and he said "see I'm not crazy!" (I think it was all a joke and he doesn't actually live near there.)
I guess because I'm not on Xitter but the link in 44 takes me to one tweet, not to a thread, and I don't know how to get to the thread.
It's only possible to link to a single tweet; scroll up or down to see the rest of the thread.
135: I think post-Musk, if you're logged out, you can sometimes see tweets but not the threads they're part of.
Just realized how appropriate it is that the guy's name is kind of synonymous with pissing all over stuff to let people know how important you are.
133.last: I forget what that guy's screen name was, but I'm pretty sure it was a joke too.
136 is right. I can also click over to the poster's home/profile page, whatever that's called, and see other tweets, but oddly the linked tweet doesn't even show up there, much less the whole thread. No matter.
Copy and paste the x.com URL and then replace "x.com" with "nitter.net". Somehow the elongated muskrat hasn't been able to keep that site from reformatting things to work better.
At some point in the past year, profile pages were changed to show logged out users the 10 most popular posts the user had posted.
"at this point I feel like I understand everything except the actual hole."
I feel that the only thing I do understand is the actual hole and that's probably because I've got it wrong.
||
Attn (especially) Doug:
https://eurasianet.org/memoir-clinching-the-baku-ceyhan-pipeline
|>
I was very confused when I first heard about this because it was in the context of some random NY guy pointing to previous posts where he claimed he heard Hebrew coming from underground and he said "see I'm not crazy!" (I think it was all a joke and he doesn't actually live near there.)
Maybe I'm being too cynical - I remember that "Rich Pratt" and "Butch Otter" both turned out to be real American men - but I'm sceptical that "Dick Strocher" actually exists.
Finally just read The Yiddish Policemen's Union last week and am amused that some key plot elements involve Hasidic sects and secret tunnels.
(I found the book entertaining enough, but overall pretty meh.)
140: Thank you FA, nitter worked and it was an interesting thread.
OT: My father-in-law is now "accuse nurses of things" years old.
He has a very ill friend in The Villages who emails him stuff daily. I think if that guy dies, it might get better.
There is a running theme among some of my friends where their dads are growing senile and are not wealthy, and in particular cannot afford the kind of nursing home that allows them to boss women around in this kind of 1950s Fox News senile brain way that they expect to be able to.
My father-in-law is wealthy. His friend is really wealthy.
My father-in-law is now "accuse nurses of things" years old.
I have been this old for years, but that's just because I've known too many nurses, like Westley with Spaniards.
From a friend (VERY long):
The first thing to know is that the synagogue is 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. It is not some large New York suburban synagogue that will be hosting the Schechter bat mitzvah this weekend while the sisterhood is scheduling its performance of Cats. 770 is the hub of large and influential Chasidic movement known by the acronym Chabad which stands for Chochma, Binnah, Daat or Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge.
Chabad is simultaneously a network, a set of organizations, and religious ideology that is at the center of the Lubavitch Chasidic community. After fleeing Europe, the leaders of that community settled in Crown Heights (my family played a small roll in all of that) and purchased the home at 770 Eastern Parkway. From then on the building was associated with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who by the early 1950s had become the Rebbe--or the central spiritual leader of Chabad Lubavitch. He was a very learned charismatic figure whose reach and influence were enormous. I was taken to see him at 770 when I was 5, but I don't think that proved to be a pivotal moment in his story.
The Rebbe, as he was commonly known, focused his thinking on the coming of the messiah (moshiach) and how, in the wake of the Shoah, that might happen. The long standing idea that moshiach would reveal himself at the darkest of moments effectively died in the ovens, and so many were rethinking how and when moshiach would reveal himself. The Rebbe devoted Chabad Lubavitch to increasing the number of religious acts Jews performed in the belief that it was up to us to make the world ready for moshiach. The Rebbe's was an active philosophy that deemphasized passive waiting and hoping and stressed taking action--literally.
Chabad Lubavitch men and women took it upon themselves to reach out to the less religious to urge and facilitate greater religious practice. Lighting a candle, putting on tefillin, saying a blessing--these all were tiny acts that cumulatively could bring on moshiach--and best of all, there was no way to know which tiny act--which stopped passerby--might be the moment that tips the scales and brings on the ultimate redemption. These were (and are) big high stakes cosmic issues and people take them very seriously.
All of this made Chabad Lubavitch a unique entity in the Chasidic world--outward focused and engaged whereas most communities tend to be inward looking and isolationist. It also led to there being lots of new adherents--people who were not raised in a Lubavitch home or had a Lubavitch ancestry, but nevertheless adopted the Chabad belief system and way of life. This has added a unique dynamism to this Chasidic community.
By the late 1980s, the rebbe was aging and a lot of the people with memories of Europe were passing. The community at large was becoming younger as people started large families. New adherents also swelled the ranks. The Rebbe's call for outreach also led to a global network of Chabad synagogues started by his "emissaries" (schlichim) who in many cases he charged personally to start a community and facilitate the increase of religious acts. These people became a sort of elite within the larger community--some approached rockstar status as they raised huge sums and build magnificent shuls for large and thriving communities. The Chabad network encompassed schools, publishing houses, meat processing plants--everything needed to live a Chasidic life. It was and is a huge and complicated enterprise with global reach. And all of it centered on 770 Eastern Parkway, the spiritual center of this whole movement.
As the Rebbe got older, some of his followers--many of them young men--began to speculate that he was himself moshiach. In their view, he had already fulfilled many of the requirements of moshiach--all that was needed was for him to reveal himself as moshiach and then bring on the next phase of the final redemption. There was never a real consensus about this issue, but there was at least no harm him wanting the Rebbe to be moshiach--it is not even a particularly rare or uncommon belief. Adherents tend to see their spiritual leader as being the best there is--the leader of the generation--this was no different.
The campaign to declare the Rebbe as moshiach took on some new edges though. One was the proliferation of posters around New York hailing the Rebbe as Moshiach. There also acts by Lubavitch religious courts calling for the Rebbe to reveal himself as Moshiach. These rested in the idea that the rulings of earthly courts are mirrored by the heavenly court, so in other words, an earthly decree was an attempt to jumpstart the heavenly process.
As the Rebbe's stature grew and an increasing number of young adherents--many of them Israelis who had come to Crown Heights to be near the Rebbe and study--the physical significance of 770 (as it is commonly called) grew. If the Rebbe was moshiach, and this was his synagogue, then 770 was one the holiest places on earth--a sort of proto-temple until moshiach rebuilt the one in Jerusalem. When the Rebbe had called for the building to be expanded years earlier the young men immediately began hammering away at the basement walls to grow into the next building--that is in fact where the main shul is today.
Expanding 770 was a physical metaphor for the coming of moshiach. Emissaries in other parts of the world build their new synagogues and schools as copies of 770 and you can see copies everywhere from Israel to Milan to Charlottesville. Images of 770 adorn posters, tallis bags, and wall art. The building and its image itself came to be associated with the coming of moshiach.
Of course at the same time, 770 was and is a bit of Brooklyn real estate that has a legal owner. That is part of the problem. When the Rebbe passed away in 1994 those who saw him as moshiach had a problem. He had left the world without revealing himself as moshiach and had not completed the acts of the ultimate redemption. That placed the followers at a crossroad. Either they had been wrong all along, or they had been right but the timing was wrong for the Rebbe to reveal himself, or something else altogether was going on. There were advocates for all of their views and more.
770 though took on even more significance. When a group of followers dedicated a stone plaque commemorating the Rebbe's life and work, the most fanatical of his followers smashed it to pieces. These "mishchitzim" (messiah-ists) felt that even though the Rebbe was gone, to publicly declare him dead in the human sense was an afront, so they smashed the stone. The meshchitizm had already adopted a new prayer hailing the Rebbe as moshiach and worked it into regular prayers--something that did not please everyone. An iconography grew that included the moshiach prayer "yechi adoneinu, morenu ve'rabbeinu, melech ha'moshiach leyolam va'ed" written on the base of their yarmulkes and a yellow flag with a big blue crown became their banner.
These young men became a dominant force in 770 where their presence and singing was everywhere. Enthusiastic as they were, they nevertheless did not actually own 770--they loved the place, revered it even, and centered their lives and religious practice on it, but they did not control it.
The title has been held by an internal corporate entity that is part the larger Chabad Lubavitch network. There have been physical conflicts in 770 before about the meshchitzim and their demands. On occasion brawls have erupted when someone wanted to take down a mochiach banner their might have thought went to far. Of late, some of the young men have been demanding that that corporation expand 770 again. In his lifetime, the Rebbe had called for the building to be expanded on some meshchitzim see his word as essentially an almost divine commandment. If the Rebbe had wanted the building expanded, why is that not happening and who is stopping it from happening? This all is something that is as much a spiritual request as it is a home improvement project.
Chabad Lubavitch owns many of the buildings in the area and the young men wanted to expand into a disused building nearby. The corporation though was not acting on these demands.
So at some point a few months ago, the young men took it upon themselves to do the work. The dug tunnels to the other building in an act that was as much about bringing on moshiach as it was about making a bigger study hall--it is not possible to separate these sorts of acts. People heard the tunneling and the digging and were alarmed, and the diggers also paid no attention to which walls were load-bearing, so the whole project was an architectural nightmare and a disaster waiting to happen.
The city came in the other day with cement trucks planning to fill in the holes and stop any further damage. The young men though rioted in response and started running into the tunnels. Others started fighting with the police. Most were Israelis and are more accustomed to fighting police than are Americans--in fact, the whole thing looked like any number of haredi riots and police clashes that have become common in Israel over the past decade or so. The young men started tearing apart the shul, throwing benches around, and--for some reason--tearing down the iconic paneling that defines 770's décor. 12 of the young men were arrested when it all was over.
All of this is part of a long term conflict between different factions within a devoted religious community whose members all see this building as being of great importance.
So, when a man stops me on the street asking "Would you like to do a mitzvah?", I'm responding to a vast tradition when I reply "I bat for the other team, but thanks for asking"?
Also, thanks for all the detail. I only knew bits of that story.
VW, are the 1st person bits in 152 you, or your friend?
My friend. I probably should have put the whole thing in italics. If my oversight means I can no longer be president of Harvard, that's another dream dead. Oh well.
The panelling may be iconic but it looks really cheap. Is it veneer? Really they should have had it redone anyway.
Wikipedia says at the header for Chabad:
Unlike most Haredi groups, which are self-segregating, Chabad mainly operates in the wider world and it caters to secularized Jews.
Then further down:
Followers of Chabad can be seen attending to tefillin booths at the Western Wall and Ben Gurion International Airport as well as other public places and distributing Shabbat candles on Fridays. Chabad rabbis and their families are sent to various major cities around the globe, to teach college students, build day schools, and create youth camps. Many of these efforts are geared towards secular or less religious Jews. Additionally, unmarried rabbinical students spend weeks during the summer in locations that do not yet have a permanent Chabad presence, making housecalls, putting up mezuzot and teaching about Judaism.
So, not so much "caters to" as "tries to recruit", I guess.
It's both, really. They do provide a lot of services that can be hard to find in areas with small Jewish populations, so a lot of Jews who don't buy their whole weird ideology interface with them for specific reasons. We've gotten calendars from the one here, for example. They often do public events like Chanukah festivals that plenty of less-observant Jews also attend. They're also often the only synagogue option for people who want a more traditional service, so a lot of people attend who would belong to a Conservative or modern Orthodox synagogue in a bigger city. Also their High Holy Day services are free, unlike most other synagogues. It's a weird mix.
Isn't paying for high holy days kind of central to Judaism?
They're the only people here in Heebieville, so I make awkward small talk once a year at the menorah lighting on the town square.
Would you like me to try to steal the giant menorah on the top of someone's minivan and sent it to you?
As in, you take your sheep to the temple for sacrifice and the temple takes, as it were, a cut?
160, 164: Sure, at one point, but that hasn't been practical for 1,954 years.
And one year a bit before that, Jesus thrashed a bunch of people for it.
Religion is all about impractical traditions.
Nobody thought that after I turned over the bake sale table.
Bakesale loans? Talk about late-stage capitalism.
Got to finance the Air Force somehow.