Evergreen State College faces $2.1M budget shortfall, cites enrollment drop, issues layoff notices

So I’m seeing this passed around as the feedback mechanism that’ll stop Savonarola/Red Guardism on college campuses, and it even sounds plausible: following an outbreak at Evergreen State, enrollment drops slightly.

However, just like at fellow state school Mizzou before it, this is an existential threat because the drop is concentrated among out-of-state students, whose higher tuitions provide a margin to subsidize in-state students as shrinking legislative appropriations once did. (Without which they’re forced into layoffs and hiring freezes, further undermining the path to tenure, etc.)

Still I’m not sure exactly how this “PC backlash” tangles with the distinct but proximate issues of declining state funding and a possible “end of the college bubble”.

Like, are “PC culture” and “low funding” independent variables? Do the cultures that produce such things alienate legislatures, leading to low funding (like Freddie deBoer was warning)? In the other direction, does underfunding by, uh, The Man alienate students? (Recall, that iconic cop pepper spraying student protesters in 2011 was from a protest against tuition increases in the UC system)

And I’d really like to see comparable local/nonlocal student numbers from other state schools and equivalently selective private colleges, with just Evergreen and Mizzou’s numbers I could also tell the stories

1. Demand for college is falling at the high private/out-of-state price point but not the lower in-state
2. Demand for out-of-state specifically – a state school experience at a private college price – is declining

It’s also a possible sign that the market is so oversaturated that minor perturbations from not just PC-gone-mad but any source, or random noise, can render a school unviable, and we’re in for an imminent crash that might differentially favor the non-PC to some extent but largely occurs on other lines.

There was actually a US crash in the 80s, when the long GI Bill-Baby Boom buildout left too much capacity once the Boomers aged past college (and, uh, the draft ended). A bunch of undistinguished liberal arts or denominationally-affiliated colleges closed and the survivors had to hustle, I remember the animated “What about Gwynned-Mercy?” commercials on Philly daytime TV, others with all sorts of 90s-ass #aesthetic CGI, made by students to save budget and show off how they could prepare you for the exciting and lucrative new world of multimedia