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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

These degrees are not impacted:

Music; Music Business and Industry; Music Education; Music Therapy; Conducting; Acting; Dance; Musical Theatre; Theatre Design and Technology; Wildlife and Fisheries Resources; Natural Resources Science; Genetics and Developmental Biology; Plant and Soil Sciences; Natural Resource Economics; Women’s and Gender Studies; Philosophy; Health Services and Outcomes Research; Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences; Epidemiology; Social and Behavioral Sciences

These degrees are remaining with reduced staff:

Mining Engineering; Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering; Civil Engineering; Computer Engineering; Computer Science; Electrical Engineering; Software Engineering; Elementary Education; Literacy Education; Music Composition; Music Performance; Law; Agriculture; Design Studies; Fashion Design and Merchandising; Interior Architecture; Human and Community Development; Environmental, Soil, and Water Sciences; Chemistry; Communication Studies; English; Secondary Education; Professional Writing and Editing; Mathematics; Management; Human Resource Management; Communication Sciences and Disorders; Exercise Physiology; Health Informatics / Information Management; Human Performance and Health; Athletic Training; Occupational Therapy; Speech Language Pathology; Audiology; Physical Therapy; Pharmacy; Health Administration; Biostatistics

These degrees are remaining with reduced staff and getting merged together:

Theatre with Puppetry; Costume Design with Lighting Design with Scenic Design with Technical Direction; Energy Land Management with Environmental and Energy Resource Management; Forest Resource Management with Wood Science and Technology; Horticulture with Sustainable Food and Farming; Agribusiness Management with Environmental and Natural Resource Economics; Public Health with Health Services Management and Leadership

These degrees are remaining with reduced staff but with some specializations eliminated:

Art and Design; Art Education; Art and Design; Environmental Microbiology

These degrees are being eliminated entirely:

Biometric Systems Engineering; Higher Education Administration; Multicategorical Special Education; Art History; Jazz Studies; Jazz Pedagogy; Composition; Collaborative Piano; Acting; Environmental and Community Planning; Landscape Architecture; Recreation, Parks, and Tourism; Energy Environments; Resource Management; Creative Writing; MS/PhD Mathematics; Legal Studies; Public Administration; Chinese; French; German; Russian; Spanish; Linguistics; TESOL; Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences

---

Also note that these are just recommendations not final decisions yet.

View on HN

> Higher Education Administration

Not to make an obvious boring comment, but: someone was offering a college degree in this? Yeesh. Bloat begets bloat, I guess.

I guess maybe that's overly cynical. Post-secondary education is important, and it follows that we would want people to figure out how to best deliver it. But hard not to judge that, just a little bit.

> Not to make an obvious boring comment, but: someone was offering a college degree in [higher education administration]? Yeesh. Bloat begets bloat, I guess.

1. This is a graduate degree.

2. Part of the degree is doctorate type of stuff (research methodology). This content is definitely needed. The other part is stuff that is unique to universities, and it is all over the map — finance (including fund raising), policy, governance, student development, campus culture, etc.

You can’t just take a random professor or a random business person and expect them to be a good university administrator. It’s a topic worthy of research and study, imho.

All that said, many of the folks I know who majored in this field absolutely drink the kool-aid and are mostly full of shit. I personally think that’s due to the folks who are shaping the areas of discourse in this field (mostly in a very near-term sort of way that lacks vision) more than it being an issue of the field being fundamentally flawed itself.

I'm not surprised that such a degree is available and needed, but having it pop up in a list of programs of a random university is curious. Surely the need for such a degree is limited and those who would seek it out would be keen on obtaining it from an institution that isn't struggling.

indeed, the failures described in the article seem to only strengthen the case for better training school admins

> Surely the need for such a degree is limited and those who would seek it out would be keen on obtaining it from an institution that isn't struggling.

This is the flagship state school. It’s hardly some random school. If this program is not at this school in the state, it won’t be at any school.

If you’re not from the US, every state has a “flagship” state school. Some have a comparably strong second school that usually covers agriculture and engineering (these are the A&M schools).

West Virginia only has one major state school, and WVU is that school.

West Virginia has a smaller population than Dallas. I don't see why students can't go to another state to get their education.

Cost?

> I don't see why students can't go to another state to get their education.

As a non-american, I am baffled by this way of thinking. Higher education is supposed to be a way to ensure that a state is self-sufficient in terms of some core competencies by retaining a small number of workers specialized in compiling, developing, and sharing industry knowledge.

Is West Virginia so empoverished that they can't manage to support the two dozen or so teachers required to support an engineering degree?

As an American, I think freebee56's thinking is very rare - intellectually most people understand the situation as you do, and emotionally flagship state universities engender a strong sense of identity in graduates and state residents, in some states even for those who didn't attend it.

Out-of-state tuition costs for any public university are usually double what it costs for in-state students. It would seem short-sighted to deprive WV high school graduates of a solid public school where they can get in-state tuition rates.

Then WV can negotiate with other states to allow students to attend their universities, paying in-state tuition, with WV making up the difference. Students get better-funded schools, WV can negotiate good rates.

There are various regional associations to address this sort of issue. A college friend, a Virginia native, wanted to pursue a master's in library science, but Virginia did not offer one. North Carolina did, and so through one of those multi-state compacts, he went to UNC and paid in-state tuition.

We don't expect towns of 2000 people to support a high school. They go to a regional school - perhaps only one high school per county.

That is a very good point, I didn't even consider it was possible to do that whole "negotiate in-state tuition and make up the diff in funding by another state" approach. Thanks for bringing it up.

A similar example, one that I think no longer exists but did for a long time:

Tennessee is legally divided into Western, Middle, and Eastern Tennessee. There are a lot of rules in the state constitution that respect these Grand Divisions; IIRC an equal number of TN Supreme Court justices must be from each division, etc.

Anyway, the University of Tennessee is in Knoxville, which is in the Eastern Division (and a long way from Memphis). The University of Mississippi, in Oxford, is only about an hour and a half away from Memphis. For many years, students living in at least metro Memphis (and possibly most of Western Tennessee) could attend Ole Miss and pay in-state tuition - which is why in The Blind Side, the family were Ole Miss supporters. Memphis is the cultural capital of the Delta region, which covers parts of Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, and Ole Miss (though not in the Delta) was the natural flagship university for the area.

Tennessee just paid Mississippi for its students. It was cheaper than building another university that would only have attracted students from a relatively small portion of the state.

I worked at a university that offer a “PhD” in higher ed. administration. In theory I suppose nearly any field could be the valid subject of research. In practice, I saw this degree used to grant PhDs to existing administrators who didn’t already have PhDs. I’m guessing that this may be useful in gaming rankings.

It's also that someone working in higher ed, even if they're not an academic, needs a graduate degree to get the respect of the academics.

Often high school principal jobs, school district administrator and university jobs require a graduate degree, as a gatekeeping credential. This degree was likely created to capture that tuition money by offering the necessary employment credential for a relatively low level of academic effort.

There is a lot of theory and practical studies involved in running a school or university. Also, many schools will require their admin to have a background in school administration, which tracks like this one help develop.

School adminstration should be a sub study of MBA, they are mostly the same, or at least should be. Of course MBA programs deserve question too.

Suddenly everyone's an expert in Higher Education Administration, that thing they just learned about ten minutes ago.

Everyone wants to think they are special and thus different and better. Nobody is. You are all the evils of Trump / Stalin / slave owners but for minor differences of situation.

Maybe don’t judge it, then. At least not in such a condescending way. Especially since we need more people thinking deeply about how to make education work, not fewer.

Public schools have been growing the administrative side of the business for decades, getting more money than ever before per student and it seems children are learning less and less. That Doesn’t seem like the best track record for thinking deeply. They do get paid very well and in many states are allowed to retire early which insane pensions so maybe too much thinking on salaries and more attention to the students.

Might I suggest that if it’s a problem maybe it’s a good thing to have people study it more deeply?

Maybe,but it seems like a self perpetuating fraud of the taxpayers and students who are funding education costs growing faster than inflation to me.

If you are concerned about spiraling costs and the siloing of wealth in this country, let me suggest you look elsewhere. Students and educators ain’t it.

There are many different causes and all need to be addressed. Look over there is the refrain of people who want to hide their corruption.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/MAixm2zlg0vbz_OVY3D2I3QJen8=...

Yep, excellent list. I wonder where this state ranks in student outcomes???

https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/ct-st...

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/2-investigators-highest...

https://www.illinoisloop.org/salary.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/06/04/the...

Seems that the "educators" in Illinois are very wealthy.

Bloating administrations is one of the drivers in the cost of education. Throwing more people at the problem will just waste more money

Judgment is a good thing for society. These fictitious fields hurt the credibility of real fields of study. If you’re a doctor—or anyone else, but especially a doctor—you should be publicly, vociferously, and condescendingly judgmental towards homeopathy or chiropractic. It’s your obligation for the good of the public.

Education is also important — along with the administration of that education — so when people judge things they can do so from a standpoint of understanding and not from the standpoint of reactionary politics and uninformed gut takes. (Education is how doctors become doctors, after all.) Thoughtful and educated judgment born of understanding is good for society. Just clouding things with dumb opinions — or pure bullshit — helps no one.

If something is obviously not working, or doesn’t make sense, it’s important that the public be able to criticize it by reference to common sense and lived experience. Otherwise, you’re turning over the policing function entirely to the same people who are deeply invested in protecting the legitimacy of a field of inquiry.

Legitimate fields of study usually do not have trouble establishing their legitimacy to ordinary people. My undergraduate degree is in aerospace engineering. I’ve never had to argue from authority to get people to accept that’s a legitimate field that produces actionable facts.

Seems a little naive to believe engineers don’t make arguments from authority all the dang time…

The point is that they earned this authority, because their planes fly, whereas, for example, experts on childhood education cannot point to such obvious undeniable achievement that laypeople cannot reach.

We have too many administrators bloating up university budgets. In my experience, very few people involved in academia truly question it or ask how educational systems should be built from the ground up. They usually are the worst defenders of that system, since they're the ones who flourish in it most. I don't think anybody who works in academics is truly capable of thinking outside of it.

Academics hate administrators, but are too timid/selfish to coordinate with other academics across departmental lines to undermine the administrative body - not least because academics hate administration and don't have a good idea for how to deal with it.

Especially since we need more people thinking deeply about how to make education work, not fewer.

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.

Have you ever taught a class?

Yes, and the existence of difficult classes does not warrant the exclusion of learners' perspectives from policy decisions.

> Higher Education Administration

This is good as a first step. Better would be Higher Education Administration Administration, a PhD-level field dedicated to the theory and practice of administrating academic programs about higher education administration.

You can do this PhD any number of times, and each time adds another "Administration" at the end.

You comment this on a website which has weekly threads about "how I burned out switching from dev to management" or "How I started a small business on an island because the switch to management fucked up my life" threads.

“Acting” is both in “These degrees are not impacted” and “These degrees are being eliminated entirely”.

Looks like the former is about BFA Acting and the one recommended to be discontinued is MFA Acting, source: https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/28d9f865-8d36-4e55-a4d0-475c...

Acting is an interesting example. While it isnt an economicly good idea, a large percentage of successful actors do get their start there, paticularly make actors who generally "break" into the business at an older age than female actors. Jim Parsons is the classic example. He had a masters in theatre and was in his mid-30s before his breakout on the big bang theory. He became the highest-paid male actor on TV.

Compare Kaley Cuoco who broke at aged fifteen (Growing up Brady) and i do not believe ever finished traditional highschool.

Jim Parsons went to one of the top ten MFA Acting programs in the country. It's extremely competitive.

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

Well, one university cannot have a "top" program without some other universities having bottom or at least not-top programs. For excellent people to climb to the top of the pile, there has to be a pile of not-excellent on which to climb.

Knowing that why would you ever climb into the bottom of the pile?

Not everyone who takes acting classes wants to become an actor. I'm in the military and I can say that more military people should take acting classes. I've seen drill sergeants who are totally unable to fake being angry and so come out looking just crazy because they don't understand how to play a character, and generals who cannot make a simple speech without getting people angry for no reason. Even a bottom-of-the-pile acting class would help.

Improv classes is probably a better choice. It's still acting, but you're doing it on the fly, which is a lot more useful IMO than being able to prepare precanned lines.

It still requires you to warm up and do exercises, though.

There is a lot to recommend about regular acting as a life skill. It requires text analysis as well as understanding a wide array of people. It's deeply dependent on communicating abstract ideas.

Being able to come up with ideas quickly is great, but conventional acting is about considering deeply and exploring ideas together. The preparation for those "precanned" lines requires a ton of work, work that people don't understand or recognize, but they know when they connect with a performance, and it's all due to that preparation.

In short it's all those "soft skills" that techies both deride and bemoan the lack of.

It takes hours and hours of practice to do improvisation, especially at high level, and it can be deep exploration of ideas as well though long form improv shows.

It also requires you to observe and listen well.

Absolutely. I did not intend to demean improv, which is an incredibly useful skill and also great practice for a lot of analogous situations.

I just wanted to briefly defend conventional acting as well, which is poorly understood. (Partly by deliberate choice; actors do like to tell myths about their craft.) As both an actor and programmer myself, I find a number of overlapping skills.

I suspect a few classes at UCB theater or with the groundlings would be a more economical route to improv skills.

https://ucbcomedy.com/trainingcenter/course/#1-search=improv

Nevertheless, this doesn't sound sustainable for a university to fund programs for this limited purpose.

But then we're not talking about an MFA-level program are we...

I wonder how they did their selections. Some of the choices surprise me, such as reduction of staff on comp sci, software eng, electrical eng. I presume those departments would be where people want to go because of the big paying jobs.

Yeah was surprised to see Computer Science and some other 'hot fields' in the list of programs getting downsized as well, wonder if there just wasn't that much demand for these majors in this particular college?

Or perhaps there’s a competiting school that already covers those majors successfully.

Not in West Virginia…

Because despite all high paying jobs being in STEM or economics fields, the enrollment is actually dropping in those directions. And yes this is very confused by recovery from COVID, but the reality is that there was a dropping trend that started long before COVID, and today CS (or Math, or Physics, or economics for that matter) enrollment hasn't even recovered to the point it would have been at had the drop continued without COVID happening.

But yes last year we saw an increase, for obvious reasons, and the speed at which enrollment is currently dropping is lower than it was before COVID, but there's still less STEM graduates every year. Not just in the US, essentially everywhere.

On top of that young people are still running away from STEM degrees to liberal arts degrees of various kinds (but that doesn't work as well as you'd think because there's other problems there). Not even to all of liberal arts, just a few core directions.

I have a theory as to why: Most other departments get to enjoy the "PhD glut" allowing them to score candidates from top graduate programs and then pay them around $60K/year, and then filling things out by with adjunct professors who are often paid in the range of $1500-$4500 to teach a class for a semester. It's why it's not unheard of for adjunct profs to be on some form of welfare to make ends meet.

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.

I'm guessing it's more about the faculty being hard and/or expensive to retain for those majors.

For linguistics? I can't speak for the others, but I know that linguistics departments are pumping out a lot more PhDs than there are positions in the field. I expect that is true for all of them. Because these fields don't tend to bring in grant money, I expect professors can't demand rock star salaries.

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.

ChatGPT

is a result of comp sci, no?

Sure, but ChatGPT is magnifying developer productivity so demand for IT people will continue to decrease. Plus outsourcing. This is also consistent with the theme that more people are being pushed into the trades. Remove other technical options and you get more people learning to weld instead.

We don’t know about previous cuts, so it could be that unaffected programs were cut to the bone already. Also, they might not just be competitive in those programs to attract students and teachers needed to run them, so it’s better to focus on other things. Not every school can run a viable world class computer science program.

> Not every school can run a viable world class computer science program.

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.

>I wonder how they did their selections.

They published their methodology, the metrics driving discontinuation of programs and specialties were:

- Enrollment in the major/program (as of Fall 2022)

- Enrollment trends in the major/program over a five-year period (Fall 2018-Fall 2022)

The metrics for reducing headcount were:

- Student credit hour (SCH) production trend from AY 2020 to AY 2022

- Full-time faculty headcount and trend from 2020 to 2022

- Full-time faculty-to-student ratio

- Net tuition revenue trends over 2020-2022 (Tuition revenue, based on SCH production, minus expenses)

- Total unrestricted expenses trend from 2020-2022

- Net financial position and trend from 2020-2022

Exceptions were made for:

- R1 research contributions - Doctoral programs and associated non-terminal master’s programs within a unit that has annual (FY 2022) external research expenditures of $1 million are exempted from review.

- State priority program (land-grant mission)

- Areas of distinction/differentiation

Enrollment overall sounds like the issue, which may be tied to WV population demographics. I don't know how many people are moving to WV to go to college, but the population of WV continues to shrink year over year.

Do we know why? I've never been there, but Charleston looks like a cosy city and there's lots of classic small american towns around and the nature looks amazing. Have they just not been able to develop any new industry after coal mining collapsed?

As someone brought up in Appalachia with family who made good money via coal mining, I believe the phrase is "...after coal mining was killed" [1].

[1] https://www.rpc.senate.gov/policy-papers/obamas-war-on-coal which is a partisan source but the opposite side made no bones about what they were doing.

The decline of coal was hastened by public policy, but was inevitable. Also, other parts of Appalachia haven’t met West Virginia’s fate because the states successfully diversified their economies and don’t rely as heavily on extractive industries.

West Virginia’s issue — as a state - is a deep seated cultural unwillingness to adapt or change. The decline of goal is the trigger, not the problem.

If I defenestrate a frail 80-year-old that they were eventually going to die naturally is not a murder defense.

If a robust 80-year-old lived next to the frail one it is also not a murder defense.

If the frail one was a stubborn old mule it is likewise not a murder defense.

Maybe the neighborhood is better without the dead one, but that doesn't change that they were murdered.

Getting rid of an industry that literally is killing people world wide is not the same as killing a person. It's the opposite, it is saving lives.

I am not arguing about any greater good. Killing is killing.

My favorite joke here (SMBC?) is that the robbers that killed Batman's 2 parents did not save N-2 people because Batman saved N people.

You keep equating killing an industry with killing people - this is a false comparison.

Ending the use of coal saves human lives and does not take any human lives. The batman comparison is irrelevant.

No longer using asbestos saved lives and didn't take lives. Removing lead from consumer products saves lives and didn't take lives.

I'm sure you there were people in the asbestos industry who weren't happy about the change and they would have gladly gone on giving people cancer. Just like people in the coal industry still bemoan the fact they can't keep killing as many people.

If I kill a car's engine or kill the music or kill this conversation do you understand what I mean?

The executive branch killed the coal industry. It was a swift action to bring something to a close.

That people in this thread can't disentangle one sense of "kill" from another is disappointing. My "murder" examples probably didn’t help but I figured people might enjoy the nuances (All of them could have been written about turning off, or killing, a bad radio station vs a good radio station and the arguments hold). Lesson learned.

My point has never been about the extent to which coal usage ends the life of humans. Frankly, that doesn't matter to anything I have said.

This sort of victim mentality is endemic to the region.

WV could have taken the path of western PA. Not perfect, still some deep scars, but a flourishing new economy that can help pay for long term recovery and provided youth with some sort of future.

WV chose victimhood over adaptation, for decades, and here we are. The article isn’t just about cutting humanities departments. WV is so thoroughly hollowed out that it can’t even afford to keep its flagship Computer Science department fully staffed. It’ll be left out of the great onshoring because there is not sufficient human capital or infrastructure.

It’s the state government version of a private equity “strip mine the assets and wind it down” operation.

Constant victimhood is a self fulfilling prophecy. Opportunities were there. WV was too busy being obstinate to take them.

Heh, this family is in Western PA which I left in the early 2000's for greener pastures outside of PA entirely. I love the area and the people, but pretending things are economically rosy in Western PA in the extraction areas undercuts your credibility. Leave Pittsburgh once in awhile.

No one's saying things are economically fine in western PA. But, they can still easily afford to teach French.

My comment notes there are still deep scars.

> Leave Pittsburgh once in awhile.

1. These sorts of presumptive comments are presumptive and serve no purpose in the conversation. Believe it or not, you aren't the only person on the internet with your background.

2. Western PA is an enormous region, and it's not just Allegheny County that is doing well relative to West Virginia.

3. Having some base of economic activity outside of coal is still better than nothing, even if resulting employment is concentrated in metro areas.

It's not victimhood, its corruption and incompetence in a massively centralized state government system.

Realtalk, one of the biggest problems with the United States is that there’s no mechanism to adjust or reboot states after statehood.

In some of these cases the state would simply go under and be reformed or reabsorbed into neighboring states, but thanks to the federal mechanism this cannot happen. The US taxpayer will always be injecting federal money into the state and that’s enough to stave off total collapse, it is unpossible for even a natural disaster to push even the shittiest corrupt state under or anything else. And in many casss that means these corrupt ineffective states continue to linger on far past their actual shelf life and after they would have been reformed into a more stable one under any other system.

This also has the effect of crippling the federal government with a lot of “pocket boroughs/rotten boroughs” that have constitutionally-allocated voting rights yet have almost no residents and potentially no economic activity. And there is no mechanism to reform this without the consent of the states, which will never be given for political reasons even if the states themselves wanted it (which they don’t).

It is also not a coincidence that when the Slave States left that the north got a bunch of regulatory stuff passed while they were gone. The marriage is really not a happy one and part of that is that these state governments continue to be set up in an undemocratic fashion which continues to promote and empower these same folks over and over - like the 1910s/1920s and 1950s/1960s flareups of the Klan. But again, we rebuilt the same antidemocratic (by design, to suppress threats to oligarchic slaveholder power) government structures after the war and expected a different outcome somehow. And there just is no mechanism for reform without another war and re-admission to the union as being a club to force reforms.

This lack of a reform mechanism for state allocation and structure is going to be the thing that kills the union for good, I very much feel this is the singular underlying issue that’s been rattling around the untied states for almost 250 years now. Fix the state allocation and the senate or presidency aren’t as undemocratic a structure.

And yes, I understand full well that the slave states would never have joined the compact if such provisions were included. They should have been, and the slave states would eventually have collapsed or initiated a fatal war and been assimilated into a more stable structure. The economic collapse of the south in the 1840s/1850s as they missed the industrialization wave due to the Resource Curse of slave labor would have pushed them under in the alt-history timeline too.

(and yes West Virginia was the loyalists who stayed with the union, but, culturally and economically they have weighed with the rest of Southern Appalachia more in the intervening era, and suffered similar resource-curse economic failure due to coal rather than cheap slave labor.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

You could hold state constitutional conventions- God knows Louisiana’s done that enough times

And surely the guarantee clause serves as a backstop in the constitution for the worst of state governments

As someone who was born and raised in WV, I’ll say that though the coal industry had been the state’s lifeline for over a century, the relationship was toxic at best. Appalachian coal miners are among the most used and abused groups of workers in modern history. The pay is good for the area yes, but it requires trading away your health and risking death. Coal companies are shameless when it comes to workers’ rights and that traces all the way back to their origin point. They’re part of the reason that governmental worker protections exist now.

Realistically the state government should’ve started to seriously try to attract alternative industries decades ago, because the state was always going to spiral if it relied on coal… the only difference is the speed of the spiral.

Yup, things like “portal to portal” rules for Amazon warehouse workers have their origin in the subterranean portals of a mine, because coal companies didn’t want to pay their workers for the hour ride down or up the mineshaft. Which is the analogy Amazon drew to their frisk lines at the exits, even if they require it it’s not “part of the job” etc.

Coal companies were the Uber of their time, “innovating” in a space and time when the law hadn’t kept up with industrial progress, and obviously one of the places you can extract value is from the welfare of your workers.

> West Virginia’s issue — as a state - is a deep seated cultural unwillingness to adapt or change

As illustrated by the 2016 election.

One candidate said coal had played a vital role in making the US what it is but it is in decline due to both the need to address climate change and falling demand due to advances in other forms of energy production. That candidate proposed a $30 billion dollar plan to "ensure that coal miners and their families get the benefits they’ve earned and respect they deserve, to invest in economic diversification and job creation, and to make coal communities an engine of US economic growth in the 21st century as they have been for generations" [1].

The other candidate said he would reverse the decline in coal and bring back the jobs and mines that had gone away over the previous decade. He offered no hint at how he would accomplish that, and nearly all analysts and even more coal mine owners said that because of the shale revolution and the rapidly falling prices of wind and solar coal would remain in decline no matter what the government did

West Virginia overwhelmingly voted for that second candidate giving him a larger percentage of their vote (68%) than any other state.

[1] https://static.politico.com/b8/90/cbbc9c59413089d87e8d6340f1...

I wonder if those who exploited child labor talk about the times before and after child labor was "killed", or drug companies talk about the times before and after thalidomide was "killed"

Clearly, I am morally equivalent to child labor and thalidomide by attempting to correct that coal mining didn't collapse on its own but rather it was explicitly killed by executive action. </sarcasm> Next.

yes, coal energy is worse for the world than thalidomide was, and the chip on your shoulder is enormous here

if you have any reason the analogy doesn't apply, besides acting offended that it does, feel free to cite it, otherwise it just seems like you're bitter about coal being bad for earth

Was child labor ever actually 'killed off'? As I understand it, its use declined before legislation hit, but even legislation never completely got rid of it. It just rebranded as "helping my family on a farm" or "helping my family shop" or "summer jobs" or similar.

Eg this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/incidence-of-child-labor-...

The 1920s is when education was made compulsory in the south and on the federal level it took until 1938 (which still excluded agriculture).

was coal mining ever actually "killed off"?

as far as I can tell, it, too, still exists

I'm curious about the mindset behind your statement. The article you linked is very clearly a political propaganda piece, and I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with it.

Does the local population really see the coal industry as purposely killed off by government, and not an industry that's been long in decline, with the final nail in the coffin being provided by the rapid expansion of natural gas via fracking?

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-ki...

I am making the point that Obama's energy policies were a deliberate, concerted disaster for coal mining far in excess of any gradual market changes.

Anecdata, but this was common knowledge in the region at the time. Retroactively, the broader public thinks the industry faded away. But no, it was shived.

Wow. No one remembers even the NYT coverage of this exact thing https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/us/politics/obama-coal-mi.... I am not saying anything not agreed to by both parties at the time. The only difference was whether or not a politician cheered it.

Obama did not "cheer" it and did not kill it. The coal industry had already been dead for years. He was the first president to refuse to commit to continuing the political fiction it wasn't, and to offer an actual alternative.

We could have debated the alternative - it had problems! - but instead the argument formed, and still forms, around the outright lie that coal mining could have continued. Even as it was already not employing people anymore!

My brother-in-law somehow took great care of his family during this period of time via the non-existent employment of which you speak.

I think that you are taking things entirely too literally.

The entire world is transitioning off of coal. Here are some charts on how England coal mining/use has also deeply fallen: https://ourworldindata.org/death-uk-coal

Pure economics are driving its demise.

WV basically has two things going for it: coal and natural beauty. And the tourism industry isn't enough to support a whole state. So people are leaving quite a bit.

A lot of people coming in, including myself, are not full time residents. Some of them are retirees from northern Virginia looking for a lower cost of living. Some just prefer rural life with a more live-and-let-live vibe. But almost nobody is moving out here to raise kids who will go to college here.

For the small number who do raise college-bound kids here, a fair number of them will gladly take a lower ranked school to be closer to the city, e.g., University of Richmond.

Tourism is enough to support the state if it is combined with amenities that attract year-round residents -- especially remote workers.

The problem with WV is a pervasive culture of corruption among its elites.

> The problem with WV is a pervasive culture of corruption among its elites.

As compared to where? Senator Byrd did a lot to bring federal programs to WV- the FBI, astronomy, interstates, various DoD, I don't think anyone has replaced his influence for the state.

> Tourism is enough to support the state if it is combined with amenities that attract year-round residents -- especially remote workers.

Tourism and amenities for remote workers don't come across as a universal remedy for addressing the challenges of West Virginia.

While certain areas are undoubtedly picturesque and the cost of living might be low, similar sentiments apply to Montana, the Carolinas, Maine, and so on. Truth be told there are many such areas in the majority of states that have similar natural beauty and low cost of living (barring a handful of distinct cases).

What specific beneficial attributes does West Virginia possess that set it apart from other states?

Politically this is the classic “rotten borough/pocket borough” problem in a nutshell though. People move away, and you are left with a seat controlled by a ridiculously small number of people who nevertheless control a constitutionally-allocated location.

In the UK this got down to some districts having literally single-resident or single-family districts. And it’s super easy to influence the residents when there’s a single master who controls the borough… kinda like coal in WV.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs

Part of the reason why they got the political say in the first place - so that they could have a say in politics to prevent this kind of decay from happening. It doesn't always work out though.

The nature is nice. Harper's Ferry is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life. But it's not much nicer than any other Blue Ridge state all the way down to Tennessee and Georgia. Meanwhile, the town life, at least as of 20 years ago, is desolate. My best friend from college grew up in West Virginia, and I spent a week with him there before he moved to LA to become a television writer back in 2001. I don't know that I've seen a place more falling apart. Houses collapsed, abandoned. Weird paint splotches that looked like blood stains on houses that were still occupied. Every single lawn had a Camaro body with no engine and no tires propped up on cinder blocks. Other than coal mining, the only employer in this guy's town, which is where he worked, was some kind of direct mailing marketing operation that paid minimum wage.

The only upside, if you're truly poor, is you could rent a reasonable sized place for $100 a month.

I grew up in semi-rural Virginia and recently watched Peter Santenello's Appalachia[1] series on YT. The reality is that WV is nearly entirely rural (like Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas), but there's little oil or gas to backfill the coal, and it's absolutely not flat enough (and is almost entirely forested) for either meaningful factory/ranch farming or much else. It doesn't benefit from interstate commerce and there's no river running through it, either. Beyond all the topographical/geographical challenges, the cities are shells of their former selves, and since both the educational attainment and financial independence of West Virginians is low, the potential for breaking out of this death spiral seems low.

All that ... and then add the fact that WV is perhaps the worst hit state by the opioid crisis.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9lSZlDJAC0&list=PLEyPgwIPkH...

Tons of natural beauty and I think the state should continue investing in tourism along the lines of what Tennessee has done for decades with the Smokies.

My hometown is in semi-rural WV as well, and this is all true.

Furthermore, because the lack of opportunity and things for young people to occupy themselves with, many young people with means (and many who don’t, via college loans) move elsewhere to build a life for themselves. I did, because if I hadn’t the path ahead of me had a ceiling I’d hit by my late 20s or early 30s.

This contributes to the cycle of decay that much more. Fewer young people → shrinking working population → no interest from employers → no jobs.

And the opioid cross has made it all that much worse. It’s sad. My hometown wasn’t exactly bustling when I was a kid in the 90s, but it still had some life to it. Now it’s barely hanging on.

This is part of what I hoped would evolve as part of the full remote pandemic stuff. I left my home area because it was obvious my salary ceiling would be about a third of what I am making now, and I still have room to grow where I am where I would otherwise be stuck. With full remote it would have been possible to at least move back home, but attitudes seem to have shifted for the worse in a lot of cases so being within an hour commute of a tech hub (US) is the only way to get the salary parity.

Looks like an amazing place for remote workers. Sadly, the internet connection is probably dogshit.

It's not even dogshit in some parts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/green-bank-west-virgin...

Started watching that series now. Brilliant. Thanks.

As a WVU grad who grew up there: ya, pretty much. Outside of some select towns and cities, WV is poor as shit, and it's only getting worse. Lots of abandoned towns, homelessness, and very few jobs. Even when coal mining was big, it wasn't exactly a thriving area. The movie October Sky is a great rendition of what it was like in the 50s, the coal company owned everything, and was the only source for anyone's income. Now imagine that 70 years later with all the coal companies gone, and tons of painkillers.

Its a very sad state, anyone I knew with half a brain who grew up there wanted nothing but to leave. Even those in good situations were all looking to move far away after college.

Closing a major university will surely be a good route to convince the brightest to stay.

Should career/job prospects and impact to the WV economy also be part of the criteria?

Maybe the computer engineering is vastly underpaid compared to computer science but, I guess they can’t attract computer science professors and or students ??? It seems very odd.

Apparently they rank 139 in CS.

Barring significant open-source contributions or stellar leetcode skillz, the path to an entry-level tech job in the valley or NYC will be a challenge.

I went to a top-25 CS program in a flyover state without tech jobs, and only the top 5-10% of the graduating class made it to a major tech hub within 5 years. Granted, there a personal reasons to not leave, but still.

This happened to Tulane after Katrina it’s usually because the administration thinks the faculty quality isn’t up to par

> Mining Engineering; Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering; Civil Engineering; Energy Land Management with Environmental and Energy Resource Management; Forest Resource Management with Wood Science and Technology; Agribusiness Management with Environmental and Natural Resource Economics

That list is not what I would expect as having a hard time in West Virginia.

Not sure how accurate this list is. Acting is both unimpacted and eliminated according to this post, for example.

I don't have a hard time believing that mining is not as productive a field as it once was. It's a shrinking part of the WV economy.

You can see the recommendations for yourself here: https://provost.wvu.edu/academic-transformation/academic-pro...

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.

Could also just mean that they have some fewer teaching personnel or in research positions. Trying to do same job with less people.

Isn't this the problem with all teaching positions?

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.

Most of these sound more like job titles than degrees. There are a few foundational disciplines that are buried in a sea of vocational disciplines. What happened to learning the fundamentals and gaining the rest through work experience? Most of these should not exist.

> What happened to learning the fundamentals and gaining the rest through work experience?

Why subsidize job training with valuable shareholder capital when you can have universities teach the fundamentals AND teach real world skills?! /s

Surprised by the elimination of all those language programs. Surely, there has to be demand for Chinese and Spanish, at the very least?

What does one do with a DEGREE in Chinese? As opposed to not getting a degree in Chinese but spending 4 years learning it while getting a degree in, I dunno, materials science or something.

Professional translation and teaching. For real world use. Then there is research and other such cases.

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

Is there any hope of becoming proficient enough at chinese to compete for these jobs when you're just starting in your late teens?

I feel like one would never stand a chance against someone who was raised in a bilingual house.

Bilingual could allow you to work in some capacity. But in teaching those people really don't always know why. Why is something correct or why is something wrong. What is probably a good learning path. Just think of average native speaker. They can tell that something is wrong, but they can't always explaining in common framework why is it wrong.

And then if you get money involved, you probably want version in both languages or even more. And those have to be correct exactly.

> Is there any hope of becoming proficient enough at chinese to compete for these jobs when you're just starting in your late teens?

Yes… sort of.

First, folks who have learned the language as adults are often better at teaching early stages of language learning. Bilingual folks may know what is right or sounds right, but they may not know why.

Second, folks who are bilingual mostly by speaking the language in their home often have a very limited scope of knowledge of the language. The range of language needed to teach at a university or to a higher level of proficiency (beyond tourist level) requires a much wider range of target language knowledge.

Third, for folks who want to become a professor, their research will matter much more than their ability to teach the nuts and bolts of the language.

Lastly, at most universities that teach Chinese, you have mostly if not exclusively grad students from China teaching the pure language stuff. Someone who has a major in Chinese will be teaching literature, linguistics, culture, or something similar.

Yes. I have lived in China for about five years, and while I myself am not yet fluent, I have met several foreigners who started learning Chinese in their twenties and who are completely fluent and can speak like native speakers. I have almost met Chinese people who have never lived abroad, started learning English in their teens, and who speak English as fluently as a native. I think it's all about the immersion and the willingness to keep up with it.

If you're not fluent in Chinese, how could you tell if someone speaks Chinese like a native?

I'm only a native speaker of English, but I know vast swathes of native Chinese speakers who have been in the US for decades and sound nothing like native English speakers. I know ones that do sound like native speakers too, but it's rare in my experience.

I don't think immersion is anywhere close to sufficient to guarantee native-like proficiency, there's something else.

I don't know what the something else is.

Because I have been with them in group settings, and although I am not fluent I understand a lot. They can speak at native speed and are never confused about what is being said. Basically that's it.

Have you lived abroad? Living in China has dispelled a lot of my previous notions about what is possible when it comes to language. Another person I knew moved to China after college, taught English, and ended up staying her for forty years. My Chinese friend told me that when she speaks to him she forgets he is a foreigner. It happens.

If a native Chinese speaker said that person speaks like a native, then I believe them. However I don't believe it's possible for a non fluent speaker to make that determination.

I think we're on the same page with regards to whether a non native speaker can reach native levels. It can happen with a lot of work. But time and immersion alone doesn't do it, I've already said I've seen cases where that didn't work and some where it did.

There can be big benefits to being white in Asia for these kinds of jobs. They want to employ a foreign/"exotic" businessman to give them credibility. If you were raised bilingual, odds are you're Chinese and just fit in there.

> Is there any hope of becoming proficient enough at chinese to compete for these jobs when you're just starting in your late teens?

Yes.

(Classroom teaching/formal teaching is not gonna matter much -- consuming lots of Chinese content at just the right level will be much more effective.)

> I feel like one would never stand a chance against someone who was raised in a bilingual house.

Actually, you might. A lot of them are not raised with Mandarin -- or if they are, a heavily accented form of Mandarin. You can go straight to Mandarin.

You might also have another advantage. If you put in the work, you will learn how to read and write. A lot of the bilingual types raised outside of China have not put in the hours and are basically illiterate in Chinese.

And finally, your ability to communicate in Chinese -- or any foreign language -- is not just a question of fluency or having as little accent as possible. It is very much a matter of how you choose to express yourself. IQ matters a lot here. Donald Tusk (former PM of Poland, former President of the European Council) is a great As an example of someone who was able to express himself very well, despite a poor grasp of English.

maybe chatgpt can translate adequately for low end jobs in the space?

More important jobs can be filled with candidates from more well-heeled colleges?

MTL with some editing is probably enough even without gpt for the lowest end.

Then you can get some hobbyist or Chinese person for next tier.

But you will probably always want professional for legal and contractual work, translating international treaties and interpretation at high level. We might get somewhere close, but I think for situations like UN you will always want live person at least some of the time.

And probably for literary translation as well... Although I'm not so sure in the long term, in light of the progression of the GPTs.

> What does one do with a DEGREE in Chinese?

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.

> I met a few folks who did that exact job in Japan, and most of them were miserable.

Interesting. What was the source or cause of their misery, and how sure were you that the correlation wasn't spurious?

> What was the source or cause of their misery, and how sure were you that the correlation wasn't spurious?

Great question!

In their words, the legal work wasn’t that interesting, the business side (rain making) could be infuriating due to cultural differences, working in Japan wasn’t that interesting after the honeymoon period, and living in Japan wasn’t something they wanted to do long term with their family.

I will add that some ambitious folks who worked in firms that had locations back in the US kind of felt like second class citizens in their own firms, even though they were driving quite a bit of revenue at the time.

Having worked in Japan myself (since I spoke with them), I can add some things that they probably thought but didn’t say:

1. Trying to explain American anything to someone who thinks that the Japanese way is the best way and should be the only way around the world gets old after a while. These folks existed in Japan in droves at that time (90s). It’s better now, but they still exist. Note that this knife cuts both ways — trying to explain Japanese ways to Americans who think the American way is the best and only way gets old as well. I’ve done both. If you want to get technical, it usually boils down to the “international” person being at a higher stage of adult cognitive development than the local (see Robert Kegan for an example of what these levels look like). Given that some US legal concepts seem counterintuitive or even unfair even to Americans, you can imagine how added layers of a different culture and a different legal system might meet some resistance from Japanese clients.

2. Raising a family in Japan, even in Tokyo, can present challenging issues. Even if everything is covered in terms of cost (housing, schooling, travel, etc.), there is still the issue of the constantly rotating cast of characters of your co-workers, friends, classmates (for kids), etc. Also, some spouses get very antsy and/or dissatisfied for a variety of reasons. If costs are not covered, it takes a lot of money or a lot of compromise to make things work.

3. I’m fairly certain that one or more of the folks I spoke with actually didn’t speak much Japanese — they were top notch legal practitioners who had interpreters do whatever speaking needed to be done. While one could live in Tokyo fairly well without speaking a word of Japanese, it would be a very shallow experience, imho.

There are a lot of things I could say about the legal profession in general. They aren’t related to Japan at all, but they may have contributed to the misery these folks were experiencing.

While certain areas of law fascinate me (Berkman Center stuff can be quite interesting), I’m glad I didn’t become a lawyer in general, and a lawyer in Japan in particular.

Many attorneys are miserable. It’s easy to get stuck with awful, dreadfully boring work.

In theory it makes perfect sense to cut the degree programs and keep (perhaps smaller or at least lower overhead) departments as pure service depts.

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.

I would reckon lot of jobs such as teaching or translation have that as a requirement.

Presumably the people coming through these programs are a drop in the ocean next to number of Americans fluent in Chinese and Spanish, and likely able to teach it at quite a high level without a specific degree for that language.

Legal studies seems most surprising for me. I thought that those were the expensive, but cheap to teach subjects. Which would make sense from cost perspective. Optimize the cost to return.

Probably because it's not a very useful exit. The most successful law school applicants have degrees like history, classics, or math. A degree in legal studies (1) doesn't rank for getting into law school (or if it does, it's clearly not the what law schools want), (2) Looks a little useless/incomplete if you stop after the bachelor and don't go to law school.

FWIW people with 2 or 4 year degrees in law or justice and no other education seem to become probation officers in my experience, so I'm all for WVU sending that one into the ocean.

Thanks for posting this list. Makes it seem like practical decisions from my point of view.

The list you provide looks to me like a college that believes anyone in arts can actual pursue their own path and ambitions. The way the arts work this could go unnoticed if the instructors do it correctly.

This looks to me like a college that is trying to break out of the traditional liberal arts idea into more focused instruction. This will work out for students that are focused.

I went to a four year art school and I would have loved the art history department being disbanded. I was talking to my freshman year roommate and his quote was something like this.

"They knew I choose this school because I can't do that work, so why do they make us take art history."

Wow, MS/PhD Mathematics is cancelled?

proof assistants have taken over?

Yeah you don't need a PhD in math to calculate the odds of getting to tenure with that degree.

Well the first and biggest problem is that phd students are INSANELY cheap teaching labor. Math PhD programs run at a loss in absolute terms, but almost never compared to the alternative of having to pay market rate for summer instructors and TA/grading labor.

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.

> Finance, biotech, and tech all pay good math phds

Are any of these jobs actually in West Virginia? Maybe the state sees little point in educating people who will just move away.

Okay...

But given that they are also cutting Mining and Ag programs, I'm not sure what exactly they expect the future of the stat's economy to look like.

Seems desolate in any case.

This is the end-point of WV mentality.

> 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”.

Yes. Now convince Math PhDs of that ;)

so math has gone the way of studying history, it only makes sense if your entire life is paid for by rent-collecting relatives of you.

Biometric systems engineering cut huh? Looks like that play to the FBI to convert miners into biometrics staffers for CJIS in Clarksburg didn’t play out huh?

I'm from Canada so maybe this is more typical of the US, but does anyone else find these degree programs a bit odd? Like here, we get a degree in Computer Science, or in Biology, or in Life Sciences, or Health Sciences (I will say, those last three can get a bit weirdly specific) but I've never heard anyone say that they are getting a degree in 'Human and Community Development'. That seems so specific so as to reduce the value in getting a degree.

At some point I wants to say to these backward states: may it be as you ask. Fine, turn your back on the fruits of humankind's knowledge and development. But of course, they have children; even if they do not care for them, we must.

They're also cancelling Parks and Recreation? :(

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