Below is an article posted to Inside Higher Education this morning
by one of my favorite bloggers, Dean Dad (aka Matt Reed). I’d encourage you to
read it first and then come back here.
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
Let’s talk about the dog. Actually, it’s more like a pack of
dogs.
The Inside Higher Education website has a section devoted to the
topics of Assessment and Accountability. In 2013, there were 52 articles
published under this heading. In the first 5 months of 2014, 30 more have
appeared. These articles address topics such as completion, college and
university ratings, competency-based programs, the value of a degree,
escalating tuition costs, return on investment, among others.
There are dozens of books written by insiders; academics in
varying disciplines, from economics to political science to business management
and the humanities. Most of their conclusions are surprisingly consistent. They
talk about the ways in which academic culture strangles innovation and reform.
Even the academic insiders that love and respect for our educational mission
are identifying the greatest hurdle to overcome in higher education is inertia.
Attribution of blame usually follows.
“… Social psychologists call the drive to find and punish villains
a “fundamental attribution error.” It’s the fallacy of ascribing motive without
understanding context. Why did the driver in front of me brake suddenly? Obviously, he’s
a thoughtless jerk! It couldn’t be that a dog just ran out in front of him --
after all, I, from my vantage point behind him, didn’t see a dog! If we want to move the discussion forward, we have to make the dog
visible.”
Still, , we have little
incentive to overcome our natural inclination to stay the same and apparently,
what we do today is broken or at least not good enough anymore. The President of our United States has warned us of this several
times over.
On July 24th,
2013, President Obama vowed that he would soon unveil a plan to promote
significant reform in higher education with an emphasis on controlling what
colleges charge students and families. President Obama
directed the Department of Education to create a plan by the 2015-16 academic
year to rate colleges based on measures of access, affordability, and student
outcomes, and eventually to allocate federal aid based on those ratings.
Five days ago,
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “The federal government gives about $150-billion in grants
and loans to support higher education each year. Virtually all of that is based
upon inputs, virtually none of that is based upon outcomes. Taxpayers are
supporting a massive investment each year and have very little sense of whether
they are getting a good return."
In other words, the Federal government is threatening to insert
itself into what has traditionally been an institutional prerogative and
privilege…unless we change.
There’s a dog.
“A college, by
definition, is a collection of very smart people. In the right climate,
it’s a potentially fertile ground for crowdsourcing solutions. But if the
faculty and staff don’t see the dog, they’ll reach the wrong conclusions and
instead take positions based on what’s right in front of them. That could
mean retreating to personal or departmental self-interest, or it could mean
simply shooting the messenger. Either way, an opportunity is lost.”
But change is hard. Take some comfort in the fact that we in
higher education are not alone. Most people resist change. Most organizations
resist change. The hard-working and deeply committed staff and faculty of our
colleges are not unique in searching for ways to make progress while preserving
the status quo.
But the status quo, however, is disintegrating.
Once No. 1 in college degrees held by 25- to 34-year-olds, in
2010 the United States slipped to 12th among 36 developed nations. Graduation
rates (except for the handful of students at the most selective institutions)
lag; tuitions rise, while the unemployment rate is at record highs for recent college
graduates. Imagine, $1-trillion in student debt—and then our graduates enter
the worst job market in years.
On July 15th I posed an article in this space called “The Sorry
State of US higher Ed”. The article discussed our implied, if not overt,
mission that clearly includes getting students to graduation. Yet, only a bit
more than half of all US students enrolled in four-year colleges complete their
degrees within six years, and only 29% who start two-year degrees finish them
within three years.
On the other hand, there is a thread running through much of the
recent writing on change in higher education, and it’s a comforting theme in
that universities and community colleges especially, are more important than
ever. Our society allegedly needs educated citizens more than ever.
And of course there is the fact that only we, accredited
colleges and universities, can issue a degree that has value, the entry ticket to the knowledge economy. However, the value of the diploma is symbolic. It isn’t backed by gold but
rather by the graduate's sense of its worth, the reputation of the College, and
an employer's willingness to accept it as the currency of competency.
Overlay the President’s rhetoric, assaults on tenure, performance-based
funding, nationalized healthcare, declining state support, changes to the
pension system, restrictions on our ability to hire retired faculty and staff,
budget cuts, and a downturn in enrollment with the mission of Parkland College
– to engage the community in learning.
What do we do differently or stop doing in order to be able to continue fulfilling that
mission?
“We did that locally in January, with a college-wide “data day.”
We put all manner of information on posters and put them up all around the room
on a day when the faculty came back. The goal, which I think was actually
achieved, was to get a common fact base out there. It was only a beginning, and
one could certainly argue about what other things should have been included,
but it was an attempt to at least indicate the size, nature, and sheer presence
of the dog. At that point, it became possible to start a more fruitful
discussion about how to respond to it.”
Here is another dog, this one right on our doorstep.
Due to a number of circumstances, Parkland College needs
to spend at least $1.5 million dollars less in the next fiscal year than we are
projected to spend at the conclusion of the current.
You may recall
from budget discussions and meetings all semester, we are projecting that we will have effectively underspent
this year compared to the last by nearly $200k.
Overall salary growth has
been held to only 2.36%.
Most of our controllable budget lines are trending
under budget.
We don't appear to have a
spending problem, but we most definitely have an income issue. Certainly, enrollment is
down and this has had a significant effect on our revenue. We have experienced and endured cyclical enrollment patterns before, however, in the past, the other components of our
revenue we stable or growing.
Today, they are not. In
fact, they are declining at a rapid rate, perhaps faster than we have ever
experienced.
By way of example, the Community College Equalization
formula hurts us badly.
Equalization dollars are distributed by the State of Illinois via formula and are
designed to offset discrepancies between college districts that have vastly
different tax bases. Over the past two years, Parkland College’s share has been cut by
nearly $859k.
State funding is down over
12% since FY2010 and now represents just 9% of our total budget.
Our own property tax base is
flat, and with the removal of the Carle Hospital properties from the tax roles, we
have lost $350k ($246k from the operating fund) in real dollars with an additional $270k still at risk.
Permanently.
Illinois Veterans grants, as you may have read
in the News Gazette recently, remain unfunded and represent $500k per in lost
revenue.
In total, these few examples
approach $2.5 million in lost revenue over the past two years.
Something needs
to be done.
“If you skip that step and just go to “what do you think we should
do?,” you’ll tend to get answers based in personal or departmental
circumstances. Worse, if you skip even that step and just go to “here’s what
we’re doing, make it work,” you’ll engender all sorts of resentment,
foot-dragging, and sabotage. Absent context, it’s easy to impute all sorts of
motives, and some will.“
I have recommended a
two-part, long-term fix to our Board of Trustees that reduces spending even
further, and modestly increases revenue from the only sources we can control –
tuition and fees. It looks like this:
1. Reductions in spending for FY15 by $1.5MM.
Areas we have identified include:
- Operations and
Maintenance (less flowers, slower mowing, no overtime, less reliance on outside
contractors to fix issues, relying on hand dryers in bathrooms rather than
paper towels, etc.)
- Reductions the
Student Worker budget
- Reductions in
overtime (in areas other than physical plant)
- Slowing down
hiring processes. When a vacancy occurs, the position will be held for 3-6
months before being refilled.
- Reductions across
the board in materials, commodities, supplies, and travel.
- Reductions in hourly
workers
- 4 Faculty
positions have not been refilled.
- 4 Professional
Support positions have not been refilled.
- 2 Administrative
positions have not been refilled (recent re-organization additions are reflected.
There are still 2 less admin positions)
- The Leadership
Conference is postponed
- The Holiday
party and various other social events are scaled back or postponed.
2. Tuition increases of 6.5%
($7 on in-district) and an additional $7 in the form of a technology fee have been scheduled.
These actions get us to a
balanced budget over the next three years, including a modest amount of capital
(equipment), a small reserve to handle enrollment fluctuations, and
most importantly, puts the College on a budget-positive long-term track,
assuming no additional unforeseen events.
It appears that this is the “new
normal”.
The campus will look different. Cleaning schedules will be altered. Service hours will change. We will see less of just about everything. But our core mission will be protected -- teaching, learning, and services students will be prioritized.
“Of course, even a really well-executed bit of dog portraiture
will bring some skepticism. But truth is persistent. Even if it initially meets
with a wall of denial -- which sometimes happens -- it has a way of outlasting
alternatives.”
We train and re-train the workforce that companies need to
thrive and expand. We transfer more students from Parkland College to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Eastern Illinois University than
anyone else. For forty-six years, Parkland College has well-served
hundreds of thousands of students for a reasonable investment.
But during the last decade and more pointedly in the last two years, we have realized less and less
support from the State of Illinois and it is clear to me that this situation
will not change in the foreseeable future.
We have two choices. Do nothing or
build our own bridges to the future.
“Until faculty and staff see the dog, it’s all too easy to assume
that administrators are just driving recklessly. (To be fair, some probably
are.) Shared governance or crowdsourcing works best with a shared
context. Without that, constituent politics and worse are probably
inevitable.”
There is no standing still anymore. There’s no room to pause or
to sit back and reflect for a year. We’re already in the midst of the solution and that is to
continually ask ourselves, “are we doing the right things for the right
reasons”, and “how can we best use our limited resources to achieve our mission?"
This is accomplished by challenging assumptions, the same old way
of doing things. But challenging assumptions causes the foundation of
everything around you to shift and twist. It can be a little scary, but it’s that kind of movement that
improves the institution and the enterprise.
Parkland College has
accomplished so much since its formation in 1966. Our vision and our plans
build on our record of accomplishment by focusing on why we exist -- to engage the
community in learning -- and in the process we
improve the quality of teaching and learning and the services that support it.
In other words we translate our strategy into
action.
