Our genius administrators decided to eliminate graduate assistantships to save money. Graduate assistants get a tuition waiver, and the administrators thought that if we don’t offer them, students will pay full tuition.
We tried to explain that applicants choose the most competitive package when deciding where to apply. If you don’t offer a tuition waiver, people don’t go to graduate school. Even Harvard doesn’t charge for graduate studies. And we are not Harvard.
The administrators scoffed at us in loud, obnoxious ways and eliminated half of all graduate assistantships.
Then the graduate enrollment dropped off a cliff.
Now the same administrators are sending us long, desperate missives asking us why our graduate school is disappearing.
All the administrators involved in this scheme are extremely woke. This cluelessness of theirs is a result of that. They sincerely believe that human beings are blank slates and interchangeable widgets. They think they can engineer people’s behavior into pleasing results. And it never works because humans are more complicated than that and have agency. But the poor darn fools never learn.
Clarissa's Blog 
I think some university faculty never talk to students or have zero ability to put themselves into anyone else’s position. Our administration has forced through changes to the general education program that are going to cause drastic enrollment shifts and departments need to prepare for this. Without revealing too much identifying information, students used to have A as a requirement, but future students will have options A, B, or C.
– A is similar to the traditional requirement and requires the most work
– B is a bit less work for students
– C involves the least work for those students who qualify to do it. But a large percentage of students will qualify.
It seems pretty clear that A courses are going to shrink drastically, B courses might grow a little bit, and C course enrollments will boom. Most students will choose the option that is the least work, it’s not rocket science. Departments need to roll out more C courses and make them interesting if they don’t want to lose out on enrollments.
I’ve been to several meetings about this change and faculty thoughts on this have included things like:
– A is still an option and the students learn the most with A, so most of them will choose to do that.
– Our A courses have always had great enrollments, so I don’t see what the problem is.
– Students who take our C courses will love them so much that they will want to take our A and B courses so all of the enrollments will increase.
– This is an enormous opportunity to grow our B course on an insanely obscure and specific topic.
– Why would our A enrollments change? Won’t we just get more enrollments in the B and C courses? We will definitely need more TAs.
– We’re just going to retool a super boring D course and call it a C course, that should be good enough.
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I witnessed this while teaching at a high price middle school.
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