Emerson College fires employees, sees enrollment drop following anti-Israel protests

[Slant Eyed Polack]

Link: Emerson College fires 10 employees, sees enrollment drop following anti-Israel demonstrations

Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts has fired 10 employees following anti-Israel protests at the school earlier this spring.

“College leadership has made the difficult decision to eliminate ten staff positions to help us realize our necessary cost savings,” announced an Aug. 13 email...

...School President Jay M. Bernhardt initially announced the plans for the staff reduction on June 18, citing dropping enrollment in the college. Bernhardt attributed the falling enrollment in part to the negative attention that Emerson has gotten due to disruptive anti-Israel protests at the college...

In deep blue Boston, no less. I'm diagnosing it as an anomaly; an exception to the rule. Rabid antisemitism is the new normal on the left. From the river to the sea, boys & girls. Seig Heil!

 

[Melensdad]

While college enrollment took a dip around Covid and then started rising (slowly) again, colleges are closing at a rate of approximately 1 per WEEK across the United States.

Many are smaller schools that are not well known.

Many are schools with nearly as many "administrators" as they have students, some have more administrators than students.

Many are schools who have low academic standards and provide low value for the dollar.

Many have expanded the 'DASH STUDIES' departments like "gender-studies" or "queer antiquities-studies" or similar such things that don't really lead to any sort of a career that can pay back the student loans.

Many dropped standardized testing (SAT or ACT) which are the single highest predictors of success in college.

Many don't have strong pre-med, engineering, pre-law, economics, mathematics/physics departments, etc.

We have Valparaiso University roughly 35 miles east of where I live. They lowered the standards of their law school maybe a decade (?) ago in an effort to boost their law school enrollment. It eventually led to the law school failing and closing in 2020. The University still exists, but it took a big hit in their law program. They had an enrollment "goal" to get up to 6000 students but due to many factors the enrollment fell below 2600 students by 2015 while debt piled up. I don't know the future of the school, but it seems fairly bleak long term. Wittenberg University, a long standing Ohio university, seems to be suffering badly from draconian covid mismanagement (and many more problems) and seems to be on the verge of teetering into the abyss.

On the other hand another small school that stands on a strong traditional education with strong departments like classics and history, Hillsdale College in Michigan is thriving and not only has maintained selective admissions but has long lines of people trying to get into the school. Purdue University adopted a strong(er) model of excellence about a dozen years ago and is now considered one of the top public universities in the nation for academics, has moved into the highly selective category for admissions, and has rigorously controlled costs.

So clearly there are two models. Follow excellence and succeed, or bend the knee and ultimately fail.