As the chancellor of Nevada's higher-education system faced yet another round of budget cuts last month, he said he had no reason to make misleading claims that "the sky is falling" on public colleges in his state. The truth, he said, is that it is.
"The reality is so ugly that what seems exaggeration merges with fact," the chancellor, Daniel Klaich, wrote in a public memorandum.
Weeks later state lawmakers approved a 6.9-percent midyear cut for higher education, a reduction that came on top of a 24-percent cut in state funds the system had already been dealt in last year's budget session.
As a result, Nevada universities are preparing to close colleges, departments, and programs; demoralized professors are fleeing the state; and thousands of students are being shut out of classes at community colleges. The prospect of shutting down an entire institution remains a "distinct possibility" for the future, the chancellor says.
That's because the worst may be yet to come, in Nevada and elsewhere.
Shortfalls in California, which faced the largest budget gap in the nation this year, have grabbed much of the attention as tens of thousands of students were turned away from public colleges and tuition rose by more than 30 percent. But other states' public higher-education systems are getting hit just as hard or harder.
Utah saw the biggest percentage drop in state general-fund spending over the past two years, while also facing one of the fastest projected growth rates in high-school graduates. Arizona's budget gap was nearly as large as California's, by percentage of its general-fund budget, and it is facing much faster growth in its traditional college-age population. Florida, too, is seeing rapid population growth and big drops in state spending that have resulted in large cuts in higher education.
In Colorado federal stimulus dollars have made up close to one-fifth of the total state budget for higher education in 2009 and 2010 combined, making the state the most heavily reliant so far on that temporary pot of money for financing higher education. Illinois is facing a cash-flow crisis, with the state last month falling more than three-quarters of a billion dollars behind in budgeted payments to its colleges. Over the past five years, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and New Jersey have seen the fastest drops in state higher-education appropriations per full-time-equivalent student.
No one factor can indicate which states and their college systems are in the most serious trouble. But in no state do prospects look bleaker for public higher education than in Nevada, where fiscal, demographic, and academic challenges all rank among the toughest in the nation.
The state's projected budget gap for next year is the country's largest, measured by proportion of general-fund budget, a shortfall expected to equal nearly 60 percent of Nevada's total budget. Over the next 10 years, the number of high-school graduates in the state is expected to grow by 26 percent, the fastest rise in the United States. And Nevada already struggles with college-pipeline problems, ranking 50th among the states on the likelihood of its ninth graders to earn a high-school diploma, with only about 56 percent doing so.
"We're at a point of particular peril," Mr. Klaich said in an interview.
Threats to Public Aid
So is public higher education in general, many college leaders and policy experts say.
State spending on higher education has already been declining, in terms of the proportion of state budgets spent on public colleges and the proportion of college budgets that come from the state, and generally has not kept pace with enrollment growth and inflation over the past several decades. The recession has only exacerbated the trend. It has been so deep and lasted so long that many fiscal analysts say it could be years, if ever, before state spending on higher education rebounds to anything close to previous levels.
Other budget pressures on states, including growing Medicaid rolls, increasing pension liabilities, and escalating prison costs, are only intensifying. In many places, politicians and their constituents adamantly oppose increasing revenues through new taxes. And even when the economy does begin to bounce back, state revenues typically lag in their recovery by at least two years.
At the same time, federal stimulus dollars for education, which have temporarily helped states stave off deeper cuts in higher education, are running out. Only 14.2 percent of the stimulus money set aside for states' education budgets remains available for the 2011 fiscal year, and 20 states have none at all left to spend, according to the Education Commission of the States.
"The current recession and a convergence of other pressures on states and the American economy have eroded the ability of states to rebuild their financial support for higher education," Paul E. Lingenfelter, executive director of the State Higher Education Executive Officers, wrote in an essay accompanying his group's annual state-finance report this year. "As a result, the resiliency of public financial support for American higher education is threatened, putting quality, capacity, and the underlying ability to meet student and societal needs at risk."
Where will those trends leave public higher education? Some college leaders say institutions' base lines of state support will simply be reset to lower levels, with the new fiscal reality leading institutions to narrow their missions, limit course offerings, and require students to pay increasingly greater shares of the cost of their education. But other college experts worry that, without more-fundamental changes in how institutions operate, the budget trends that have been accelerated by the economic downturn of the past two years will lead public higher education down a path to mediocrity.
"Higher education is changing by virtue of 1,000 painful cuts," said Stephen R. Portch, a former chancellor of the University System of Georgia.
If public colleges cannot revamp their structures—such as by creating ways to measure learning more effectively and allowing capable students to earn degrees more quickly—state tax systems will continue to limit spending on colleges in ways that will erode quality, Mr. Portch said, leaving faculty members to teach more and more students and take more and more unpaid furlough days, alongside fewer and fewer colleagues.
"Business isn't coming back to normal this time," he says.
A Chronic Crisis
That message is beginning to hit home in Nevada, where the state's major industries—construction, gambling, and tourism—have tumbled. The state has no income tax, and revenues from its sales and property taxes have plummeted.
Michael D. Richards, president of the College of Southern Nevada, said the state's budget crisis was so chronic that he was dedicating a section of the college's strategic plan, now in the process of being updated, to retrenchment. He wants to use it to outline processes and priorities for budget cutting.
"We're trying to take a systematic approach, but it's all in the negative," he said. "You're really not planning forward—you're planning forward for the survival of the institution."
His two-year college, the state's largest, has been unable to grow to meet the region's fast-rising demand, with 5,100 would-be students walking away from the institution last fall after being unable to register for classes they wanted. The college has tried to do what it can to expand access on a limited budget, including offering eight classes this semester at midnight, when classroom space is available.
The state's universities, meanwhile, are weighing how to best scale back their academic offerings. At the University of Nevada at Reno, the state's land-grant institution, the provost has proposed closing the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources and eliminating a number of degree programs. The plan would result in a loss of about 75 jobs that are currently filled, which could include dozens held by tenured professors. Final decisions on what to cut will be made in June and will take effect next year.
James T. Richardson, a sociology professor at the university who is also director of its judicial-studies program, praises leaders of the university and the Nevada System of Higher Education for the collaborative process they are using to make tough decisions, involving faculty members and other people with a stake in the outcome. Nevertheless, he said he was "extremely disappointed" in how the budget cuts are taking the university and the state backward.
How can an institution not offer a master's degree with a statistics concentration or undergraduate majors in French, German studies, and Italian—all cuts proposed by the provost—and still call itself a land-grant university? he asked. "It starts to raise the question, What is a university?"
The cuts have deeply harmed morale, many Nevada professors and college officials say, causing top faculty members to leave. John W. Fil-ler Jr., president of the faculty senate and a professor of special education at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, said 100 faculty positions have become vacant there over the past two years as people have fled.
When assistant professors, in particular, ask him about their future in Nevada, he said, he has started to tell them to "take care of yourself and take care of your family and career," and consider jobs elsewhere. Mr. Filler has been at UNLV for 21 years, and he said that he, too, would be floating his curriculum vitae within a year.
Paths Forward
Despite the gloom, universities in Nevada and elsewhere have been able to make some progress without spending money.
Milton D. Glick, president of the University of Nevada at Reno, said faculty members had agreed to teach more classes and classes with more students, leading to a 19-percent increase this year in the number of credit hours taught by tenured professors even as the university's state budget has been cut by 21 percent in the last 18 months.
Charles B. Reed, chancellor of California State University, which has faced a 20-percent cut in state aid over the past 18 months, is making plans to improve graduation rates, at no cost. His campuses are changing their approach to academic advising so students get a clearer road map toward a degree, and campus officials are tracking down students with 130 credit hours or more, urging them to complete their degrees and move on.
Many experts on higher-education policy say revamping the credit hour, in fact, could be the key to overhauling public colleges to make them more financially viable.
To thrive in the face of continued declines in state support, higher education must get serious about improving academic productivity, providing more learning for every dollar spent, said Joni E. Finney, practice professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania and vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, a California-based nonprofit group.
Colleges could reduce their academic costs by as much as 50 percent, she said, if they improved student-retention rates and cut back on the number of excess credit hours students earn beyond what they need for a degree.
"Students are given a smorgasbord of courses, but what is really important for students to know?" Ms. Finney said. "Let's reduce the level of choice in curriculum—it's where people get lost—and get them through in a reasonable amount of time."
Mr. Portch, the former Georgia chancellor, said degrees should be awarded based on what students know and are able to do. Students who can demonstrate mastery of specific skills and knowledge, through prior learning, tests, or other measures, should be allowed to progress more quickly to a degree. Time spent is the norm and learning is the variable in earning degrees right now in higher education, he said, but learning should be the norm and time the variable.
Any efforts to make fundamental changes in how degrees are awarded would face a number of barriers, including accreditation standards that take into account students' time in the classroom and federal student aid that is awarded based on credit hours. But "something has to give," Mr. Portch said.
Mr. Filler, the UNLV professor, said finding ways to reduce the number of credit hours students take did seem to be an "inevitability of the times we're going through." But improving higher education, in Nevada and nationwide, rests on improving its quality, not simply the speed with which students move through their studies, he argued.
Among other inevitabilities, Mr. Filler said, is more widespread use of differential-tuition policies, which charge more to students who enroll in more-expensive programs, such as nursing and engineering.
But not all college officials and policy experts have accepted the idea that public aid for higher education cannot be increased. Mr. Reed, of Cal State, is pressing federal officials to provide direct aid to colleges that enroll many students eligible for Pell Grants, a gauge of which institutions are doing the most to educate financially needy students. He said such an approach would give the Obama administration a better chance of meeting its ambitious national goals for higher education, including giving the United States the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020.
Mr. Lingenfelter, of the state higher-education officers' group, said states could choose to set aside more money for higher education, and even a little bit could go a long way. If the average state budget for higher education were gradually increased by one percentage point, to 7.5 percent of state budgets, the average increase in state dollars for higher education would be 15 percent, he said.
"No country has ever improved the quality and scope of its educational system by persistently reducing its budget," Mr. Lingenfelter wrote in his recent essay on state finance. "While some may wish this were possible, it is not. Nor can colleges and universities improve their scope and quality without focusing on essential priorities and increasing productivity and efficiency, most especially when resources are limited.
"Both renewed, sustainable public support," he wrote, "and a more productive and effective educational system are needed."
Comments
1. oncebobcatgreen - March 15, 2010 at 01:26 pm
Why doesn't anyone ever suggest getting rid of administrators as a means of improving efficiency and reducing overhead. If you want to educate more students, especially in areas with predicted increases in high school graduates, then you need to retain faculty and programs. That any school would consider getting rid of a biotechnology program in this day and age is ridiculous. Most major public institutions have an administrator: faculty ratio exceeding 1.0. There are just too many well paid administrators for any insitution of higher ed to be efficient.
Q. What gains revenue for a univeristy?
A. Students who pay for credit hours?
Q. How do you deliver credit hours?
A. You have faculty teaching courses?
Q. Where are administators in this revenue:cost mathematical equation?
A. Nowhere.
Many, perhaps even most, administrators play valuable roles, but the very titles they possess suggest a complete lack of effieiency (assistiant to the vice provost for XYZ, assistant to the assistant for ABC).
2. 11200222 - March 15, 2010 at 08:33 pm
Dear oncebobcat: you reveal a complete ignorance about everything it takes to making organizations work. It may be that a given school has too many in administration, but a school with all teachers and no administrators is like a house made of bricks which have been piled on each other without mortar. It might look like a good house until a stiff wind blows or someone leans against it, but then it will topple. What are you going to do when your regional accrediting agency requires extensive documentation--detail the work to a junior professor who knows little or nothing about the overall workings of the institution? What will you do when an employee sues the institution for some sort of discrimination? How will you repair the utilities and leaking roofs? How will you deal with housing issues without a student affairs staff? How will you send out transcripts of graduates--detail it to a French professor? You are totally clueless. It must be wonderful to live in your naive world.
3. pjcaruso - March 16, 2010 at 06:46 am
That is much too harsh. The growth in administrative positions is certainly fertile ground for exploration.
4. ksledge - March 16, 2010 at 08:04 am
I agree with 11200222 -- administration can be inefficient at times, but oncebobcat clearly has NO idea just how important it is.
5. fixsen - March 16, 2010 at 08:50 am
The silver lining to this cloud is that for once, someone is doing some deep rethinking of higher education, its purpose and its structure. We need to be finding answers to the questions of what a college education is supposed to deliver and how effectively it is doing it. The cost of a college education continues to rise, and post-graduate degrees are becoming more necessary for more and more careers. When will it stop? Like our health care system, our system of higher education has become extremely bloated and inefficient. Two articles that should be revisited are "A Matter of Degrees," by Clive Crook (from Atlantic, 2006), and "The New Ivory Tower," by Christopher Clausen, Wilson Quarterly 2006.
6. iusbacad - March 16, 2010 at 08:51 am
Wow, it is clear those wanting to get rid of administration have no clue what the role of administration is.
oncebobcat - "Why doesn't anyone ever suggest getting rid of administrators as a means of improving efficiency and reducing overhead. If you want to educate more students, especially in areas with predicted increases in high school graduates, then you need to retain faculty and programs. . . . "
In times of budget crisis, Administration always gets cut. Eliminating Administration, as you suggest, is not smart or wise. Administrators are needed for institutional strategic planning, assessment, accreditation, and accountability. Faculty are very good at assessing at the course level but not so much at the program and institutional level. Throwing more resources at an institution such as additional faculty and courses isn't the answer.
"Most major public institutions have an administrator: faculty ratio exceeding 1.0. There are just too many well paid administrators for any insitution of higher ed to be efficient."
Please provide your source for this statistic.
pjcaruso - "The growth in administrative positions is certainly fertile ground for exploration."
Perhaps this may be the case at your institution but it is certainly not the case at ours.
7. gimmeabreak - March 16, 2010 at 08:54 am
To oncebobcatgreen:
In my institution of over 8000 students, we have six senior administrators (two of whom are faculty), about 130 staff members who service students, maintain ground/buildings, take care of the campus technology, raise funds, attend to legal/personnel/record-keeping matters and assist the 300+ faculty (some of whom teach no classes and others of whom work only two days a week).
Because of personnel shortages resulting from budget cuts, we have staff members working 55-60 hours a week to take care of the students and keep the mechanisms running that put and keep the butts in the classes you teach. Take away the computer on your desktop/in the classrooms and labs, the secretary that collates your course packets, the housekeepers that empty your trash, the student service personnel that process the financial aid, the administrators that have to keep morale from plummeting when there is too much to do and not enough time or people to get it done for the senior level faculty who complain about having to come to campus other than on Tues and Thurs between 9a-3p, who won't allow the SFR to increase beyond 16.7:1, who are rude to the support staff that are there to attend to the things that are beneath the faculty member (i.e., cleaning out the microwave after your soup boils over), just see how many students come to the institution that provides your cushy tenured job.
Since faculty outnumber administrators 50-to-1, how about if we get rid of 50 pieces of tenured deadwood for every administor we let go?
8. iusbacad - March 16, 2010 at 09:03 am
"Since faculty outnumber administrators 50-to-1, how about if we get rid of 50 pieces of tenured deadwood for every administor we let go?"
Or perhaps utilize tools such as the Delaware Study to examine instructional costs.
9. 7738373863 - March 16, 2010 at 09:19 am
One unexamined issue is what we mean by "public higher education" as that term relates to the cost of a college education and how that cost is borne. Some state systems charge rather hefty tuition and fees to in-state as well as out-of-state students--Massachusetts, for example--and some systems, such as Pennsylvania's, use state subsudies in partial support of otherwise private universities. Not all of the institutions in question are of the low-tuition, low-fees variety.
In all of the hand-wringing about cuts to state aid for higher education in the Mountain West--and let me concur that these are painful cuts--I have seen little or no discussion about the possibility of raising tuition or fees significantly. I think the systems in question need to enter into a pact with their state citizens and legislators: a freeze on administrative costs for three to five years, accompanied by a modest rise in tuition and fees, with a strict accounting of how these new revenues are being used to support the primary mission of a state system: educating its undergraduate citizens.
10. nibs08 - March 16, 2010 at 09:23 am
The Nevada system's financial woes stem partially from ignorance and disdain for government in general, and the university system in particular, among the populace.
No state income tax + plummeting property taxes + declining gaming revenue = A LOT less money for higher education. State systems of higher education are a subsidized enterprise -- an initial investment produces an educated workforce and a more diversified economy, which prevents losses from a lopsided revenue stream -- gaming in this case -- from decimating an economy. Yet even the suggestion of creating a state income tax evokes screams of protest from the masses and the conservative hacks they elect.
11. 7738373863 - March 16, 2010 at 09:23 am
It's time to donate the Delaware Study to the Smithsonian, which will proudly display it, with its flawed methodologies--especially its strange accounting--in the dinosaur wing.
12. ciceronow - March 16, 2010 at 09:26 am
The discussion above looks like a fight between administrators and faculty, that's just what the corporate types want. Stop funding public education, cut the budget, let the educators turn on themselves. We have to look outside that box. The real problem, given short schrift in the article, is this:
"In many places, politicians and their constituents adamantly oppose increasing revenues through new taxes."
My only problem with administrators is many, not all, have for the past decade or so, taken up the cause of the corporate overseers on their goverance boards, you the ones appointed by politicians as pay back for campaign contributions. May have big salaries, fly around in corporate jets, have maid and cooks on the state's dime. At my schol we have become top heavy with administrators with two new associate deans and a communications officer hired all with high salaries. Now they are participating in making higher education look and act llike a business. In the business world there is no tolerance for frivolous thngs like art history or foreign languages. This crisis ios being used to transform public higher education into forpprofit model like phoenix and Kaplan. its a slippery slope. Yes adminsitrators are needed and yes its probably a place to look for trimming.
I wish Obama would have a one time massive tax on thse who made windfall profits in the past several years like banking, investment finance, housing loan executives and board members, the oil and gas producers,etc. Take back the public money taken by the robber barrons of the last adminsitration. I also wish we had some uniform industrial tax policy in the country that would not allow corporatins to play one state against the other in scheme to lower corporate taxes.
Another solution is to make faculty more a part of adminstration. it used to be that universities were self goverened. Make faculty admisntrators and make them cycle through, do their duty and then return to teaching.
13. novain - March 16, 2010 at 10:12 am
Lean and mean efficient systems; I fully support it. As a start, why not get rid of tenure. The open market will weed off the inefficiency, unless labor unions impede the process.
14. ciceronow - March 16, 2010 at 10:25 am
How about if we require 50% of all corporate boards of directors be elected by the workers like they do in Germany and other places instead of getting rid of tenure. Or how about we open up access to higher education and have the government pay for it like they do in European nations. Whoops, that would require taxing coprporations and the rich appropriately. novain is exactly what I am talking about. Its the final push of the econmic institutions of market capitalism to take over every other institution (politicians, heath care, public education...). We all now where that leads (two depressions as history). The open market is a failure, read stome Stiglitz or Reich if you need evidence. we had 25 years of deregulation and market forces, now colleges and universities are failing just when Obama wants us to reclaim the 60% college grad rate as we have slipped behind other industrialzed nations.
The capitalists must be stopped. Make higher education the beachhead.
15. intered - March 16, 2010 at 11:06 am
There is an alternative to this whining, begging, and threatening a loss of quality.
See: http://www.intered.com/higheredbriefing/2010/1/26/an-alternative-to-begging-how-our-state-universities-can-do.html
A better approach is for state universities to learn to manage their enterprises effectively. Among other things, they could recover the millions they lose to the competition by offering better programs, better service, shorter times to degree (e.g., more three year degrees), less indifferent and inefficient organizational bumbling, understanding and participating in the marketplace, creating more partnerships, and much more. It is also time for them to begin measuring and managing real quality, instead of using the term as a hollow shibboleth as is now the case.
------------------
Robert W Tucker
President
InterEd, Inc.
www.InterEd.com
16. murphy - March 16, 2010 at 11:47 am
xx
17. murphy - March 16, 2010 at 11:48 am
I am interested in thoughts on the value of the Delaware Study. Is anyone using it for budget ideas?
18. ciceronow - March 16, 2010 at 11:53 am
More neocon lecturing to public universities about: measuring, managing, growth, quality, profitability, market share, and efficiency...Public universities are also supposed to promote equity and may be inefficient if they are fulfilling their mission. National parks are inefficient uses of the land are they not. The online, private, for-profit model is not the model for the salvation of higher education. I mean really if you want to talk about quality.
The metaphor of education as a business doesn't work despite the fact that some people make a good living off of it. Let's find a new metaphor.
Voice or opposion to the dominant paradigm is "whining". Demanding more from government for supporting the mission of public higher education as defined by its professionals is deemed "whining".
Someone also wrote about freezing adminstrative costs and raising fees. That seems like another tax on the middle class and didn't a court in CA just require the UC system to return to students a pile of money raised from fee hikes?
See:http://www.jceps.com/
19. 22234131 - March 16, 2010 at 12:08 pm
I am very concerned for a couple of reasons. How as a country can we regain some of our loss wealth and reclaim our standing as an innovative, educationally desirable place creating jobs if we don't take care of educating future generations. Do I believe that only our current 120 hour/45 hours for a 3 credit course work, no. But if we only focus on a defined set of skills and knowledge are we simply giving a series of certificates?
I believe that one of our greatest assets in higher education was the need to look beyond what I had to know for this job--and to learn something about other things. Is this our current general education--2 maths, 2 history, 2 political science courses, 2 english---i think that answer is also no.
But our focus on No Child Left Behind outcomes has not helped our K-12 schools, so let's now push that mentality into higher education. We need to rethink general education into liberal education--focus on synthesis and analysis--not learning more facts.
20. davidmo - March 16, 2010 at 12:15 pm
We live in an increasingly socialistic society that continues to be supported (more or less) by a captitalist funding model. It's not sustainable. We move toward the inevitable precipice hobbled by excessive laws, regulations, and "unfunded mandates" with the tripartite albatrosses of inflexible labor, clueless administration and unyielding ideological fanatics around our necks.
I'm retiring.
21. sciencelibrarian - March 16, 2010 at 01:00 pm
This article brings to mind what the late management guru Peter Drucker said about higher education. Here is an excerpt from an article about Drucker published 13 years ago:
"Education. Now there's a subject that interests everyone today. President Clinton says we should pump more money into the present educational establishment. Drucker says the current setup is doomed, at least so far as higher education is concerned.
'Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive. It's as large a change as when we first got the printed book.
'Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? And for the middle-class family, college education for their children is as much of a necessity as is medical care--without it the kids have no future.
'Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis.'
Crisis means that things will get either much better or much worse. Things will get much different, Drucker says.
'It took more than 200 years (1440 to the late 1600s) for the printed book to create the modern school. It won't take nearly that long for the big change.
'Already we are beginning to deliver more lectures and classes off campus via satellite or two-way video at a fraction of the cost. The college won't survive as a residential institution. Today's buildings are hopelessly unsuited and totally unneeded.'
Drucker, though a lifelong academic, will shed no tears for the present system. 'High school graduates should work for at least five years before going on to college,' he recommends. 'Then it will be more than a prolongation of adolescence.'"
Citation:
Kenzner, Robert, and Stephen S. Johnson. "Seeing things as they really are." Forbes 10 Mar. 1997, pp. 122-128.
22. goodeyes - March 16, 2010 at 03:15 pm
Universities like to pay $100K+ for an administrator to do a job that a 50K person with no PH.D could do better. If you really want to say money, pay employees based on valued added and and not on degrees for administrative positions. You don't need to pay someone 100K+ to advise students or recruit. This is wasted money even in good budget times but this money could go for faculty development, scholarships, etc.
23. dmaratto - March 16, 2010 at 03:46 pm
DOOM!
I just get annoyed when people want all the benefits of socialism (Medicare, social security, subsidized public education, unemployment benefits, etc.) and yet refuse to acknowledge that this isn't possible without paying for it all somehow. People in Nevada pay no income tax? Come on now. Give a little, get a lot.
I agree that the U.S. government is wasteful, inefficient, and probably evil, but that means we should do something about the structure of the institution, rather than piss and moan. Jeez, I mean, when this kind of situation happens in other countries, they start chopping off heads. In America, we can at least vote out all the party people and incumbents who have no knowledge of real life, and get some typical citizens into Congress and the White House. Do Obama or Pelosi or McConnell or Boehner know how much milk and bread costs? I doubt they even pump their own gas. Citizens should run the government, not a corporate elite.
As for higher education: there are over 3000 colleges and universities in this country, and there will be less when the decade is over. Hopefully the survivors will be better and stronger, not just disabled and antiquated. That can't happen.
24. upallnight - March 16, 2010 at 10:09 pm
A large percentage of the lawmakers in my state do not have college degrees. There is a general anti-intellectual environment, particularly in socially conservative sttes. The lack of support and funding for higher education goes deep and is just another reason that American is well on its way to becoming a third world nation.
25. bdbailey - March 17, 2010 at 07:34 am
Novain,
As a practitioner of Lean, lean and mean should NEVER be used in the same sentence.
As for the free markets, isn't that what got us in the current mess?
One approach that has value in the long term, but is not a short term fix is the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria and process.
26. kcfeminist - March 17, 2010 at 09:01 am
"Goodeyes" said "You don't need to pay someone 100K+ to advise students or recruit." I don't mean to continue the administrator/faculty divide, but this is just ridiculous. Advisors and recruiters at my university make around 30K (and many even less). Admissions in particular has a high turnover rate thanks to long hours and low pay. There may well be some overpaid administrators who are overpaid and do nothing, but that is simply not true for the majority of administrative staff.
27. cleverclogs - March 17, 2010 at 10:18 am
I would not advise raising tuition and fees (as suggested in #9). I'm in MA where this is what they have done. This plan has made it difficult for most people to get through the school in a timely manner. Students often have to have full-time jobs and their academics suffer greatly. Alternatively, others take on so much debt that they only care about learning things that will get them a job so they can pay back their loans. Is this really what we want our lives to be about? It's almost Kafkaesque, and certainly short-sighted.
The whole point of public higher education is 1) to create a well-educated populace capable of participating in democracy and 2) to offer access and opportunity for those who cannot afford a private higher education. The point is not to feed the credentialing monster with loan money.
You can't paint all administrative types with the same brush. I think most people would agree that their are lots of admin people who make universities go and without whom we would cease to function. These people tend to make not nearly enough (30K-50K). And then there are the worthless fatcats making $450,000/year + a car or house or whatever. These chancellors and presidents and provosts and overpaid deans are justly condemned, especially since they appear to do no actual work, just grandstand their way through the day. But even if they did twice the number of things they say they do, these administrators still make way too much money. Half a million dollars for a public servant is way, way too much, especially as they seem to make so little progress.
28. observer001 - March 17, 2010 at 11:28 am
Those (like post 21) who claim universities are irrelevant, like books now that ebooks exist, are simply deluded and confusing an advance in the means of delivery for content, whose quality, no matter what, still depends on how much an institution can and will invest in its faculty.
The question is really whether the middle and lower classes (meaning the vast majority of the population) will have access to world class higher education and means for social mobility. Although voters and taxpayers in states like Nevada might not want to admit it, they have answered no. Fine, I guess many aren't surprised to see Nevada, Alabama, New Mexico, S. Carolina in that category, nor is it a great loss if their institutions dissapate. But voters in states that have built world class institutions, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Carolina or California, are evidently still trying to make up their mind whether they want to keep them, destroy them- or privatize them. The Harvard, Princeton, Yales will still exist to educate the wealthy and well-connected after the dust settles. The next generation in states like Nevada who can only get a short online 'degree' taught by adjuncts, will not be able to compete in life with those who are equipped with an education from a Harvard or Michigan. The UK is already well ahead in dismantling their public higher education system and worth of their degrees (BA's reduced to two years, PhD's mandatory 3 yrs) with Lord Mandelson's imposed cuts (sadly including their elite institutions too like UCL, Cambridge and Oxford). Thank goodness the US will still have its private universities intact, but without its great public universities, it will be greatly impoverished and less able to compete.
29. lorax - March 17, 2010 at 01:22 pm
To 21: we're now apparently nearly halfway to Drucker's 30-year mark. I'd expect public universities to be nearly half-gone by now if his dramatic prediction were accurate.
To change the subject less than it looks like, though--what if there is no easy fix for this? Maybe nothing any of us can write in a couple of paragraphs beginning with "the problem is really..." can address a complicated situation with many components, including poor credit hour generation by (some) faculty, (some) overpaid administrators wedded to a "business" model that hasn't worked well in actual business, (some) state and federal legislators who are bought by (some) bloated corporations, or a populace AND a government in which relatively few people value education highly enough to sacrifice for it? Some of this we can change, slowly and painfully, but what quick fix will address the whole interlaced system? Things don't look good for public education at any leve; they look likely to grow much worse; maybe we can't change that, no matter whom we blame. Maybe we're looking at decades of dark years. Maybe the best advice, if also the most belated and least practicable, was Philip Larkin's: get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself.
30. acetylcholine - March 25, 2010 at 12:05 pm
... the fact that, from what this article says, Nevada could be the first state to totally lose its entire public university system should be a wake-up call.