Has cutting your way to greatness ever worked? — from insidehighered.com by Matt Reed
I can’t think of a time that it has, yet it remains a common default mode.
Excerpt:
Has cutting your way to greatness ever worked?
I can’t think of a time that it has, yet it remains a common default mode.
In places with declining enrollments and without generous external benefactors, it’s easy to fall into the trap of constant cutting. Each year is a fresh emergency, bringing another round of short-term patches and “temporary” workarounds that quickly become new baselines.
Over time, though, the cuts do damage that starts to show up in enrollments. Too many classes cancelled or calls unreturned lead to attrition, which leads to calls for still more cuts. Cut an off-campus location to save money, and whoops, you lose its enrollments, leading to a need for more cutting. Add an inexorably rising underlying cost — say, just hypothetically, health insurance — and you have the makings of a death spiral.
The task for the emerging generation of leadership isn’t just fiscal; it’s narrative.