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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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!
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
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"
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
