CHAPEL HILL – When Erskine Bowles took over as president of the University of North Carolina system in 2006, his top priorities were to make the system more accountable to taxpayers and to make the system more efficient. His interest in those goals was among the reasons that Bowles, a former business executive and Clinton administration chief of staff, was the top choice as a replacement for then-president Molly Broad.
In his first year, Bowles lived up to his promises in these areas. Throughout the year, Bowles and the Board of Governors initiated policies that focused on ways to “manage this organization in the most efficient, effective manner we possibly can,” as he told the Board of Governors in his first address. “We are going to do everything we can to make sure we operate this place in a manner that you can be proud of, that any organization could be proud of,” Bowles said in January 2006.
The biggest step was the creation of the President’s Advisory Committee on Efficiency and Effectiveness (PACE). The committee was established by Bowles to address areas where the UNC system can become more efficient. A report released in November outlined policy changes that could account for actual savings of $62 million and cost avoidances of $426 million for the next five years. (The total university budget is about $2.2 billion.)
Some of the policies, such as the elimination of duplicative reports, allowing water and juice contracts to be solicited jointly, and construction policy changes, need legislative approval before they can be implemented. In their legislative agenda for the current session, UNC officials list PACE’s policy changes as their top priority. According to the agenda, any cost savings that come from state appropriations will be reallocated to the university missions of education, research and public service.
The recommendations outlined in the PACE report are not the only efficiency moves. In August, Bowles announced a 10 percent cut ($1.3 million) in the General Administration’s budget that received rave reviews from the General Assembly. The cut led to the elimination of 12.5 positions.
Sen. Robert Pittenger, R-Mecklenburg, is among those impressed with the efforts Bowles and his staff have made to streamline the system. In 2005, Pittenger was a critic of the Broad administration and what he considered high administrative costs, and he supported Bowles for university president.
“President Bowles has initiated the efficiency and fiscal reforms that he promised in his inaugural address, which we hope will continue throughout the system and serve as a model and catalyst for restructuring the entire state government,” Pittenger said.
Bowles’ work to make the UNC system more accountable and efficient is just beginning, however. A centerpiece will be an accountability plan to inform the public about the university’s success, or lack of it, in specific areas of performance. The plan reflects growing concerns, highlighted by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education (known as the Spellings Commission), that it is difficult to know how much students are learning in college and how education in one school compares with education in others. Typical school rankings, such as the widely watched U.S. News and World Report ratings, mostly reflect inputs (such as the talents of the students entering college) rather than outputs (students’ actual learning).
Alan Mabe, vice president for academic planning and university-school programs, outlined the accountability plan during the January meeting of the Board of Governors. He noted that the program is voluntary and is not derived from a legislative request.
The draft plan echoes the goals listed by the Spellings Commission, emphasizing access, affordability, quality of learning, and accountability. Some of the barriers to achieving these goals, the plan points out, are inadequate preparation of high school students, high tuition, growth in administrative costs for student services, inadequate student learning, accountability measures that focus on inputs not outputs, and lack of transparency.
The accountability plan will identify performance measures that can be tracked and reviewed – and many of the actual measures are still under development. To measure the access of students to the university system, for example, the plan will record the participation of high school graduates, community college graduates, and transfers in the university system, as well as track retention and graduation rates. It will also track the growth in online student credit hours.
To measure affordability, the university will track such measures as the net cost of attending school by family income level, as well as students’ debt load and financial aid and its sources.
To evaluate the quality of faculty, there will be measures of teaching workload per faculty member (compared with peer institutions), grants per faculty member, and listing of prizes and awards. To measure the university’s support of its faculty, the plan will track faculty salaries, with the goal of making the average faculty salary reach the 80th percentile of the average salary of the university’s peer institutions.
Other areas in which performance measures will be developed include program emphasis and quality, economic and community development, adequacy, utilization, and safety of facilities, effectiveness and efficiency of the system’s academic mission, and private fundraising.
An actual vote on the plan has not been set. Board of Governors chairman Jim Phillips said that each board member would be able to look over the final plan before a vote is taken. The final plan will include additional performance measures. “Higher education has gone on way too long without a proper level of accountability,” Bowles said during the policy meeting.
One potential performance measure is public service. It’s one area that Bowles, when discussing his accomplishments in his first year to the Board of Governors, called a disappointment. He was unable to find a system-wide public service project for General Administration. Public service is one of the three core missions of the UNC system, along with education and research.
“Our campuses do a great job,” Bowles said. “The campuses have their faculty, staff, and students involved in a zillion different ways. I think we failed here. That is something I want to address. I think we can do better here.”