Hard times should mean hard decisions about higher education in North Carolina. The state’s community college system does not appear to have heard the news, however.
UNC system president Erskine Bowles has already ordered the seventeen constituent schools to reduce spending by five percent, to account for the anticipated loss of revenues due to the economic recession. This is more than the four percent ordered by Governor Mike Easley for all state spending.
While the more prestigious four-year UNC system has long been a favored recipient of the state legislature’s largesse, the state’s community colleges have historically received a lower level of support, said community college system president Scott Ralls.
Ralls was addressing the November 13 UNC Board of Governors meeting to explain his 2009-2011 budget request to the state legislature for the community college system. This budget proposal, already passed by North Carolina Board of Community Colleges, seeks a $64 million increase this year and $111 million more in 2010-2011. The combined increase for just two years would be roughly 19 percent, at a time when the entire state is looking for places to cut back. It would be better for the community colleges to re-examine priorities rather than expect state money to solve its problems.
One example of the disparity between the two systems is revealed by their efforts to improve faculty salaries. UNC schools are trying to—and in some cases already do—pay professors at the 80th percentile of the average at equivalent institutions. This means that average faculty salaries at UNC-Chapel Hill will be higher than at all but 20 percent of highly rated state flagship universities, and that salaries at UNC-Charlotte will be higher than at all but 20 percent of large, state-supported, urban commuter schools, and so forth. (A system known as the Carnegie classification ranks schools according to their student populations and levels of research.)
In contrast, the state’s community colleges have been struggling to raise their average faculty salaries to the 50th percentile. They are currently only paying 79 percent of the national average of community college salaries.
Despite these shortcomings, Ralls stated his intention to bring the community college system up to “world class” status. Such a transformation will require intense investment—paying higher salaries to attract top educators is merely the start.
Ralls said the system needs approximately $1,000 more per student per year to achieve the desired level of excellence. That means an increase of hundreds of millions of dollars in a system with over 800,000 students (not all students are full-time)—a huge increase over the current state allocation to the community colleges of $933 million.
But the economic downturn has put the community colleges between a rock and a hard place. The system has a “comprehensive” mandate to essentially be all things to all residents: to be a low-cost academic institution for students planning to transfer four-year colleges, to be a vocational training center for a vast array of careers, and to remediate the large numbers of the state’s high school graduates who lack the skills to advance academically or professionally. Furthermore, it is to be all things to all residents at a low cost. According to the Civitas Institute, the cost to educate a full-time student at a North Carolina community college for the 2007-8 school year was $5,376. The state subsidizes roughly 75 percent of that—the average tuition was only $1,277 per full-time student. Various state and federal programs reduce the tuition further for many students.
Resources are already stretched thin—Ralls said the system currently replaces instructional equipment every ten years, when six or seven years would be optimal. To add to the existing pressures, enrollment is now soaring, as it usually does during lean times. Ralls said the system enrolled enough additional students this year to fill “another Wake Tech” (approximately 11,000 students).
With state revenues plummeting, the system will be hard-pressed to accommodate the additional students. The money to accomplish many other goals is probably not going to be available, either next year or in the near future, given the potential severity of the downturn. The system should therefore re-examine some assumptions about higher education’s role in the state economy, and might have to temporarily jettison some high-cost or low-demand programs. There are ample trade-offs implicit in higher education that have not been addressed in the boom years.
One area for reexamination is technical training programs, which are often either expensive or plagued by low enrollment (or both). Ralls said that when he was president of Craven Community College, he bought one machine that used 28 percent of the school’s equipment budget for that year—to train only two students. He said the system often needs to recruit students to attend such programs.
This need to recruit students raises an important question that needs to be addressed—shouldn’t the lack of interest in such technical training programs be considered a signal that these programs are sometimes unnecessary and wasteful? If jobs in these specialties were plentiful and well-paid, chances are recruiting would be unnecessary. People naturally go where the money is, and if it is not to their benefit to attend a program, they won’t. It will probably not kill the state’s economy if some of the most expensive and industry-specific training is pushed off onto the industries that require those skills. Or perhaps, those industries can be asked to subsidize the training more.
Another natural trade-off becomes apparent when resources are scarce. The community colleges’ have been trying to increase access for all state residents, while at the same time they operate under a mandate to develop the workforce. Both efforts are resource intensive. Many students come to the community colleges poorly prepared—Ralls said 50.3 percent require remediation, and 48 percent don’t make it to their second year. This is particularly true of low-income students who receive the highest subsidies (These are the students for whom the schools are trying to create greater access). Remediation is expensive—it requires instructors to work very closely with a small number of students. And failure is expensive in the long run, too.
Demand for a community college education is currently high, much of it from older students who already have considerable skills. These students are the most likely to be able to contribute to the economy immediately. It might be best to postpone increasing access to students who are heavily subsidized, and who need extensive remediation and mentoring, until the economy rebounds and money is not so tight, in order to use the necessary resources to get the older students prepared to re-enter the work force rapidly.
Another consideration is that the community colleges should focus attention on those problems that can be accomplished without a large monetary investment, or those that will eventually reduce higher education costs for the state. In that light, considerable progress toward “seamlessness” (a form of greater efficiency) between the community colleges and the UNC system for transfer students can be achieved at low cost. This seamlessness will reduce overall costs dramatically, by pushing more academic education for students intending to get bachelor’s degrees off to the low-cost community colleges. There are several ways this can be done without spending large sums of money. One is to continue working to align curriculums between two- and four-year institutions, so that students can more easily transfer from on school to another.
Another way is to encourage both kinds of schools to participate in two-plus-two programs. These programs make use of online courses and have university professors travel to community colleges to hold junior- and senior-level classes, so students can get their four-year degrees without leaving their home communities. According to Sharon Morrissey, the president of Richmond Community College, this type of seamlessness is particularly important for ensuring that local residents in rural communities can fill key professions in high demand, such as teaching, nursing and engineering.
Many in higher education and state government hold the assumption that the state’s future economy is solely reliant on higher education. Ralls even stated that “in this state, education is economic development.” But the dynamics between education and development are not as clear as they suggest.
Education is no magic bullet for economic problems—a low tax environment and viable regulatory system also contribute to development. The attempt to fulfill every mandate that the community college system imposes on itself in a downturn will mean a higher tax burden on the middle class or deficit spending—this is likely to prolong the economic malaise, not end it. Now might be a good time to rethink priorities and cut—to add by subtraction—rather than to throw money at problems—to subtract by addition.