Colleges as Employers

I read with horror the news that Vermont may close Northern Vermont University, the recently formed merger of Lyndon State College and Johnson State College, in the northern part of the state. (Why they didn’t call it Lyndon Johnson State College is beyond me.) There has been some pushback, so it may or may not actually happen, but even if it doesn’t, I’d envision a devastating round of layoffs at a minimum.

I grew up in a town in which a state college was (and still is) an outsize presence. Back then it was important to the town; now it’s essential. Brockport used to have an Owens-Illinois plant, but that closed. It used to have a small GE parts producer; that closed. It used to be a popular place for people who worked at Kodak, in Rochester, to live; Kodak’s workforce now is a small fraction of what it used to be. The college is one of the only major local employers still standing, outside of low-end retail. And the student population is part of what keeps the downtown afloat.

Once you get outside of the suburbs of Burlington, northern Vermont doesn’t have a lot of well-paying jobs. It’s a beautiful area but not particularly prosperous. The loss of a college in a place like that isn’t only a loss for its students and employees. It’s also a body blow to small towns in the area. Losing those middle-class salaries puts downward pressure on everyone’s property values, and therefore on the local tax base. Losing the influx of students every year will hit the local restaurants, bars and low-end retailers and the people who own them and work in them.

Any loss of a college is sad. It’s much worse when the college is the town’s largest employer.

In rural areas, too, reliable broadband access can’t always be assumed. If students have to drive hours away to go to college, that’s a real problem. And the message people receive as institutions fall away -- “we don’t matter” -- tends to lead to some pretty scary reactions over time. (Jennifer Silva’s book We’re Still Here is excellent on this.) Support is reciprocated, but so is rejection.

To be fair, the fiscal struggles of Vermont’s public higher education system, like those throughout New England, are of long-standing. Perhaps as a side effect of a relatively large and influential bloc of private colleges and universities, public higher ed has been shortchanged in the region for decades. That leaves it especially vulnerable to shocks like the current one.

The CARES Act offered some help for public higher ed, but its toothless maintenance-of-effort requirement really blunted its usefulness. My own college, for instance, stands to lose more through the end of June that it will receive in federal aid, and that’s before discounting for the various strings attached. (It also assumes that the aid will actually appear.) The state has already cut its support by half, maintenance of effort be damned, so the federal aid is immediately spoken for and then some. The latest word is that subsequent aid packages are likely to stiff the states altogether, with predictable consequences for public higher ed. (As proof, here’s where I predicted it.)

The work that public colleges do is crucial; so are the people who do that work. Forcing layoffs is not going to help “open up” the economy; if anything, it’s directly counterproductive. People who lose their jobs cut their local spending, hurting the local economy. If you want to open up the economy and get the numbers humming again, whatever you do, don’t eliminate jobs.

I don’t know if the pushback to save NVU will work, or if it does, for how long. But I hope for the sake of everyone who lives nearby -- not only those who work or study there -- that it survives and even thrives. We know too well what downward spirals look like and how hard they are to stop once they get going. Better not to start in the first place.