Jackie has mixed reviews. D&I is a hot thing for organizations these days and TU was on the front end of it.
Holgorsen to UH
- Thread starter texcane1982
- Start date
I suspect that’s a starter degree like my philosophy degree, history degree, political science, etc. Get an MBA, law school, social work etc. lots of degrees don’t have obvious BA level jobs in that area. I don’t know though.
We are down the rabbit hole here, but there are a significant number of jobs for this major in non-profits and public works. They dont have a starting salary like STEM, and in a state like Oklahoma, many of the candidates have to compete with high school graduates with significant documented experience who are capable of performing the same tasks, so it can be frustrating for them at the start and they inevitably end up going back to school to get a graduate degree. Which is where the real fraud in higher education takes place. The schools attract students who cant get jobs, charge the student/federal government a premium tuition rate, while the student studies and works part time gaining the employment experience they lacked to begin with. Then when full time employment results from documented experience and greater maturity, the school tries to say their degree added the value. Nah. Maybe partly but only some of the time. For everyone else who is not a country gentleman scientist studying for studying’s Sake, if you are not getting a PhD, MBA or an MSW, you are getting scammed. A good example of that is the law degree.
In the 1990s, schools were desperate to pay for baby boomer faculty retirement while retrofitting their campuses for the Internet and technology. Anti-trust lawsuits were filed, the Clinton administration intervened, and a settlement was reached which basically eliminated academic entrance requirements to law school. If you could graduate from college, you were going to go to law school somewhere. You might not graduate, you might not get a job or be bright or talented enough to keep it, but you were going to get in and the schools were going to get that federal tuitition assistance — that you were going to have to pay back, not them.
So they greatly expanded the JD degree as an option, even for persons uninterested in actually practicing law. It devastated the industry. TU was especially guilty of this business model.
I have several friends with more than $100,000.00 in loans still pending who never practiced a day in their life. They graduated, didn’t know what to do, couldnt find a job, went to law school to “make their parents proud,” got pregnant in law school, stayed home, and their doctor/real estate broker/investment banker husbands have been paying on the loans like a day care expense ever since, $1200.00 a month or more, for the past twenty five years. It is a fine as a month to month expense, but when they are seventy and look at their retirement account and run the numbers of what it might have looked like with $250,000 additional in it, plus compounded interest, who kind of talk do you think they are going to have with their kids about how much the grandchildren spend on education?
I know a kid with $150,000 in student loans from law school making less as a lawyer than they made as an entry level manager at Outback Steakhouse ten years ago, and that’s before he subtracts his student loan payment. He’s at a pretty good firm with offices in downtown Tulsa. He isn’t alone.
And TU is feeling those effects. Only 80 some law students in this year’s class. That number has been over 300 in the past. All of them paying customers, most borrowing the money, and TU using those funds inside the law school at the rate of about 60 cents on the dollar so they can spend the excess money elsewhere on campus on programs that run a deficit or dont bring in money at all. We are talking millions of dollars over a decade. The law school was viewed essentially as a profit generating business.
That money is gone because the degree is viewed as having less value than in the past, the labor market is saturated, and TU is unwilling to admit students anymore just to take their money, so they are trying to make up elsewhere. They are going to have to do so. Even if the law degree value bounced back, there is no assurance that there will be enough students to fill the seats. The raw number of kids graduating from college is set to plummet, at least for a few years, because of a short term decline in the birth rate between 2008 to 2012 after the financial crisis.
So TU has significant short and long term financial challenges. There are solutions, but a clear pathway that avoids financial ruin twenty or thirty years from now is not assured.
For those of you who think this is just gloom and doom, there is historic precedent for it. I was shocked during my first week at Oxford when I was told that there was a period of about one hundred years, where education was so expensive and transferred so little real value that virtually every college in England would admit anyone from the upper classes just to keep the doors open. The value of the degree plummeted and even degrees from Oxford and Cambridge degrees were considered worthless. Several colleges within the Oxford system had to be closed or were consolidated with other better heeled colleges because the ruling class simply refused to along with paying the expense once they weighed the costs/benefits.
American higher education is likely headed to a similar consolidation/market correction. About a half dozen law schools have closed in the last couple of years, some more than 100 years old, including one that TU would consider a peer. Valparaiso is a regionally accredited private insitution of approximately 4,000 students in Indiana just outside Chicago. They play pretty good D1 basketball. They tried to give away their law school to anyone who would take it. No takers. Middle Tennessee State University sniffed around and passed.
Y’all starting to get the message on the full picture over on Tucker Drive?
Y’all still think we should drop a $1 million on an offensive coordinator just so we could buy 3 extra wins with this current staff just so we can go 5-7 instead of 2-10?
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