This morning James Joyner notes that Greensboro College, a small North Carolina college, has resorted to stringent measures to reduce its costs—it’s imposing a 20% across the board salary cut:
It’s an understandable move but one that will surely be harmful in the medium run. Unlike most jobs, where employees forced to take a salary cut can immediately start looking for another position and leave two weeks after finding one, colleges hire on an annual basis and it’s now too late to find a new tenure track job for the 2009-10 academic year. I’d expect Greensboro’s best faculty to spend much of the next year looking for a job at a more stable institution.
That may be harder than it sounds. I suspect that the Baby Boomer faculty who hold tenured professorships in many institutions are going to be clinging to them for dear life as long as the economy is shaky.
On a related note in an op-ed in the New York Times Tom Brokaw calls for consolidation among small institutions of higher learning, particularly those located in rural areas:
In my native Great Plains, North and South Dakota have a combined population of just under 1.5 million people, and in each state the rural areas are being depopulated at a rapid rate. Yet between them the two Dakotas support 17 colleges and universities. They are a carry-over from the early 20th century when travel was more difficult and farm families wanted their children close by during harvest season.
I know this is heresy, but couldn’t the two states get a bigger bang for their higher education buck if they consolidated their smaller institutions into, say, the Dakota Territory College System, with satellite campuses but a common administration and shared standards?
He goes on to observe that North and South Dakota are far from unique.
Over the period of the last thirty years American business has undergone dramatic changes in the way they do business. Some of them, e.g. the excessive dependence on borrowed money, have resulted in the consequences we see around us. But others have resulted in dramatically greater efficiencies. We are demonstrably getting more done with fewer resources.
The institutions that have been largely avoided those reforms are those that haven’t been subjected to the same competitive pressures, notably government and its handmaiden industries of healthcare and education. I believe we’re reaching a tipping point at which these institutions will either reform or collapse.
Update
On a related note in reaction to the state’s fiscal problems the University of California is considering pay cuts:
The University of California’s huge workforce could face salary cuts and furloughs if the state’s economy continues its downward spiral, UC President Mark Yudof has told his staff.
In a memo this week, Yudof said he has instructed his top deputies to “begin planning for the possibility of employee furloughs and/or temporary and permanent salary reductions” as a response to the state’s continuing budget crisis.
The UC system employs a whopping 170,000 full-time and part-time faculty and staff, a payroll of more than $9 billion. When California’s colleges sneeze, U. S. academe gets a cold. Either faculty wages at institutions of higher learning will respond to factors of supply and demand or funds will need to be transferred, i.e. taxed, from other, more productive organizations.
I also agree with Brokaw’s other point, we have too many county governments and buildings in places with too few, and diminishing, people. Here in Illinois we have more than one county with a population of less than 5,000. Half of the counties in Illinois have less than 27,000 people. And I’ve been to numerous of the counties that have all the activity of a Maytag repair shop. And then after 9/11, they all got added security details. I’d start combining the counties, so they have no less than 50,000 people in them.