If you read the article, you’ll see that the universities in question have already, voluntarily, given partial refunds to students prior to these lawsuits.
The lawsuits are demanding even more refunds while the students still want to collect the remote education. If the Universities were faced with this decision up front, it would have been better for them to furlough all employees and simply delay education until after Coronavirus.
Instead, they made the best of the situation and tried to do right by the students as best they could within the financial, legal, and ethical constraints of Coronavirus. In my opinion, it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate (which I suspect may be happening already in some cases). We’re all making compromises under the circumstances.
I’d be more sympathetic if these students were requesting to defer their education until after Coronavirus and were willing to forgo all education and credits in the mean time. Demanding both the education and a refund isn’t exactly fair.
Universities have a variety of tools they use to lock-in students. If the universities gave students the ability to take the semester off and get a refund before it started your argument would be strengthened. Most universities did not offer that option (if any).
When you build an org with a massive cost structure, you cannot survive big risks. We are seeing it playout in a number of markets, but education is about to be changed forever
it's not reasonable to expect students to pay for the costs of operating a university when all they receive is a glorified khan academy experience.
I think it depends on the endowment. If the University in fact has a lot of money, then I think they _should_ be operating at a loss while taking advantage of their cushion. But yeah for the majority of universities not in that situation I do agree with you.
I highly doubt that these universities have offered even close to a 5/6th refund to their students.
It's not fantastic in that the courses vary wildly in quality, are mostly taught by teaching assistants, can require 20 or more hours of (busy-ish depending on course) work per week, and just like undergrad, you will struggle and be forced to teach yourself the material instead of being taught a significant portion of the time. Usually the textbook is much more informative than the lecture; your life is better if you own many textbooks on the subject since often the lecture information density and coherence is poor.
What I'm saying is, the course lectures are pretty mediocre for ~40% of offered courses. OMSCS is valuable because it's cheap and prestigious, not because the instruction is high-quality. It's great for self-starters, auto-didacts, and hard-workers with background in the subjects (admittedly, most students from decent engineering schools will qualify).
The alternative is graduating 6-figures in debt, and having missed out on all the benefits of on-campus learning.
Give us some specifics to discuss. Because while almost everyone agrees administration needs to be trimmed, if everyone just wants to keep the ones they think are important and there's not much overlap, then there's clearly no way to do this.
Same as when people say "government should stop spending on useless things, government should be smaller and trim the fat / pork barrel spending". Yeah of course when you put it that way, who wouldn't agree with that. But when you get specific, "government should reduce veteran's benefits, national parks, border security, obesity research, food stamps, etc." well that's when it's not so easy.
And you'll see that this is effective, because now when you ask those more specific questions, there are potentially good discussions.
Like "Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant" and someone might wonder if it makes sense (based on your proposed structure) for the Dean of Athletics to be handling rape cases, and whether they have the expertise to deal with the federal regulations that come with Title IX.
Or "Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college?" and someone might wonder why it makes sense for someone responsible for undergraduate education (which might not involve research in some universities) to handle grants, which is usually related to graduate education and research (and in many fields, don't involve students at all).
Or "administrators in admissions ought to be handling [diversity and inclusion]" and someone might wonder if there should not be someone also responsible for diversity and inclusion in faculty/staff/administrator hiring, or in campus policies around inclusion (like accessibility services), which are post-admissions.
Administrators in admissions handle diversity and inclusion for students. Whoever is already in charge of hiring faculty/staff should also be handling diversity and inclusion there as well.
I get that specialists are needed at times, and having one person (or group of persons) can help in getting a singular focus and consistent strategy. But there's nothing wrong with people wearing multiple hats in a job and communicating with peers as they do so.
There also can't be a discussion of which adminstrators to let go until we are talking about specifics. Each University will have different circumstances, priorities, problems and budgets, and each individual adminstrator will have their own skills, expertises, and abilities to handle certain workloads. What changes Harvard would make are going to be different than the changes Notre Dame would make. That's why you can't have those specific "which administrators" conversations. It's not because we can't decide whether to cut administrators in charge of diversity or administrators in charge of athletics. Any given administrator can have multiple roles. They don't need to specialize in one. Which grouping of roles occurs will be determined by a very specific set of circumstances for a given University and its people, which is going to depend on knowledge that neither you nor I have.
A student's behaviour can generally get them kicked out of a university, despite not being convicted by a court of law. Just like you can be fired from your job, without a jury-of-twelve-peers conviction, if you've broken your employer's code of conduct.
So, no, the dean's job in this case is to not to simply grep through the list of state felons, and match them against the student roster. There's broader discretion in the kind of censure that private individuals need to apply, that does not begin and end at the courts.
Among other reasons: It takes an entire team to manage the lifecycle of grants, it's too much work for a single person to accomplish. In addition to the work needed to apply for a grant, there is also mandatory reporting and compliance to that needs to be completed. Additionally, a dean doesn't have the capacity to bind the entire university to the terms of a grant (nor the awareness to safely do so), so you run into problems with interdisciplinary research, which is increasingly encouraged.
Same with government. Government waste is bad? Of course! Trim unnecessary government spending and pork barrel? Yes!! And which branches and positions should we cut? The Right Ones!! [cue nothing actually happens]
Shut off the money first. Some of the universities will make their cuts in academic and research departments. That's fine. I don't expect we'll hear too much from them after a while. Good riddance.
For a start, let's cut any administrator that was not considered needed for the proper running of a university 30 years ago. So we can start with the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion and tech transfer. You can probably also get rid of most of the administrators administering grants, athletics, and title IX.
Give us some specifics to discuss. Because while almost everyone agrees administration needs to be trimmed, if everyone just wants to keep the ones they think are important and there's not much overlap, then there's clearly no way to do this.
The argument, "We can't cut anyone if we can't all agree on who to cut" is a recipe for, "We will cut everyone after we go bankrupt." Those bankruptcies are already starting. And before COVID-19 is over, plenty of universities that can't figure out how to do layoffs of administrators are going to have to do just that.
Education has been on an unsustainable path for decades. It is widely recognized that it is unsustainable. As Stein's law says, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." But before we get there we get to see the truth of Stanisford's corollaries, "It will go on a lot longer than we think" and "It will end badly when it does stop."
It has gone on a lot longer than I thought it could 20 years ago. However COVID-19 has changed the equation enough to end business as usual, and now we get to see how bad the ending is. The more that administrators cling to keeping business as usual, the worse that they will make things for themselves.
What makes you so sure universities were sufficiently well-run 30 years ago? And what makes you so sure other people agree with you?
Nobody is suggesting that universities were perfect 30-40-50 years ago. But... the parents of millenials seemed to thoroughly enjoy college back then, so they couldn't have been run that badly.
On top of that, when I compare my undergrad experience, 20 years ago, to that of my nieces and nephews attending today (or cousins who attended 10 years before me), I fail to find substantive differences.
Sure, there is a general trend that cafeteria food has improved (or, at least, schools brag about it more), and dorms are a little fancier, but how does that justify the administrative bloat?
Going from that point to this, the cost of university has more than tripled in real dollars. A significant portion of that change is increases in money spent to administrators. It seems absurd that anyone would think that the education received today is worth over triple the education received 30 years ago.
I know, as a parent, given the choice I would cheerfully prefer to pay for my kids to get the university experience that I received and have no debt than I would have them get stifling loans for the modern university experience and start their lives in debt. I know very few parents that disagree with me on that.
If the comparisons were fair, then I would expect to see university administrators switching back and forth to industry, with salaries going up and down, and for them to offer reasons both ways as to why they did so. That expectation is based on what we actually DO see happen with professors in employable subjects like computer science and engineering. However we DON'T see it happen administrators.
I therefore conclude that administrators are worth less to industry than they think they should be. Which fits with my opinion that they are worth less to education than their pay suggests. And fits with my further opinion that the current growth in number and salary of university administrators is unsustainable and is a luxury that our society cannot afford. Particularly the part of our society that is university graduates with crushing loan debt - which are the people who paid for those administrators and did not receive sufficient benefit from it for the debts that they bear.
It comes down to the amount of the refund. Students are still receiving something online, but less than they'd receive in person, both in quality of education (e.g. no chemistry labs) and everything else that physical attendance comes with. Arguing for a higher discount factor seems fine to me, and probably depends on the amount the college has already agreed to.
I feel its not reasonable to ask students to pay more than fair market value for what they receive regardless of operational costs. They should refund up to what similar online schools charge today.
If it costs the auto dealer as much as a new BMW to deliver a used Toyota, that isn't my problem I'm only paying used Toyota pricing or I'm taking the matter to court.