And so it begins. As we learned today from Jennifer Gonzalez’s article, “State Directors of Community Colleges See Bleak Financial Times Ahead,” community colleges that were supposed to get a much-needed opportunity to improve and update their infrastructure, courtesy of the economic stimulus package, will instead be faced with record-high enrollments concurrent with record-low budgets.
It seems as though state and local officials saw stimulus funding not as a way to pay for some much-needed, one-time investments in facilities, but instead as an excuse to cut their own support for these important instituitons of higher education. Community colleges have done the right thing for decades by keeping tuition low, despite the fact that the students they serve are most likely to need costly academic support services. Now community colleges are being further penalized at the very moment when demand for their services has increased. We had a golden opportunity to give a little boost to these institutions that are so critical to our post-secondary participation and success goals, yet state and local officials let it slip through our collective fingers.
Of course, we will be quick to criticize these institutions when the students they cannot afford to support don’t somehow manage to persist. Whether you supported the stimulus package or not, this was a golden opportunity — perhaps the only one we will have in our lifetime — to give community colleges a boost similar to the one they received in the 1960′s when we made the initial investment to set up campuses across the country. We had our chance, and it looks like we blew it. Maybe if state and local officials would give more money to community colleges, they’d need less for prisons.
But lest you believe that this is a problem unique to community colleges, I’d like to remind everyone that a similar pain will be felt by research universities when stimulus funds end and federal R&D budgets go back to a baseline that will seem quite anemic by comparison. We all know that stimulus funding is time limited, but when the money runs out, there will be an uproar about the “cuts” that are being made to the federal R&D budget. We can see the storm coming, but the question is, are we prepared?
We learned a lot from the recent doubling of the NIH budget that should be instructive to Federal agencies and universities about optimal uses of stimulus funds. When the NIH doubling effort was announced (and from the very beginning the community was warned by the Clinton and Bush Administrations that after doubling, there would be several years of flat budgets), it seemed as if nearly every research university built a new building so that they could better compete for these newly available funds. This, of course, meant that while the money doubled, the demand more than tripled, and NIH grants were even harder to win than they had been before. Moreover, while doubling was sold to us as the way to increase success rates, and provide more funding to younger scientists, in reality, success rates declined and the average age of first-time awardees increased by the end of the doubling period.
The stimulus package nearly completes a “tripling” of the NIH budget, which was $14-billion at the time that doubling began. But it is hard to see how this level of funding can be sustained into perpetuity. I hope that agencies and instituitons are using this time-limited cash surge to invest in equipment and facilities rather than research and salaries, or the results will be dire in a few short years. If a flat budget in the wake of doubling seemed like a cut, I can’t imagine how a $10-billion return-to-baseline reduction will be felt by campuses across the country. And NIH was just one of several agencies that received a hefty bump in their R&D budget as part of the economic recovery act. Depite the best wishes of Congress and the adminstration, it is doubtful that voters and taxpayers will support another stimulus package, and returning to pre-stimulus baselines will feel an awful lot like falling off of a cliff.
