2008 Woodie Awards
Colleges must try creative approaches to budget shortfalls
Issue date: 2/20/03 Section: Opinion
- Page 1 of 3 next >
|
COMMENTARY
By Leo Higdon Jr.
(KRT Wireservice)
As state revenues dry up even more, public colleges are facing a crisis. Even when the economy improves, more cuts to public higher education may occur, and reductions already implemented might not be recovered. At the same time there are still thousands of additional students attending college due to a boom in the college-age population, estimated to increase 13 percent by 2010. And although there have been measures to deal with this, such as mid-year tuition hikes and removal of enrollment caps to handle the influx of students, the bottom line is the same: there is not enough money to support public higher education.
In a 1999 report published by the Center for Public Policy in Higher Education, analyst Harold Hovey predicted this crisis: Paying for other important public services such as K-12 education, roads, prisons and police would not only strip money away from colleges, but force states to curtail even current levels of service.
Colleges have always responded to past budget shortfalls by reducing costs, replacing full-time faculty with adjuncts, increasing class size and raising tuition. Then, if that failed to do the trick, they escalated to cutting programs and people.
But these measures can be counterproductive to the purpose of higher education, especially in light of today's knowledge economy. More than ever, we need an educated workforce to deal with increasingly complex business and social problems, and right now 80 percent of that workforce is educated in public institutions.
So this time the way in which colleges are funded must undergo reform. The universities themselves and the legislatures must share the onus to ensure that both this and future generations receive the best education possible. And there is much more at stake here than the survival of our public institutions; also at stake is our economic growth and development, the development of an informed, involved citizenry and access to higher education.
The universities can lead by focusing on the institution's mission and the core academic programs necessary to support it. Any programs extraneous to that mission should be re-evaluated for possible elimination or curtailment; so, in some cases, this means moving away from the "academic supermarket" mentality of the 1990s.
This also means asking tough questions: Is a program within our mission, key to our future, and, if so, is it affordable? Is it a duplication of an existing program at another institution? Truthful answers may mean that the university's aspirations need to be tamed.