[1]Robert Cohen/Post-Dispatch
As economic conditions worsen, a reckoning is underway nearly everywhere. The financial industry has accepted unprecedented government involvement. Local governments are searching for ways to pay their bills and maintain basic services. The American auto industry is dancing around bankruptcy. Media companies are cutting jobs, as are pharmaceutical and technology companies.
But what about colleges and universities?
President Barack Obama noted in his inaugural address that transforming “colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age” is a central part of the “work of remaking America.”
But there’s little evidence of transformation so far. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon announced on Wednesday that he proposes to spare state universities from budget cuts in 2010 in exchange for their promise not to raise tuition during the 2009-2010 academic year.
It’s a noble gesture that already is facing skepticism from Republican lawmakers. But it might serve as a reprieve that buys the university system time to confront a much needed and long overdue reckoning in higher education.
Still, public universities must prepare for the worst, in case the Legislature doesn’t go along with Mr. Nixon’s proposal. That could mean immediate budget cuts of between 15 percent and 25 percent, along with layoffs and cutbacks in courses and programs.
National college ranking services already rate Missouri as a “high-tuition, low-aid” state with a woeful record of college affordability. In 2008, families with average earnings had to expend 29 percent of their income to support one child in a public four-year college or university — even with financial aid. That’s up from 18 percent in 2000.
Last year, the University of Missouri System received 23 percent less funding from the state than it did in 2001, adjusted for inflation. Of the 50 states, Missouri ranks 47th in per-capita funding of higher education. By any measure, that’s a crisis, not only for students and their families, but for the state’s economic future.
But in crisis lies opportunity. Missouri should radically rethink how its public universities are organized and funded. The higher education system should subject itself to a broad, independent performance audit without delay.
By inviting in performance auditors, state colleges and universities would be telling taxpayers that they are not afraid to have independent outsiders take a fresh, rigorous and systematic look at their operations.
Colleges and universities are not strangers to such audits. Other state university systems have used them to evaluate elements of their operations, such as purchasing practices or management of construction projects. The same auditing principles could, and should, be used to broadly evaluate a university system’s performance.
In 2006, a commission organized by then-U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings concluded that “our complex, decentralized postsecondary education system has no comprehensive strategy, particularly for undergraduate programs, to provide either adequate internal accountability systems or effective public information.”
It urged higher education institutions to “improve institutional cost management through the development of new performance benchmarks designed to measure and improve productivity and efficiency” to enable consumers and policy makers to measure “academic quality, productivity and efficiency.”
Missouri should lead the way. The groundwork is in place. The Department of Higher Education’s planning board last year outlined goals for coordinating colleges and universities in the state, with a view toward “building a higher education system for the 21st century.”
The University of Missouri system, meanwhile, published a statement of “strategic direction.” Both documents are long on aspirations — access and affordability prominent among them. But they are short on practical strategies to implement reforms.
Outside auditors could help break through institutional inertia. They could conduct a review in which nothing is held sacred except the principle that Missouri students should have access to a high-quality, affordable education.
Everything should be on the table: how the system is organized administratively and academically; how to measure the productivity of faculty and administrators; strategies for eliminating wasteful duplication of programs and services and controlling the growth of personnel and other operating costs.
But the reckoning shouldn’t end there. State lawmakers also must be called to account as part of the auditing process.
Because the reality is that unreliable state funding, no less than management inefficiencies, has put an unfair burden on Missouri families, contributed to educational mediocrity and limited the future of the state and its children.