It seems like a lot of schools doing cuts were cutting back on religious or religion affiliated degrees.
Drake is focusing on some serious cutbacks. At the end I think the faculty senate will have little influence on the decision.
including theology/religion majors, this is certainly not a shock. Think about the benefit vs. cost relationship. Generally and practically speaking, Why go to a private school with high tuition to get an education degree? The debt will be high and the salary is not there to pay it off.Also a lot of cuts to math, history, chemistry, music, social work, education
as for math, that may be a surprise, but if you can form the degree to make it applicable to industry that can be a selling point.
I'm just catching up on a few of these posts.
Like others, I can testify to the excellent quality I received at the VU College of Engineering. Sure, we are a smaller school, yet out in industry I realized my undergraduate education was the same as or demonstrably better than undergrads from Stanford, MIT, Purdue, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and many other highly-regarded engineering programs. A few of those individuals had some specific coursework (in focused electives) that VU did not have, yet there was no doubt about the quality of the overall and I would not trade their experience for what I had at Valpo. As a Christ College graduate, I also was well-prepared in the liberal arts, and that combination has proved immensely useful throughout my career.
More broadly, there are three themes I see in many of these discussions:
1) President Heckler, as likable as he seemed to be to many, failed in many ways. The disastrous plan to GROW to 6,000 students and the law school debacle were under his watch, and the antagonism toward the traditional Lutheran base (and their high school grads) are all high on the list of failures. (As has been discussed, why do no students come to VU from Ft. Wayne Lutheran HS, what should be VU's strongest geographic and historical base?).
2) There has been a strong resistance to change at VU for a long time. For example, a few years ago there was an outcry when VU eliminated the Greek and Roman Studies major, or the Asian Studies program. These were decried as, "the death of liberal arts." These previous objections to cutting very small programs seem so quaint now.
3) The financial realities of VU (and many similar private institutions) are challenging. In VU's case, there have been years of systematic budget deficits that have not been addressed. The University has a solid but modest endowment, yet also has substantial borrowings, including several of the new buildings completed under President Heckler that have not been paid for.
President Padilla has been facing an exceedingly difficult set of problems. As far as I can tell, he is working to put the VU on a sustainable fiscal path. It is not surprising that VU would have to cut some programs and under-enrolled majors if they are not viable.
I can say that the tech layoffs were focused more on the fact that these companies over hired and were less selective during the 2020s. You could be a self taught coder and still make a decent living 4 years ago. Now you need the degree and companies are going to be more selective because they overtired during 2020. Also just don't work on the coasts for tech. The midwest is where the jobs are as people only see the FAANG guys as the end all be all when there are plenty of jobs if you look for em.
The cutthroat market in thr tech industry can be broken down into 4 factors
1. Only wanting to be a software engineer.
2. Only applying in silicon valley or the east coast.
3. FAANG applications
4. Work Visa. A lot of people wanting tech jobs are foreign workers, and unfortunately, a lot of tech companies don't want to sponsor your visa.
@vuindiana this is entirely what I think. Yoy seem to have gotten tbe exact reason I went to a satellite school as well. A lot cheaper than purdue and IU and I still get the Purdue and IU degree
Comprehensive, private universities -- those respectably ranked, fair-to-middlin' financed schools trying to balance professional training and the liberal arts -- are facing challenges just about everywhere. This entire category of institutions may be at risk.
It would be a small tragedy for higher education and for America's middle class if they were to go the way of the dinosaur. At stake is that sense of balance, the multiple portals to upward mobility, and opportunities to have the "college experience" of going away to school and growing in that way.
One other factor is that at VU (and peer comprehensive privates), few domestic students pay the full sticker price for tuition. I do not have the stats at hand, yet the average tuition per student is about half the $47,000 sticker price. This pricing model (high tuition + high discounts) is under significant pressure - there was a time where tuition was viewed as a mark of quality. In addition, students would get a "scholarship" tuition reduction that was constant, yet tuition went up over time.
One downside is that there is little room to keep increasing tuition.
Another downside is that the sticker price looks shocking, and keeps some well-qualified students from even considering schools like VU. If IUPUI costs $10,000 and VU costs $47,000, then it is hard to make the case that it is worth it (especially for some majors), and the $148K difference over four years is staggering. If that same student gets next to no discounted tuition from IUPUI and gets a 2/3 scholarship from VU, then it is a difference between $10,000 and $15,667 per year - that is a difference of $23K versus $148K over four years.
The only private I know of that tried to address this was Concordia St. Paul. They cut tuition by 1/3 in 2012, with a corresponding reduction in discounted tuition. The result, at least in the short term, was very successful and they grew their enrollment then. Their tuition in 2022-23 was $24,400.
I can say that the tech layoffs were focused more on the fact that these companies over hired and were less selective during the 2020s. You could be a self taught coder and still make a decent living 4 years ago. Now you need the degree and companies are going to be more selective because they overtired during 2020. Also just don't work on the coasts for tech. The midwest is where the jobs are as people only see the FAANG guys as the end all be all when there are plenty of jobs if you look for em.
The cutthroat market in thr tech industry can be broken down into 4 factors
1. Only wanting to be a software engineer.
2. Only applying in silicon valley or the east coast.
3. FAANG applications
4. Work Visa. A lot of people wanting tech jobs are foreign workers, and unfortunately, a lot of tech companies don't want to sponsor your visa.
I live in this world on a daily basis, in leading my company's Technical Recruiting department. It was mainly the short-sightedness of Amazon, Meta, and Google, which drove the ridiculousness of 2020-2022, where Software Engineers could ask for the Moon and get that and then some, since each had a mission to hire 20,000 Engineers. Just about every SE would tell us that they held an offer from one of these companies, and those that did not, could just lie and act like they had the same, in order to drive up their expected wages from my company. Things have come down to Earth a bit in the last 2 years, and companies have even started asking for verification of unvested equity being left behind (which is legal, since it is not a requirement to offer equity like you would a base salary), due to how much fudging happened in prior years on total compensation, and the companies just had to take it.
In regards to locations, it has gotten much more spread out. While you are still going to find some of the most innovative folks in the Bay Area or NYC, a lot of others moved to Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, etc. Companies are fighting back on how much Remote work is allowed, and that will be interesting to see in the coming years, but we still hire a small % of folks in that classification, which gives us a competitive advantage against those that are mandating return-to-office.
@valpotx YOu went a lot more in depth than my explanation, but all is still true. FAANG k basically turned the industry upside down. Now I have to make sure I know every Leetcode question by heart. Have at least 3 internships, and 40 projects all before graduation. Oh, an I have to have at least 100 people added on linked in. Still a sophmore in standing, but the grind does not stop.
What I mainly have an issue with is people who think that AI is going to take over coding jobs. Im sorry, but when AI only knows how to copy code off of Stack Overflow or GfG and is marketed as an "Innovative Coding Mind" I have serious doubts that AI will ever be able to independently code. My former professor wrote the "For Dummies" books on CS and he claims all AI will ever be able to truley do is assist in coding. His best quote, "If you can be replaced by a bot, you probably aren't a good coder"
@vuindiana Becoming a HSI would help a lot. Gets public money to come into the school. If you look at cost after FINAID, VU is acutally suprisingly cheap compared to other private schools in your classification, but 24k is still 24k to deal with in the loan market.
