College Presidents See Gloom from the Top
In previous columns I have discussed opinions about higher education from the vantage point of faculty, students and the general public. But what do college and university leaders think of the current situation and predictions for higher education in the United States?
A study published last April by the top trade journal in the field, “The Chronicle of Higher Education,” sheds some light on these subjects. Under the title “The View from the Top,” the report shows the results of a survey of 376 presidents of four-year colleges and universities in the country. The questions in the survey concentrated on issues that are on everybody’s minds when it comes to postsecondary education: financial sustainability, college rankings and student outcomes.
To begin with, 65 percent of the respondents said that higher education is going in the wrong direction. They said that although they are optimistic about the state of the U.S. economy, they are very worried about the financial sustainability of their own institutions. Not surprisingly, the ones showing the highest level of concern are presidents at public institutions. This is not unexpected given that states have made deep budget cuts to higher education, with more expected in the years to come.
According to a study published in March of last year by The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an American think tank that analyzes the impact of federal and state budget policies on different sectors of society, states are spending 28 percent less per student since the 2008 recession. In some cases the cuts have been extreme. In Arizona the cut was more than 50 percent. And the future looks even worse. The governors of states such as Louisiana, Wisconsin, Illinois and many others have announced very deep cuts in their budgets for higher education.
Presidents of private colleges and universities are less concerned than their public counterparts because they do not depend upon public funding, but they are still worried that federal funding will diminish, making their colleges less affordable to students with fewer means.
Because the natural way out of some of these financial difficulties is to increase recruitment of students, leaders of postsecondary institutions in states where the number of high school graduates has either leveled off or even decreasing (like, for example, in the Midwest) are even more concerned since they do not see this as a viable option.
Private institutions feel a little bit more optimistic since they have more freedom to configure their financial structure by not having to follow mandates by state legislatures.
One thing on which leaders of both public and private institutions seem to agree is their opposition to the federal government publishing ratings of their institutions. They are partially right when saying that postsecondary institutions are difficult to compare with each other because of the great diversity of their histories, missions, the constituencies they serve and their financial means. On the other hand, given the increasing concern over the cost of college education, and after a wave of state-mandated regulations, it is somewhat naive to think that the federal government will not continue to insist on rating these institutions when it comes to their cost and effectiveness to generate graduates with the ability to get a good paying job.
Since they can see this coming anyway, college presidents would like these ratings to be based on factors such as completion rates, average net price, and percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, while opposing using transfer rates and graduate school attendance as metrics.
Whether or not they like the feds rating their institutions, college presidents are aware that other ratings have a big impact in the way they see their own institutions, such as the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. In fact, 60 percent of those presidents say that such rankings are as much or even more important that they were 10 years ago. This is interesting given the fact that such a college ranking does not really take into consideration what should be the most important metric to measure higher education effectiveness: how much students learn.
Somehow these college leaders recognize that is an important factor since they still believe that what is learned in the classroom is most important when students are seeking jobs after graduation. This is in contrast to employers, who are interested in college graduates coming to them possessing basic skills.
When asked what are they doing to confront these problems, college leaders cite their actions in the following order: increase fundraising, create more online programs, have more revenue-generating programs and increase enrollments. It is interesting that these actions are expansive in nature.
Because of the diversity of institutions in this country, it is hard to imagine that there is a “one size fits all” solution to their problems. What does seem probable is that these college leaders will seek more entrepreneurial and progressive actions than just wait and see how much more budget can be cut. The reason is very simple. Once you start reducing student services you become less competitive. And once you start reducing the ranks of faculty, the quality and effectiveness of education diminishes.
Maybe they need to learn from Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, who during the 1929 recession, instead of firing employees, decided to transform and expand his company. They may also want to remember that Watson was the one who used the motto “THINK” to motivate his employees.
PDF Version
College Presidents See Gloom From The Top