- US universities have cut 650,000 jobs, a 13 percent workforce reduction, since the onset of the pandemic, WSWS, 25 Feb. 2021. - Ed.
The Dept. of Labor published a striking report this month on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education. The report concluded that colleges and universities have cut a total of 650,000 jobs since Feb. 2020, 13% of all higher education workers. While the Dept. of Labor has not specified the types of jobs which have been cut, reports from university systems across the country demonstrate the damage done to university workers.
Thousands of positions for food service and custodial workers have been cut as on-campus services were slashed and dorms closed.
Workers engaged in student services have also been vulnerable as services were moved online & condensed. Some of the most notable targets of university layoffs & cuts have been adjunct faculty & non-tenured professors, who have been the subject of significant rounds of mass firings as to cut costs and consolidate courses. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY announced in May that it would not be renewing the contracts of 200 employees, incl. 60 full-time non-tenured faculty & an undisclosed number of adjuncts.
RPI also furloughed nearly 300 employees, mostly non-instructional staff, despite the university president making $5 million a year.
Over the summer, Northern Arizona Univ. eliminated 114 non-tenured faculty. Provided with no severance, they were told they would lose their health coverage within a week. The Univ. of Akron eliminated 178 positions, incl. 23% of its unionized full-time faculty between the start of the pandemic and summer 2020. The Univ. of Michigan laid off 173 workers, furloughed over 3,500 & enforced more than 2,300 wage reductions. One of the largest attacks on university staff came from the City Univ. of New York (CUNY) system, which laid off 2,800 adjunct faculty last summer, a quarter of CUNY’s adjunct staff..
The immediate cause of these mass job cuts is the collapse in university budgets during the pandemic. However, there is no doubt that the crisis is being utilized to push through a restructuring of higher education that will result in lower wages for professors & other school staff...https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/26/high-f26.html
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