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Evergreen State College Wakes Up to the Costs of Wokeness
Extracurricular activities at Evergreen State College.
It’s been two years since violent racial unrest crippled the University of Missouri. The school’s decision to coddle the mob resulted in freshmen enrollment dropping by more than 35 percent, the elimination of 400 positions, and the closing of seven dorms. The 2017 enrollment drop lost the school $16.6 million, while a disgusted state government punished the campus with another $15 million in cuts.
Following this summer’s angry protests at the much smaller Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, that school is also facing the “Mizzou Effect.” The College Fix has the deets:
Administrators at The Evergreen State College have announced that the embattled school faces a massive $2.1 million budget shortfall due in part to a drop in enrollment, and the institution has already handed out some temporary layoff notices as officials grapple with balancing the books.
In an Aug. 28 memo to the campus community titled “Enrollment and Budget Update,” officials report that fall 2017-18 registration is down about 5 percent, from 3,922 students to 3,713. But the problem is nearly all of the students they lost are nonresidents, who traditionally pay a much higher tuition to attend, officials explained in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.
Combined with a shortfall in funding from state coffers to shoulder a mandatory cost-of-living salary increase and a rise in the general cost of operations, and the school must find a way to resolve a $2.1 million shortfall for the fiscal year that began July 1, according to the memo.
“This creates the need for significant budget cuts in the immediate future,” the memo states, adding that the university late last month already handed out temporary layoff notices to 17 facilities staff members.
Universities might praise Marxist economic theory, but they’re waking up to how the real world operates. Even the most progressive upper-middle-class parents won’t send tens of thousands of dollars to schools that won’t prepare their kids for adulthood — or even provide physical safety.
The free market works, even among the woke.
Published in Economics, Education
There’s a certain mocking, muted two-note trumpet motif, popular since the Thirties, that goes something like “Waack-waah!” It means, someone thought they’d be clever but got their comeuppance.
Seems appropriate here.
Impromptu lessons on the history of the sad trombone. I might have to take this over to Fred’s post on the joys of Ricochet.
Neener, neener, neener! Todd Herman was having a field day with this news today, on local radio station KTTH 770AM. That was the news as I got into my car to drive home this afternoon. <grin>
Expensive snowflakes!
Defund the Birckenstock Bolsheviks.
Payback. It’s rough when your own stupid moves kick you in the teeth.
I didn’t know about anything going on at that college, probably because I just rolled my eyes and moved on, so I went looking for stories and got the lowdown. Then I saw this comment in a story today by some reporter, who apparently gets it: “Turns out, being nationally recognized for unhinged Progressive students who are allowed by cowardly administrators to run amok doesn’t pay off, as Evergreen State College is learning.”
Works for me.
What was weird is that minority enrollment at Mizzou went down more than white enrollment. At least I ran across an article to that effect awhile ago.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I hadn’t heard any of this. Fantastic. So we need to shine bright lights on the schools that propagandize and provide unbalanced education. Parents who are going to spend so much money will want to know and will read up. If leftists parents pick leftist schools employers can look that up to. Freedom and markets work. Just keep the Federal government out of any of it and it will sort itself out.
when the minority are running things like they’re the majority then finds out that they’re in the minority. doubt these two lessons will slow their “cause”, ala parasites – they’ll just move on to the next “host” to drain.
What’s especially interesting about this is that the sort of parents likely to send their child to Evergreen in the first place are not, shall we say, “Deplorables.”
I keep wondering where the adults are… cowering in a corner somewhere, I guess, afraid of their Frankenstudents.
Jon,
That’s the problem with Marxism. There’s no profit in it.
Regards,
Jim
I guess I’m sort of shocked that registration is only off by 200 or so students. Who are the other 3700 families who voluntarily send their kids there?
This was my suggestion in another post: when state-funded universities start allowing such craziness, the state legislature needs to start cutting state funding. If you want to play crazy, you can’t do it on the taxpayer’s dime!
It’s the only way these Universities will learn. When they get hit in the pocketbook. This University needs to stand as a cautionary tale to other universities.
Do you really think the administration understands the connection between their declining enrollment / funding and their coddling of the mobs? I don’t.
Hoist by their own petard.
There are so many ways the express the delicious Schadenfreude.
Evergreen has always been a very wacky liberal place. That allowed students to “build their own degree”. Unfortunately, the regressive left are starting to take over and make it not a open liberal place, but a fascist place.
I am very encouraged about the statement this makes about the people who could have sent their kids to Evergreen! It could just be a safety issue, but I hope parents are realizing that values DO matter, and their kids aren’t going to receive a values-based education at Evergreen. This outcome should send a message to other universities that focusing on teaching and education, not protesting, is an honorable and worthwhile goal!
I was telling my husband about this last night; his eyes lit up: “Will the same thing happen at Berkeley?” he asked. He doesn’t come from the U.S. originally, so he isn’t totally clear on which schools are the top tier ones that everyone wants to get into. Sadly, I told him that the same thing probably wouldn’t happen at Berkeley: too many people want to go there. What happened at Evergreen will serve as a warning to other mid level schools, but will if affect the Ivy Leagues? Probably not, except to even further separate their students from the rest of America.
Don’t expect rise in ideological diversity. They will probably cut STEM classes and give half the savings to expand the Race & Gender Enforcement Section.
I am amazed that anyone goes deeply into student loan debt loans to major in some form of leftist rhetorical masturbation studies. That there are whole departments dedicated to promulgating this offal is hard to believe.
If small colleges of (residual) good reputation started offering the option of not being required to take any ‘woke’ courses at all and instead provided a substantive approach to every subject, I would think that could be a major marketing coup.
Schadenfreude sure feels good.
Ah, but there’s the rub. One can presume that most of these 200 students not attending Evergreen are freshmen. Maybe a few just quit or transferred out. If the pattern keeps up, it’s devastating.
I looked at their factpage:
http://www.evergreen.edu/institutionalresearch/factpage
Back of the envelope, they have about 250 out-of-state students per class. They lost 200 in the incoming class and they tell us “most” are out-of-state.
So let’s say they lost 150 out-of-state and 50 in-state.
That means that in 4 years, if the trend continues, they will have 3200 students, 400 of which will be out-of-state, going from a quarter to an eighth of the student body.
That trend might decelerate or it might accelerate, but they would be wise to plan on those kinds of numbers.
A Republican tried to cut the budget at the state legislature level, but that went nowhere. However, Evergreen will go hat-in-hand to the legislature and that will go nowhere.
Another factor (and one which I only know because I’ve been obsessed with this case) is that Evergreen has a huge dropout rate for freshmen. I think that has part to do with people not enjoying the Evergreen experience and part to do with the 97% acceptance rate. Apparently, this occurs disproportionately for racial minorities and is part of the justification in that it’s the problem that justifies all the social justicing.
The out-of-state students are the ones who believe in Evergreen. For most in-state students, it’s just a 97% acceptance rate with cheap tuition and/or the only 4-year school in the Olympia area. They will be even less inclined to put up with the eccentricities of Evergreen State University.
Not surprising. The conventional wisdom is that it’s because Mizzou is now perceived as a hotbed of racism and an uncomfortable place to live for African-Americans. But I also believe that it has in part to do with the (lack) of education you’d expect to receive amongst all the protests and activism.
I love the smell of Schadenfreude in the morning. Smells like… victory.
Small detail to highlight the extent of the left’s caring attitude is the fact that the layoff notices so far have all gone to maintenance workers and other “facilities staff members”, not the disgusting faculty screamers or limp-spine administrators.
So the PC crowd screws the pooch, the college has a resultant drop in high-paying out of state applicants, and the lowest of the low on the hierarchy of employees get the boot.
There’s social justice at work!
It’s like the lefty AGW hysterics in their SUV motorcades and private jets — consequences are for the little people.
That’s a good point. But the left isn’t so much about “The Workers” anymore. They find the workers distasteful and, well, low class.
In a practical sense, firing even an untenured faculty under the Evergreen model is difficult. I’m sure some of this hit is being absorbed by not replacing retirements (which are happening at a good pace now with baby boomers aging).
Had to look this up: