Seeing the Dog

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.

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Seeing the Dog  By  Matt Reed

 http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/seeing-dog#ixzz30wqFB5X8

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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 24^th, 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.