The impact of AI could actually be worse in the short term. The downsizing of the jobs will put people with limited experience competing with grads just as the number of jobs collapses. It will take awhile to work through the laid off until they become discouraged, in the interim the grads will become stale ...
Also, the reduction of college education may impact the split between Democrats and Republicans - Democrats are the home for more of them now.
A small but relevant point: WVU also has a deeply retrograde BOT, and exists in a state that is exceptionally right-wing. It's no coincidence that they killed DEI at the same time as they were butchering programs. The budget shortfalls exist not because of declining enrollment so much as radical cuts to state funding (WVU received 70% of its budget from the state in 1980, and as much as 20% a decade ago; that's down to around 12% now). As with most public universities, the story is one of disinvestment that advantages the wealthy at the expense of the poor. And that is a story of politics, something strangely missing from your piece.
You're very right that the disinvestment story deserves more space. The decline from 70% to 12% state funding is a structural transformation in its own right, and it shapes everything downstream.
Where I'd gently push back though: the governance and accountability dynamics I'm describing aren't reducible to *purely* right-wing politics. Blue states have disinvested too. Also, the institutional resistance to adaptation I'm mapping shows up across the political spectrum.
But the distributional consequences of who pays when public support retreats, absolutely, that's a political story I could have told more explicitly--in fact, probably deserves its own essay.
The impact of AI could actually be worse in the short term. The downsizing of the jobs will put people with limited experience competing with grads just as the number of jobs collapses. It will take awhile to work through the laid off until they become discouraged, in the interim the grads will become stale ...
Also, the reduction of college education may impact the split between Democrats and Republicans - Democrats are the home for more of them now.
A small but relevant point: WVU also has a deeply retrograde BOT, and exists in a state that is exceptionally right-wing. It's no coincidence that they killed DEI at the same time as they were butchering programs. The budget shortfalls exist not because of declining enrollment so much as radical cuts to state funding (WVU received 70% of its budget from the state in 1980, and as much as 20% a decade ago; that's down to around 12% now). As with most public universities, the story is one of disinvestment that advantages the wealthy at the expense of the poor. And that is a story of politics, something strangely missing from your piece.
You're very right that the disinvestment story deserves more space. The decline from 70% to 12% state funding is a structural transformation in its own right, and it shapes everything downstream.
Where I'd gently push back though: the governance and accountability dynamics I'm describing aren't reducible to *purely* right-wing politics. Blue states have disinvested too. Also, the institutional resistance to adaptation I'm mapping shows up across the political spectrum.
But the distributional consequences of who pays when public support retreats, absolutely, that's a political story I could have told more explicitly--in fact, probably deserves its own essay.