<p>What do you think? I think he's nuts on most suggestions.
From the COHE. Feel free to email him your comments.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:schweber@polisci.wisc.edu">schweber@polisci.wisc.edu</a></p>
<p>In Rough Seas, Flagships Could Use a Course Correction
By HOWARD H. SCHWEBER</p>
<p>When we talk about the future of public universities, we are usually talking about the flagship state universities. They have greatly increased expenditures in the past decade. A case in point is the University of Kansas, which has tripled its spending and raised its tuition and fees by a factor of five since 1988.</p>
<p>That's unusual, but not extraordinary. The goal of the flagship institutions has been to compete with the best private universities, based on the assumptions that state funds will be plentiful, and that students and their families will be able come up with the money.</p>
<p>But both state support and tuition are becoming less secure as states face deficits and families find the cost of college increasingly difficult to meet. Overall, the price of tuition and fees has gone up 439 percent in the last 25 years, while median household income has risen 147 percent (and those gains were far from evenly distributed). Student borrowing has more than doubled in 10 years. And all of those developments occurred before the current economic crisis.</p>
<p>For example, the state of Wisconsin has a $5.4-billion budget deficit this year, and next year's is expected to be worse, so appropriations to higher education will most likely be severely limited. Meanwhile, the cost of tuition at Wisconsin's public four-year colleges was 24 percent of household income for families in the middle economic quintile; for those in the lowest two quintiles combined, it was a whopping 44 percent. The average debt of a graduating college senior in the state in 2007 was more than $20,000.</p>
<p>America's public universities are already underfunded and will become only more so. Something has to give. Some actions that public flagship institutions might take to alleviate their financial distress include:</p>
<p>Find more money. The federal government makes money the old fashioned way by printing it. States don't have that option. They can increase tuition, raise taxes, or issue bonds, none of which is an attractive option for the near future. The stimulus package that is under discussion in Congress includes money for higher education in the form of expanded Pell Grants, tax breaks, and science fellowships. But those are only partial responses at best. Federal intervention is a short-term response to the lack of state support, not a substitute.</p>
<p>Reconceive the mission. The mission of flagships is commonly described as research, teaching, and service. Two themes are at work: serving the people of the state through education and training, and excelling academically. The problem arises when the costs of pursuing excellence begin to interfere with the possibility of providing education and training. If Wisconsin families cannot afford to attend Madison, the university that consumes half of all of the state's appropriations to higher education, can we still justify the pursuit of excellence for its own sake?</p>
<p>Suppose we abandon the ideal of the public Ivy. Suppose we limit the mission of flagship state universities to teaching state residents and attracting economic investments. Flagships like the University of Wisconsin at Madison eat up state funds, but they also compete with the richest private colleges for top faculty members and resources. From the state's perspective, money invested in a flagship is not necessarily lost; the federal money that flows in translates into jobs, investments and expenditures, and tax revenues. In 2005, Madison employed 9,100 in university research; 218 companies had direct ties to the university, and faculty members brought $764-million in research-and-development spending to Wisconsin.</p>
<p>But those direct economic benefits accrue from a specific set of research areas, primarily in the natural sciences. In those areas, there is obviously no economic argument for reconceiving the institutional mission. What would be the consequences of treating research as secondary to teaching in other areas? Such a reconceived mission would mean paying faculty members less, insisting that they teach more, making promotion depend on teaching and service as much as on research and publication, and perhaps weakening tenure to enable institutions to get rid of highly paid but unproductive faculty members. Above all, it would mean getting out of ruinous bidding wars for "star" faculty members, unless their presence is expected to generate enough revenue to justify the expense of hiring them.</p>
<p>Lowering the competitive standards of programs that do not produce significant amounts of nontuition revenue would free up resources. But then states would be getting out of the business of supporting top-level liberal-arts scholarship. The best students in the social sciences and humanities would, presumably, no longer want to attend flagship state institutions. Professors except, perhaps, for eccentric idealists would divide themselves even more quickly. Many, if not most, marketable faculty members would probably migrate to private institutions or to more-competitive public institutions in other states. The differences among the educational tiers of American higher education would become even more sharply defined than they are now.</p>
<p>Keep the mission, but shrink the institutions. A different way to reallocate resources is simply to make the flagship universities smaller. That means not just fewer students, but fewer programs. Madison's 30,000 undergraduates can choose from among 161 majors and 35 certificate programs. Those programs offer wonderful educational experiences that enrich the lives of students. Many also have small classes with lots of seminars. Nonetheless, it may be argued that 161 majors is a luxury.</p>
<p>Flagships could continue to compete with the best private colleges, but in fewer research areas and with fewer students. The specific decisions would have to be left to institutions, a kind of educational federalism. I would hate to be on the committee that makes those decisions, but certainly the criteria would have to include something about efficiency: How many students are served by how many faculty members with how much staff support and using how much space?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, more students could be served by expanding the less-expensive campuses in the system. Even now those campuses are facing record applications and the deepest cuts in state appropriations. There is something to be said for the argument that the colleges that provide the training that lift people out of working poverty, turn a future of jobs into a future of careers, or provide the training that makes a modern work force competitive, ought to be at the top of the list of public priorities.</p>
<p>Share the pain. Pay cuts for everyone! Keep the mission the same, but declare that those who want to pursue careers at an august and prestigious flagship will have to do it for (even) less. Average salaries for faculty members already are not particularly high. Nonetheless, if the choice is between making even less money or seeing programs cut, hiring freezes, and junior faculty members dismissed, perhaps enough tenured faculty members would be willing to make a sacrifice. (Those are the sorts of concessions that 50-year-old autoworkers are being asked to make to keep their industries in operation.)</p>
<p>An alternative is to leave salaries alone but freeze hiring, increase the teaching load, and wait to save money by attrition through retirement and departure. (More than 15 public and private institutions have publicly announced hiring freezes in the past month or two, and many more have quietly stopped hiring.) Other people in academe are reconsidering the health-and-retirement benefits that come with public employment. It is worth noting that increasing employees' contributions for health-care coverage, like a hiring freeze, is an approach that falls most heavily on the most vulnerable among us: junior faculty members, graduate students, and staff members. Our current plight will test the willingness of those at the top to make sacrifices for the sake of those at the bottom.</p>
<p>Cutting salaries, like lowering research standards, would increase the divide between public and private institutions. A good number of the best and most-senior faculty members would leave, and some would take labs and grants with them. And the gap in attractiveness between working at a public university and working at a private institution would grow.</p>
<p>Change nothing. That might mean hiring fewer faculty members and paying them less, but otherwise not acting. Departments that are understaffed would remain understaffed; departments that are top-heavy with senior faculty members would fare better. After a few years, course offerings would begin to be affected, meaning that some students might be unable to pursue certain majors or find it difficult to complete their degrees in a reasonable period of time. Tuition would continue to go up, and more and more state residents would forgo college altogether, while others attend two-year colleges instead. Someday the economy would get better, but until then, well, it's just too bad.</p>
<p>At a certain point, of course, flagships' finances could get so bad that they have no choice but to act. At that point, the opportunity for careful planning and weighing of options will very likely to be lost.</p>
<p>Now is the moment to think about the future of public higher education. What is our mission, and does it justify spending public money? What are our priorities? The ideas sketched here are only starting points for a conversation. Other ideas are worth considering, including three-year bachelor's degrees, restricting flagships to the third and fourth years of study for students who have already completed two years on another campus, outsourcing remedial programs, and expanding professional master's programs in lieu of Ph.D.'s. There is no doubt that many of those proposals will draw howls of outrage, and in some cases rightly so. But it is time we started having that conversation.</p>
<p>Howard H. Schweber is an associate professor of political science and law at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.</p>