From the issue dated July 11, 2003
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Big Troubles Loom for Florida's Public CollegesLawmakers do little about with imminent crises involving money and governanceBy PETER SCHMIDT Predicting a train wreck is one thing. Stopping the trains is another.
The Legislature wrapped up work on matters related to public colleges last month, and it's the actions that its members didn't take that could have the biggest effect on higher education in the state. Lawmakers failed, for example, to centralize the governance of Florida's 11 public universities to conform with Amendment 11, a ballot initiative adopted by voters last November. Although the lawmakers established a Board of Governors to oversee the state's public universities, in accordance with the amendment, they didn't give it an office or money to do its job. Backers of the constitutional amendment say they are preparing a lawsuit to force the Legislature to carry out the measure. In the meantime, the question of exactly who is running the state's public universities is up in the air. What may be worse, the Legislature did little this year to rescue public colleges and student-aid programs from projected fiscal crises. Nearly every legislative proposal dealing with higher-education finance was shelved in the face of strong opposition, even though reaching consensus on such measures may only get harder down the line. "We are really stuck," says Aubrey W. Jewett, who monitors the Legislature as an associate professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. Echoing the sentiments of public-college officials throughout the state, he says, "The higher-education system needs more money if we are to maintain quality and access." But lawmakers, who already have reduced support for Florida's public colleges by more than $50-million in the budget that they adopted for the fiscal year beginning in July, appear unlikely to give the institutions much more money anytime soon. That leaves tuition increases as the colleges' only likely source of major revenue increases. But proposals for double-digit tuition increases have been blocked by fierce resistance in the Legislature. And the more-modest tuition increases that have won legislative approval in recent years have barely provided the colleges with enough additional revenue to cover the cost of increased enrollment. Rock-Bottom Tuition Florida has several distinctions that make its infighting over how to finance its public colleges and student-aid programs especially volatile and difficult to resolve. For one thing, the state's tuition rates are among the lowest in the nation. Florida residents paid an average of $2,700 in tuition to attend a public university during the 2002-3 academic year, compared with a nationwide average of $4,100, according to the College Board. Many of Florida's higher-education leaders maintain that tuition must approach the national average if its public institutions are to be able to improve their academic reputations and keep up with enrollment growth. But many of the state's residents love its low tuition rates. State Rep. Fred Farkas, a Republican member of the State House of Representatives' Education Committee, says the public universities "have been cheap for so long that no one wants to pay more." Lawmakers have been loath to increase tuition, assuming that to do so will only anger voters. And because Florida spends much less on need-based student aid than many other states do -- just 16 percent of its federal Pell Grant recipients, the neediest students, receive state aid -- many legislators have worried about the effect of tuition increases on poor students. Among them is Senate Minority Leader Ron Klein, a Democrat, who warned during the recent legislative session that higher education was being priced "out of the budget of many families in Florida." Complicating the debate are Florida's prepaid-tuition plan and merit-based Bright Futures Scholarship Program, both of which rank among the largest of their types. The lottery-financed Bright Futures program distributed awards to about 107,000 college students in the 2002-3 academic year, at a cost of about $219-million. About one-fourth of the recipients -- those with high-school grade-point averages of at least 3.5 and test scores of at least 1270 on the SAT or 28 on the ACT -- received the program's Academic Scholars Awards, fully covering their public-college tuition and fees. Most of the other recipients -- those with GPA's of at least 3.0 and scores of 970 on the SAT or 20 on the ACT -- received the Medallion Scholars Awards, which cover 75 percent of tuition and fees. The number of students receiving some form of Bright Futures scholarship has doubled in the past five years and continues to grow at a rapid pace. As a result, because so many Floridians receive scholarships tied to public-college tuition, the state cannot increase tuition without also increasing the cost of its Bright Futures program. "Every time we raise tuition, we take [money] out of one pants pocket and put it in the other," says state Sen. Stephen R. Wise, a Republican member of the Senate Education Committee. Power of the Prepaid When the state House voted in April to let universities increase undergraduate tuition for in-state residents by 12.5 percent, some higher-education officials warned that a prospective seven straight years of such increases would cause the annual cost of the Bright Futures program to more than double, to approximately $450-million. Florida's State University Presidents Association argued that, rather than eschewing such tuition increases, legislators should take steps to hold down the cost of the Bright Futures program. They suggested detaching the awards from tuition costs and raising the bar, academically, for students seeking the Medallion Scholars Award. But legislative proposals for such changes were shot down, partly because of the program's popularity, and partly in response to a legislative report concluding that black and Hispanic students would be disproportionately harmed by a heightening of the eligibility standards. Parents who had invested in the state's prepaid-tuition program also emerged as a powerful force against the 12.5-percent tuition increase adopted by the House. The state-sponsored program, which essentially lets parents buy a future college education at today's tuition rates, operates on the assumption that it can invest the money collected and count on the returns to more than cover rising college costs. As long as the economy and the stock market were healthy, and tuition rates didn't rise by much more than 7 percent annually, the financial health of the program seemed a given. But the Legislature's recent consideration of much steeper tuition increases in the sluggish economy prompted Stanley G. Tate, chairman of the Florida Prepaid College Board, to warn people who had purchased prepaid-tuition contracts that the long-term financial health of the program was in jeopardy. Given that nearly 880,000 such contracts have been purchased in the program's 15 years in existence, and nearly 42,000 Florida residents were using prepaid-tuition funds to pay for college, his warning was enough to ensure that lawmakers' phones would ring off the hooks. "Many of the people who get these benefits are middle class, and many of them are Republican middle class," says Mr. Jewett, of the University of Central Florida. "If there is anybody that can have clout with our Republican-dominated Legislature, it is these voters." Lawmakers agreed to let Florida's public universities increase their tuition for in-state undergraduates by 8.5 percent, while giving them the option of raising tuition rates for out-of-state and graduate students by up to 15 percent. The state's community colleges, whose tuition is near the national average, will increase their tuition by 7.5 percent. Lawsuit Likely The $53.5-billion state budget adopted by the Legislature for the 2004 fiscal year calls for a reduction of $40-million, or 2.7 percent, in support for Florida's public universities, even though the institutions expect to take in an additional 22,000 students in the coming year. At a meeting last month, some members of the university presidents' group said they may need to freeze freshman enrollments in the fall of 2004 to cope with the insufficiency of state funds. Support for the community colleges was set to decrease by $11.2-million, or about 1 percent, despite their predictions of substantial increases in their enrollments and costs. "We are just not going to be able to provide every student with every course they need," says Harry T. Albertson, executive director of the Florida Association of Community Colleges. The situation is likely to worsen, he says, because state economists have predicted an even bleaker budget picture for both the state and its public colleges in the coming year. Advocates of Amendment 11, the higher-education governance measure, argue that the Legislature acted illegally in setting public-university tuition. They say they plan to challenge the Legislature's actions in court, to ensure that the new Board of Governors will be setting tuition henceforth. They also say they may challenge the Legislature over its failure to allocate any more for an office or staff for the new board. "I think there is an excellent basis for a legal challenge," says E.T. York, a former state higher-education official who is helping to devise the lawsuit. One former member of the Board of Governors -- Richard W. Briggs, the faculty representative -- says he was not willing to wait around for the state's budget picture to improve, or for the board to assume its full powers. In June, he announced that he was resigning from the board before the end of his term, and leaving his position as an associate professor of radiology at the University of Florida to take a job at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. His resignation letter cited the "consistent underfunding" of the state's public colleges and "the increased politicization of education" in Florida as major reasons for his departure. In a subsequent interview, he said, "A lot of changes need to happen." 
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 49, Issue 44, Page A21
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education