West Virginia University to drop 32 majors including all world language programs

I'm not sure that's true. The US system is staggeringly wasteful, partly because there are 50 states and thousands of school districts all making out that they are unique and different and need to find their own ways of doing things (a critique which could be leveled at the US more generally). This is an invitation to corruption and endless politicking.

Amid all the various studies and reports and education manifestos, you know what I never hear? Of policies derived from surveying students about what they think and what does or does not work for them. Generally when I bring this point up it gets dismissed with some variation of 'students will just ask for more time off and less work and standards will crumble' which I don't think has any basis in fact.

I suspect it's far more difficult to recruit Computer Science PhDs who will work at these prices, so they probably have to rely on more expensive full-time, tenure-track faculty who likely are paid more than their peers. If you're passionate about teaching or your area of research, you'll probably cope with the lower pay - but that greatly narrows the pool of applicants, especially when FAANGs will pay you 5x more to work for them.

But if your ratio of professors to students is poor, your department is going to be a money drain even if its demand in salaries and facilities is low.

This is a consideration, but for WV residents it is better to have a mediocre program with in-state tuition than no program and this will eventually affect the WV economy as a whole..

There's a short term logic in shutting down everything that isn't competitive to attract out of state students, but the resulting function of the public system wont fulfill any of the goals of a state system.

For teaching you want better understanding than just learning it with self-study and probably for some pedagogy included in the degree.

1. Teach Chinese

2. Translation and interpretation

3. Dual degree with any number of degrees (e.g., business, art, etc.) that have natural pairings due to demands in the labor market (although not sure how much demand in West Virginia specifically).

On a more real but anecdotal note, I know many language majors who have moved to the/a target language country for a year or more after graduation, and they learned more about what types of bilingual jobs were available. That led them to either get a job in one of those areas or skill up in some way (typically going back to school) to get the skills and/or credentials they needed to get the job they wanted.

On a personal note, even though I wasn’t a Japanese major, I went to Japan after college to learn Japanese better. My idea was to learn Japanese and become an “international lawyer” with a focus on Japan.

I met a few folks who did that exact job in Japan, and most of them were miserable. Needless to say, I changed the direction of my career.

The problem is that, in practice, tiny majors use of very few resources for non-service courses. As a result, the savings from cutting the major are much lower than expected and realizing those savings requires gutting the departments service capacity as well.

Plus you lose all your half decent faculty — and especially the ones who aren’t already senile and/or retired in place.

Usually, if you really do need the service courses, it is better to keep the major but adjust compensation and resource allocation for under-subscribed upper division courses. See math departments as a case study.

Great call out on Acting, I needed to be more specific.

As you can see here: https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/28d9f865-8d36-4e55-a4d0-475c...

BFA Acting is unimpacted but MFA Acting is being eliminated.

You have to really like academia to go into a role like that.

Especially when you can make so much more om money in the private sector.

WVU's MFA program doesn't even rate and I don't think has a single notable alumni among them.

More to your point though: who in their right mind wants tenure after doing a useful PhD in math?

Math phds can be extremely remunerative if you focus on studying useful topics, avoid abstract nonsense, pick up domain knowledge, and stay the heck away from low paying teaching jobs like “professor” and “instructor”. Finance, biotech, and tech all pay good math phds comparable to or better than big tech pays mediocre CS phds. Mid six to low seven.

It’s a surprisingly low bar, since most math phds are incredibly romantic about choice of research area.

1. We can't afford the expert we need forever so we consult temporarily. Like major IT infrastructure. Colleges and universities tend to not attract the massively high quality tech workers that private industry does.

2. We know what is wrong, but internal politics or external politics keep us from saying and doing things we need to do. In this instance, consultants come in to tell us what we already know, but lets managers avoid responsibility for damaging relationships/politics.

3. We got a grant. Let's spend it on consultants because the prof that wrote it left last semester and his "notes" are like the necronomicon.

I usually work with number 2 when I consult (there is a Midwest school that still refers to me as the grim reaper because of all the firings that happened after I completed my findings report). But I would argue that number 1 is more common, in my experience.

As part of that, they can put in requirements for consultant staff, require proposals show time allotment for staff and tie billing to hours actually put in.

So if you hired a consultant and got nothing but fresh out of university know nothings its because you did it on purpose, or you are inept both at writing RFPs and also evaluating proposals, and maybe at managing consultants as well.

That being said, most of the time, outside of a few cases where the expertise is hard to find anywhere and you literally cannot find it outside of consultants, I'm of the opinion that the money spent on consultants would be better spent building that specialty knowledge in house.

You pay the consulting firm ~ 1 million, they confirm what you already know, "these 32 programs are costing the University 10 million or whatever a year with few enrollments. The only logical thing to do is to close those programs and reallocate those funds." You, as the president, hide behind a report from an independent third party but still get to make the correct but unpopular opinion to cut bloat.

> Alsop says that revenues will decrease over the next 4-5 years ‘given the demographic cliff’.

Exaggerating for conciseness: I put in a good 20 minutes. Got left with a dizzied feeling of a gish gallop or perhaps motte and bailey, repeated.

The only helpful part was the end, where they clearly implicate one person and identify the problem as pushing for growth in 2014, failing to recognize it had failed and pivot after realizing shrinking was actually the trend line. None of this required any of the rest.

The rest seemed to fall into:

1. Leadership should have looked at $SMALL_SET_OF_COMPARABLE_INSTANCES projections to identify their projections must be wrong.

2. $SMALL_SET_OF_COMPARABLE_INSTANCES had a smaller shortfall[2].

3. Confusing long segments recounting slight differences in statements made multiple months apart. [3]

[2] Ended up closing it once it felt like #2 had several repetitions in a row, it doesn't matter if there's a smaller shortfall somewhere else, shortfalls add up to a shortfall.

[3] for example, lengthy recountings of Official $X said 2025 is where the real trouble is, but they also said next 5 years are important, and birth data shows 2006 was the start of a new era of lows, and 2006 + 18 = 2024.

Also, if we look at graduate enrollments for WVU they are at best flat with some programs ascending and some declining. Notably, and this is a national trend, M.S. degrees are growing in popularity and M.A. degrees are declining in popularity. The recommended program closures are almost all in the humanities and so this is all in alignment.

The administration and colleges in general could probably do better at pointing out how many programs they have opened over the past decade as it would probably be a similar number. Generally colleges and universities are bad about this type of messaging because they do not have to do it very often.

> WVU produced $102,684,423 in revenue, which was a decrease from the $110.5 million produced by the department the previous year. However, it was still more than enough to cover the program’s $91,807,281 in expenses.

https://wvmetronews.com/2019/08/12/west-virginia-ranked-37th...

Football isn't broken out here, but it generally subsidizes other sports, so if you wipe out the football program, you aren't going to help the deficit.

I am betting on LLM against "humanities"

I’m an engineer, I work with engineers. As a profession, we tend to lack EQ and real understanding of social issues.

A lot of the bad decisions that have had an outsized impact on society were naive decisions made by tech companies out of that ignorance.

"Your men thought so hard about if they could they never stopped to think about if they should!"

Money is the root of all evil! Specifically, money is means where whatever evil was done to achieve some amassing of "wealth", once converted successfully into "money" it is washed of its sins and passed onward to successive generations with no exposure. This is a core of money combined with the limited liability corporation, the other major sociopath-washing mechanism of capitalism.

Examples:

- southern chattel slavery

- oil/gas earnings with global warming

- cigarette industry

- prohibition-era criminal organizations, or really any outright organized criminals that manage to launder their money successfully

- Chinese and Russian oligarchs exfiltrating their fortunes to the West

The core component to the concept of money at the level of the elite is ethical and moral laundering.

Then there is just simple stuff like ordering a product off a Chinese or Japanese site without an English translation. Increasingly they are just machine translating their product descriptions themselves, but it wouldn't be economical to have a human do that for thousands of SKUs.

For example, compared to Western languages, Chinese has very little grammar and words that are more ambiguous and with several meanings. This translates to a way of thinking that is more fuzzy, holistic, and high level, relying more on connections (intuitively, when you don't have grammatical constructs telling you the connection between things, you are forced to seek/guess it by yourself)

As a native German speaker I, for example, for consider thinking in German (regarding the case system that is deeply ingrained into this language) very much like thinking about types in a type system in a programming language; you have to pass an object [pun intended] of the correct type (genus) to a function/predicate so that the code compiles/the sentence is grammatically correct.

This kind of thinking does not work in English because of its different grammatical structure.

Another example: it is very common in German to analyze words part by part to find "sometimes hidden meanings"). Just one trivial example: "entschweben" [to waft away]: if you analyze the construction of this verb, you see that this is the verb "schweben" [to hover] that is modified with a prefix "ent-" that changes its meaning. This prefix thus works like some higher-order function that modifies the functionality of some existing function (in programming) - or in the given case of language, the meaning of a verb. So, one can really say that how I, as a native German speaker, think about my native language daily often corresponds to quite non-trivial programming concepts.

When I attempted a similar analysis of English words to English native speakers, they soon cut me off and explained to me that "this kind of analysis is not how English works or how English native speakers think about their language".

Unfortunately no. If you speak two languages natively you know how hard translating can be unless you have training.

We are nowhere close to a proper universal translator. Simply transcribing words from one language to another is lossy.

Those aren’t being developed for most languages of the world, only the fairly large languages where corporations see financial interest. Moreover, due to poverty or censorship that has hindered publication of books and internet content in most languages, most languages do not have a sizeable electronic corpus with which to train MT.

The OP is right, anyone active in this field knows that your MT dream would actually result in massive language loss, as bilingual users of MT technology feel forced to switch from their mother tongue to the regionally powerful language in order to access that MT technology.