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Comment by miek | Hacker News Reader

I recommend this website [0] for some details about how they got into this situation. Included are comparisons to peers (public Big XII schools), which are considerably better off. Hilariously, over the past 3 years, WVU was unable to generate actionable data on costs & revenues of their academic programs, though they spent over $1mm on consultants specifically for this purpose and pay $3mm annually on internal roles whose job functions have considerable overlap and include doing this type of work. Administration hired a second consultancy for the same purpose in 2023.

[0] https://wvufacts.wordpress.com/

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This is essentially written by bitter ex or current employees.

Professors often approach public debate by assuming everyone else is braindead, rather than puzzling through conflicting information.

For example, they immediately dismiss the president's claim that a demographic change contributes to this issue as "false" because the US birth rate may have been very stable. But that says nothing about parents in the WVU area, which we know are either older or moved to other states.

> This is essentially written by bitter ex or current employees.

I imagine if you worked at a place for over a decade, then saw it being run into the ground at speed by people earning 5-10x your salary, some bitterness may emerge.

The bitterness of current and former employees, alums, and many people around the state, does not detract from several excellent points made by the piece. To read it and wholly dismiss it is questionnable (especially with a birthrate comment).

Birthrate in the "WVU area" should be considered, but consider a couple datapoints: Total enrollment overall increased [0] year over year for both 2021-2022 and 2022-2023, and over half of WVU students come from outside WV [1]

[0] To see the increased enrollment, you need to get the '21-'22 enrollment from this site: https://www.thedaonline.com/news/wvu-continues-to-experience... and the '22-'23 enrollment here: https://www.wvu.edu/faq/how-many-students-are-enrolled

This year's enrollment was published (news claimed increase); traveling and didn't immediately find the source.

[1] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/west-virginia-univer...

I'm interested for your thoughts on the excellent points.

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.

Yes, undergraduate enrollment is increasing, but many of the programs recommended for closure are graduate programs. Depending on the graduate program, the audience may be primarily local residents.

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.

I lived in a small Rust Belt city, dropped out of college, waited tables, built a restaurant management app, sold it, by the grace of God made it to a FAANG.

Everything I've learned and surprised me over 7 years there fits into exactly what you said, "[smart cloistered people without exposure to costs] often approach debate by assuming everyone else is braindead, rather than puzzling through conflicting information"

It costs so, so, much, especially when you throw in the rush everyone is in.

The enrollment cliff is well documented and real and does not impact all universities equally. A college that has a very high acceptance rate, such as WVU will likely feel the impact of the enrollment cliff more than others.

Initial enrollment is also not the same as enrollment at census. Colleges experience some level of "melt" which is the number of students who end up not showing up or otherwise leaving in the first couple months of their first year. Again, I would imagine that WVU with their high acceptance rate would experience outsized melt compared to their peers.

Enrolment at WVU hasn’t changed, even though WV population has been declining since 1950

> Gee says that due to the demographic cliff they’re expecting 20% fewer students ‘over the next period of time’,

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

> though they spent over $1mm on consultants specifically for this purpose and pay $3mm annually on internal roles whose job functions have considerable overlap and include doing this type of work. Administration hired a second consultancy for the same purpose in 2023.

Is consulting the ultimate late capitalism grift?

This style of consulting is usually a performative act because the people who should be making decisions don't have or don't feel like they have the authority to make decisions.

Paying $X million for an outside consultancy to come up with the decision, gives the decision authority. Of course, the consultancy is usually guided to the 'right' decision, either implicitly or explicitly. Although sometimes you see failures of guidance, where against incentives the consultancy delivers a good recommendation and then it's usually ignored.

Anyway, this is a grift, but who's going to turn down $1M to tell someone what they already know?

IMHO, the more grifty consultancy is systems building, where you set up a $10M contract over ten years to build a system that doesn't work and doesn't actually replace the old system. But maybe that's just performative too: nobody wants to say to just keep the old system, so spending time and money on something everyone knows won't work and won't be ready before you leave makes it look like you're doing the right thing?

There's also non-grift consulting. You might pay a real expert a reasonable sum for an engineering consult, etc.

Closing an academic program, let alone 32, will be extremely unpopular among faculty so much so that it might lead to a vote of no confidence. Using a consulting firm as a political shield is likely necessary if you want to make such a move and maintain your position as president.

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.

Or the people in charge just want to deflect blame when they make the unpopular action they already decided on. A $1m scapegoat.

I’ve seen it called decision insurance.

I could see the point of consulting if what you were paying for was genuine expertise that you lack in house, but often consultants are just know-nothings fresh out of university.

So another layer to the consultancy grift is consulting agencies who scam and delude the consultants themselves. Consultants are often just glorified temps who end up doing same sort of of grunt work as employees, but have much less job security and therefore potential to unionise. Big companies like a workforce that can't organise, and pay consulting agencies this for precariousness as a service.

A million spent on consulting is a million worth of written proof of how seriously they are taking the problem. And it's even quantifiable! ("million"), yay! As a convenient side effect, it makes the problem you have just proven to be in your focus appear more important, what's not to like. In the end the consultants are basically paid to send a bill.

When you hire a consultant as a public university for a contract over a certain amount of money, you need to put out a request for proposals and evaluate consultant proposals.

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.

It seems more analogous to a virus or scavenger. A market-based force of nature attacking moribund organizations with weakened defenses.

Consulting is a way for managers to avoid any kind of responsibility.

My experience is consulting falls into three categories, and this is specific to higher education.

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.

I would add:

4. We need plausible deniability in case something goes really wrong with the choices we've made so let's hire consultants to validate our decisions.

Accurate. I forgot that. And in the higher education realm, these are always related to discrimination of some kind by an employee or department that is a known issue that hadn't been addressed.

It's a great way to siphon money to friends and family and then when there's no output you just deflect and gaslight until everyone forgets about it

What would you do to collect this information? Keep in mind most of your administrative workers will be uncomfortable learning or doing anything new.

The people: we need smaller government The government: okay we'll fire civil servants and replace them with hiring consultants

McKinsey always wins.

The federal government desperately needs fewer people and higher pay bands. They use consulting to cover up for that

I wouldn't even say late capitalism; consulting has been the ultimate grift for decades now.

It was, arguably, part of the beginning of the end. Most of the most harmful strategies have consultants in their roots.

Late capitalism refers to 1940s+, but typically the term has no real understanding by the masses that use it online.

Late stage capitalism got started started in the thirties...

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