Catastrophe Capitalism in Increased Training

ASK A FACULTY MEMBER at just about any educational establishment in regards to the state of upper schooling and so they’re prone to let you know that we’re experiencing a catastrophe. On account of the COVID-19 pandemic, developments in generative AI, cuts to authorities grants and federal funding, and realities of the school enrollment cliff, our specific era of students and educators has seen the erosion not simply of tenure and educational freedom however of the trendy faculty and college as we all know it.

Although many of those challenges bear the distinctive really feel of one thing new, greater schooling has been in disaster for everything of many up to date lecturers’ full careers—together with our personal. Since incomes our PhDs, and even earlier than then, we’ve got witnessed the corporatization of upper schooling in varied varieties. As an illustration, the transfer to a contingent college mannequin has basically shifted educational work away from the type of labor that generations of lecturers who got here earlier than us carried out. Right this moment, the typical professor in greater schooling is a contract employee with out advantages or job safety. They’re usually paid miserably to show double and even triple the variety of college students as their tenure-track counterparts. And, due to the erosion of the tenure system, many contingent staff additionally carry out heavy service that’s normally reserved for tenured college. Contingent staff are stepping in to direct curriculum, educating facilities, and even departments, all with out job safety or the advantages of educational freedom that enable tenured college some extent of job stability. Concurrently, the price of tuition has doubled—even quadrupled if one considers inflation changes—over the past 20 years.

But with every new disaster our occupation faces, many leaders of establishments in greater schooling make excuses to erode tenure additional by retrenchment, buyouts, and the transformation of school strains into contract or workers work. In brief, astronomical tuition prices aren’t going towards educating or making certain a steady and expert professoriate. As a substitute, they’re empowering consultants and educational executives—the highest-level directors—who’re ever additional consolidating, chopping, and de-skilling the work that college and workers present to college students.

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Increased schooling is clearly damaged, however not for the explanations readers could hear about from pundits and speaking heads. The issue is that educational executives who run universities have capitalized on crises similar to financial recession and COVID-19, exploiting extraordinary conditions for short-term acquire. As sudden conditions come up, educational executives searching for to tighten institutional belts cannibalize companies and dump greater schooling, piece by piece.

Institutional actions vary from hiring and wage freezes to restructuring positions to the outright firing of workers. There have been a number of moments in latest historical past the place greater schooling executives responded to crises by suspending the norms of school governance and interesting in what the American Affiliation of College Professors, in its “Particular Report: COVID-19 and Tutorial Governance,” calls “opportunistic exploitations of catastrophic occasions.” Throughout Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the monetary disaster of 2008, the COVID-19 disaster in 2020, and the spring 2025 disaster whereby unprecedented federal funding and grants have been frozen or outright canceled, educational executives used these occasions to shut departments and applications, take away tenured college and exchange them with precarious labor, or have interaction in different techniques that eroded the soundness of the professoriate, to solely nominal monetary profit to the establishment.

We are saying nominal profit as a result of many of those selections have hastened the demise of the very establishments making them. The long-term outcomes, sadly, are a lot bleaker on the bottom. This predatory habits, coupled with the following backlash from staff, destroys college and scholar morale. It accelerates college and workers leaving the establishment. And, in lots of instances, it presages the wholesale destruction of particular person establishments of upper schooling as the speed of faculty closures over the past 5 years has dramatically accelerated.

At Penn State College, the place one of many authors of this text works, the destruction of establishments has turned literal with the shuttering of seven of Penn State’s Commonwealth Campuses, all of which have helped to hold out the land-grant mission of the college. Although the administration had indicated that 12 of Penn State’s 20 Commonwealth Campuses have been beneath overview as a result of decreased enrollments and projections for future enrollment all through the state, college, workers, and college students heard the information that the college president had proposed closing DuBois, Fayette, Mont Alto, New Kensington, Shenango, Wilkes-Barre, and York on Could 12 from The Philadelphia Inquirer, not from a direct message. And on Thursday, Could 22, the Penn State Board of Trustees accepted the plan to shut these campuses, with 25 members voting in assist and eight voting towards the proposal.

These campuses make use of over 500 workers and serve 1000’s of scholars, notably in rural and largely underserved corners of the state that depend on them. They’re the guts and soul of a precarious type of Penn State—one which exists to serve the general public good of those small communities. And although a plan is starting to emerge, no clear plan for the way forward for college, workers, and bodily assets was in place on the time of the shuttering of those campuses, a actuality that was met with widespread criticism from officers from throughout the Commonwealth.

Lengthy earlier than information of Penn State’s campus closures hit the mainstream media, different schools and universities confronted related challenges. As an illustration, the Faculty of Saint Rose in Albany, a non secular establishment that was recognized within the New York Capital Area as a significant producer of lecturers, closed its doorways in 2024 on account of 20 years of dangerous monetary and strategic selections.

In 1999, Saint Rose undertook an “arms race” alongside different schools and universities across the nation. Speedy actual property enlargement, coupled with 100 million {dollars} of renovations and new buildings, contributed to monetary losses over the subsequent 20 years. And these govt selections, most of which have been met with objection from the school’s college, left Saint Rose in debt with little to point out for it, notably after bigger scholar enrollments by no means materialized.

By 2016, Saint Rose had been working in a deficit for over a decade, and enrollments have been down 16 p.c. Then executives began chopping its premier applications, together with music and schooling, even if Billboard acknowledged its music business program as the most effective in North America, and likewise even if, in response to Carnegie Classification of Establishments of Increased Training, practically 1 / 4 of all undergraduates and practically 50 p.c of graduate college students studied schooling after which went to work in native college districts in and round Albany. By 2021, enrollments general declined by 37 p.c from the earlier yr, and Saint Rose tried to merge with different schools however finally failed. Their debt was too nice and their mismanagement too egregious.

In Reddit threads discussing a attainable merger between Saint Rose and Touro College, which has not materialized, these posting realized that the neighborhood round Saint Rose can be devastated by the school’s 87-building campus closure. Some customers puzzled if the merger may convey a much-needed dental hygienist program to the capital area.

West Virginia College has confronted related struggles. The college wildly expanded its actual property footprint and took on large debt earlier than participating in drastic cuts to applications similar to math and overseas languages in 2023. Earlier than the cuts, college voted no confidence within the WVU president, who led each the enlargement and ballooning deficit. Articles within the mass media have chronicled President Gordon Gee’s bullish enlargement, lavish life-style, and outrageous compensation buildings—in addition to the playbook he delivered to many earlier universities. Nonetheless, the Board of Governors pushed the cuts by, even after Gee famous the no-confidence vote. Inside a yr of the devastation at West Virginia, college and workers started fleeing the establishment.

And the doom cycle of faculty cuts and closures continues throughout the nation. A latest Inside Increased Ed article highlights the deep cuts going down at public establishments in Florida, Michigan, Montana, and elsewhere. It additionally options a number of personal colleges similar to Middlebury Faculty and Canisius College, each of that are providing buyouts to workers. Middlebury can be chopping employee retirement contributions and well being advantages and growing enrollment charges and tuition.

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Among the many extra compelling arguments towards shuttering campuses and applications is one which critiques the lack of institutional soul, a commodity that may’t fairly be quantified on spreadsheets by fiscal officers who’re involved with backside strains above all else. As Jay Paterno, Ted Brown, Alice Pope, Randy Houston, and Jeff Ballou—all present or former members of Penn State’s Board of Trustees or Alumni Affiliation—noticed in an open letter that opposed the closure of Penn State campuses,

The info across the Commonwealth Campuses recommend that we’re dropping roughly $40-$50 million per yr working them. That looks like a giant quantity however in an operation with a $10 billion finances that quantities to a 0.4% funding within the commonwealth. Not 4% however moderately 4 tenths of 1 p.c. […]

That 0.4% is an funding within the soul of Penn State and the guts of our land-grant mission to convey entry to the college to folks throughout the commonwealth. That 0.4% looks like a small value to pay for our soul.

This argument about soul gestures towards the notion that the assault on greater schooling goes deeper than revenue margins or financial opportunism. In any case, a number of articles on faculty closures word that taking over debt to finance infrastructure or program improvement will not be essentially dangerous or flawed, particularly when rates of interest are low. Saint Rose and West Virginia, nevertheless, took on egregious quantities of debt for little final acquire.

Extra basically, faculty and college closures are an assault on our democracy and on what we see as a collective, democratic venture that enriches the lives of scholars and educational staff in ways in which prolong far past a return on funding.

Since COVID-19, the losers within the enterprise of neoliberal greater schooling that catastrophe capitalism places into stark aid are the smallest, poorest, most precarious establishments, together with much less selective liberal arts schools, spiritual schools, and different regional colleges—that are closing at greater charges. Against this, schools and universities which have extra property and better status is probably not resistant to disaster, however they can capitalize on it.

These (largely personal) establishments are buying schools, a number of of them small liberal arts schools, at a quicker fee whilst they struggle the native tradition and practices at these establishments. For instance, Northeastern College was immune to participating in collective bargaining with unionized staff at Mills Faculty. Public universities like Kent State College and West Virginia College have eradicated a whole bunch of school positions and dozens of educational applications, amongst them applications in arithmetic, schooling, English, and different languages and literatures. Kent State additionally eradicated some mid-level directors similar to division chairs and affiliate chairs with college standing.

When taken collectively, these sorts of “strategic” strikes appear to be a playbook: a brand new president arrives and makes use of their imaginative and prescient to shake up mandates on the college. They tackle large ranges of debt by a sequence of poor selections, which could embody growing administrative bloat, constructing extra buildings, or investing in shiny however expensive new applications. The hope, presumably, is that these actions will entice donors and college students. On the identical time, college are pushed to the periphery of the strategic plan and globalized initiatives are inspired alongside revolutionary entrepreneurship.

However greater schooling will not be a enterprise in the best way that many of those MBA-influenced educational executives assume it to be. At its core, schooling is a typical good, which is why so lots of its staff are prepared to take pay cuts and lower-status jobs to contribute to this collective venture. These hole initiatives, over the long term, erode morale and deplete institutional coffers. However when educational executives, working in response to the logic of catastrophe capitalism, see a possibility to interchange expert and safe staff with precarious labor, they use the excuse of disaster to restructure college in methods that could be irremediable. This shift to precarity results in college transience and the erosion of educational freedom; it additionally undermines the democratic venture of schooling.

It isn’t stunning, for instance, that, after Saint Rose minimize a well-liked program, enrollments plummeted the next yr. Quantifying scholar engagement or curiosity primarily based solely on seats in courses or levels by majors misses how universities exist as ecosystems. College students may attend faculty to review one or two disciplines, however in addition they have interaction broadly throughout the establishment by normal schooling necessities, extracurricular pursuits, educational and profession assist, social actions, and extra.

It’s exhausting to quantify the methods through which a scholar strikes by their college, however it isn’t exhausting to quantify the devastating impact that shuttering applications or schools and firing college have on scholar enrollments. As Columbia College is studying, college students are savvy customers of schooling. They vote with their ft when the college betrays them.

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In an anecdotal on-line overview of the perfect schools to work for, we discovered that a lot of the top-rated universities have been additionally ones with substantial infrastructure, status, and cash, amongst them Ivy League establishments, R1 land-grant universities, and in any other case well-known colleges. But these very establishments are presently chopping workers and applications as a substitute of investing in college. And funding in college means investing in college students and the mission of upper schooling, as our analysis on educational labor has discovered.

As students of labor in greater schooling, we’ve got individually discovered that union illustration produces glad educational staff. Although unions definitely can not treatment all office points, and although some unions have extra energy than others, we’ve got discovered that unionized college are, general, extra glad with their jobs, workloads, and advantages. Additionally they have readier entry to details about their work, similar to advantages and leave-taking. Analysis has additionally proven that non-tenure-track college have higher pay, job safety, and advantages at unionized establishments.

Some establishments have countered catastrophe capitalism and given educational executives an alternate playbook to observe. Hofstra College, for instance, the place one of many authors of this text presently works, was deeply conservative with their enlargement and hiring after 2008. They used a “wait and see” strategy that solely just lately led to rising college sustainably. They don’t seem to be freezing hiring, chopping departments or applications, or quickly increasing towards the school’s will. Hofstra can be a unionized establishment.

There was a time when civic buildings, together with hospitals, colleges, libraries, opera homes, museums, and extra have been a supply of deep delight for his or her communities. Native schools across the nation have been financial engines: they employed domestically, stored {dollars} locally, and have been dependable line gadgets in legislative budgets. Neighborhood companies benefited profoundly from the financial engines of native schools.

In our present second, catastrophe capitalist practices proceed to unfold in opposition to our values. We now have all the pieces to achieve by coming collectively to supply native, communal responses. If we need to survive with our integrity intact, we’ve got no selection however to struggle for greater schooling proper now. There’ll at all times be those that attempt to exploit a fragile system for private acquire. The query for these of us who consider within the basic venture of studying is whether or not we would favor to stay comfortably silent and permit this to occur or whether or not we’re prepared to face up for our college students, our colleagues, and our communities.

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Featured picture: Greetings from West Virginia College postcard, ca. 1930–45, is within the public area. Accessed April 13, 2026. Picture has been cropped.