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