Academia and The Great Recession

Academia Still Hasn't Felt the Full Wrath of The Great Recession

The pattern of the economy has hit a new cycle putting tremendous strains on the labor market. We have already seen recession patterns over the last century showing deep cuts in the job market only to be followed by a relatively quick return to the level of employment when a depression or recession has hit. However, The Great Recession is instead turning out to be a prolonged recovery and a prolonged loss of jobs. Moreover — in correlation to population growth and job growth — there exists a plentitude of bad news; namely, the labor market may indeed not fully rebound to 2010 job levels for another ten years. This means that we may be in the longest protracted recession in American history.

Peter Philips, Professor and Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Utah, recently gave a lecture entitled Gloom and Doom Meet Cap and Gown where he examined the future of the economy. "There will be a continued and accelerated withdrawal of public tax funding toward higher education which will [in turn] create a process of creating destruction," or "destructive creation" as Philips refers to it.

"The world ten years from now at the University of Utah will look remarkably different from the world of yesterday which is comparable to the transformations after World War II," Philips says, implying that the culture will have changed dramatically by that time.

World trade has grown faster than world GDP causing an increase in economic activity flowing through international trade. In other words, the globalization of the economy has exacerbated the recession exponentially, vividly portrayed in the nation's trade deficit. But the problem isn't the United States' alone as the bubble is only going to be spread to other emerging economies such as Italy, Brazil, France, and China. This will only accelerate, as opposed to stall, the decline of the American economy and as jobs dry up people will begin looking for new ways to employ themselves which will be reflected by a dramatic shift in the labor market.

What does this mean to you? The collapse of the American labor market has only just begun and its affects will resonate through academia and the labor market after you graduate. Signs of this have already begun in the form of universities cutting programs and actively selling rights and privileges for commercial use. Italian, French, Latin and other classical programs have already been victim to the guillotine at the University of Albany. "The product of the University of Utah will be fundamentally redefined as well," says Philips.

"Education is no longer going to be education. Think football, think the medical school. There will be a proliferation of innovations as people try to piggy-back higher education on some other income generated activity such as patentable research, of which there has been a lot of work already, or commercial or sponsored research which is a new endeavor on the part of the University of Utah." Incidentally universities such as the University of Utah will take similar action in order to secure new forms of revenue.

Texas A&M has actually applied a new formula whereby they're considering what a professor is worth— regardless of teacher evaluations or peer-reviewed journal articles — and instead judging them on how much revenue they're generating. If the revenue is less than their salary the university will denigrate the professor's salary to match the new numbers. Another option universities will take seriously is privatization which will intensely raise your tuition rates. And this is only year one. More cuts are sure to come. For better or for worse the changes are coming.

By: Jacob M. Stout