Can We Afford Our State Colleges?
The Chronicle of Higher Education
by Stan Katz
April 3, 2010
On Friday morning, the Princeton University Policy Research Institute for the Region co-sponsored a forum on state-supported higher education with the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities. I attended, along with one other Princeton faculty colleague (though others may have escaped my notice), but most of the audience was composed of officials of New Jersey's state colleges.
The topic was "How to Fix a Broken System: Funding Public Higher Education and Making it More Productive." The speakers and panelists were well chosen and quite helpful. They included Rich Novak (Association of Governing Boards), John Cavanaugh (chancellor, Pennsylvania State System), Dennis Jones (president, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems), David Carter (chancellor, Connecticut State University System), Jane Wellman (Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability), and the presidents or chancellors of three of New Jersey's best state colleges.
The focus was on the plight of the public four-year colleges of New Jersey, although the speakers made clear the extent of which our state problems mirrored those of most other states.
The picture that was drawn for us Friday was not pretty, and it is not likely that we will see a prettier picture for many years. Everyone agreed that the next few years will be worse than the past couple of years -- the federal stimulus money will be spent, state budget deficits will continue to grow, the easiest savings from cost-cutting will have already been taken.
The larger problem is one that preceded the Great Recession -- declining state expenditures for public higher education. Experts do not agree on the precise numbers, but over the past generation we have moved from an environment in which states paid for 70 percent of cost and students paid 30 percent, to a situation in which those numbers have exactly reversed. Increasingly, tuition accounts for the lion's share of institutional budgets, with state appropriations playing a minority role.
This has had many profound impacts, among them the creation of the need for greatly enhanced financial aid and the dramatic expansion of out-of-state enrollment (because out-of-state student tuition is much closer to the cost of their education). State institutions have long served as the road to upward mobility through higher education for less affluent families. The crucial impact, then, will be to limit college access for those who have been most dependent upon public education.
The sense I got Friday was that higher-education professionals do not expect the "good old days" to return. Their question was what future financing system could replace the predominantly state line-item system.
This is a genuinely tough question. It is quite clear that tuition is probably already close to maxing out its potential, unless we are to move to a more or less universally privatized system of higher education.
Much of the conversation Friday focused on cost-cutting, but there seemed to be agreement that although there were still savings to be had through more efficient institutional administration, the low-hanging fruit has been already picked. The same is true of across-the-board budget cutting -- the "easy" cuts have been made. Which leaves two questions: Can our public institutions somehow be restructured to accomplish as much without greater financial resources? Can productivity be increased sufficiently to produce as much with fewer (human and financial) resources?
As to the first question, I thought several of the speakers were implicitly advocating restructuring, but there were few concrete proposals. Perhaps this was for the very good reason that restructuring needs to be institution-specific. Yet, if we are to restructure, we need general principles to guide us.
As to the second, I was frustrated by the apparent consensus that public education needs to be more productive, because there was no discussion of the definition of productivity. I think many in the audience had completion of degree (finishing the B.A. degree within six years) in mind as the measure, although many other metrics might be substituted.
There was almost no attention to faculty research as a function of public institutions. To be sure, most of the colleges represented are not doctorate-producing institutions, but their faculty members not only do research, but are expected to do research, especially given that the rhetoric of the colleges is about making a positive economic impact on the state.
But even when instruction was (implicitly) assumed to be the measure of productivity, there was no discussion of measurable learning outcomes. I was also concerned by the focus on the combination of restructuring and productivity, because using those concepts crudely is likely to produce institutional policies favoring the most immediately economic beneficial strategies -- bad news for the arts, humanities, and liberal education. When I made that point publicly, I was assured that everyone was aware of that danger. We'll see. But it was a very thoughtful discussion, and I learned a lot from it.
Source: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Can-We-Afford-Our-State/22268/