Rural Community Colleges and Federal Funds

President Obama is setting a goal for the US to have the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by 2020. It looks like that calls for annual increases of 5-6% in total numbers of degrees granted, state by state. That's quite a challenge. The Rural Community College Alliance (RCCA) and the DOE recently convened a meeting about the unique needs of rural community colleges.

Community college leaders told the audience that their needs diverge in important ways from those of suburban and urban community colleges. Though all community colleges are suffering as states nationwide tighten their budgets, rural community colleges must deal with special challenges, the college leaders said. Expenses that might seem paltry at other institutions, such as facing a bill of $55,000 to replace a computer lab, as one rural Arkansas community college is, can prove insurmountable, the college officials said. In small towns, there are few opportunities for partnerships with private businesses. Faculty members are paid less. And even when rural community colleges do obtain grants, they are often functioning at capacity, so they have nowhere to put students or equipment for new or expanded programs.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

From SHEEO: Stimulus Helped But State Schools In Trouble

SCUP–45 has NASBA CPEs for CPAs!

SHEEO, the State Higher Education Executive Officers organization, has released its State Higher Education Finance FY2009 report. We have four pertinent links for you:

• A story about it by Eric Kelderman from The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled Enrollment Growth Amid Recession Creates Long-Term Challenges for States;
• A story about it by Jack Stripling from Inside Higher Ed, titled Fading Stimulus Saved Colleges;
• The SHEEO press release covering the report; and
• The official SHEEO web page with links to all versions of the report.

From Stripling: "As enrollments soared and state dollars dried up, the temporary fix of federal stimulus money staved off significant financial losses for higher education that are still yet to be fully realized."

From Kelderman: "[S]tates will have a harder time restoring spending on higher education after this downturn than they have in past recessions. Per-student state appropriations have generally recovered after past recessions, but the current economic situation presents greater hurdles"

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Economic Hits + Stimilus Funds, State by State: How Do They Add Up?

This graphic from The New York Times could hold your attention for hours.

Obama Community College Proposal May Not Be Enough

Will $12B in federal funds work to cause an additional five million students to graduate from community colleges by 2020? Experts say that increased state and local funding is also needed:

''It's great that people are coming back to community colleges to get trained, but a student only brings about a third of the cost of their tuition.''

Ivy Tech Community College President Thomas Snyder says his school can handle more growth in part by finding savings internally and relying on philanthropic and community donations. The school will not expand too much and find itself with empty classrooms if an economic turnaround slows future enrollment.

''We're cautious in making sure that we don't make expenditures on staffing, for example, or other critical areas that we can't sustain,'' Snyder says.

This is Clearly a Time of Uncertainty

From Goldie Blumenstyck writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (requires subscription or other paid access):

"In [a] survey sent to chief finance officers at four-year colleges in September, 62 percent of the respondents said they did not think the worst of the financial pressures on their institutions had passed. Nearly two-thirds of them worry that 2010, 2011, or 2012 or later, will be even tougher."

Is it good or is it bad that Moody's thinks higher education is solid? "It's important to remember that this is an industry that has been in a golden era for a decade or more," says John C. Nelson, managing director for the Moody's group that evaluates colleges' creditworthiness. "It shows how just fundamentally stable the business model of the university is. They can absorb a lot."

Some say that "[t]ere is not really a crisis for public universities." And the number of private institutions which rely heavily on hard hit endowments is only about 100. However, Moody's expected the decline in net-tuition revenue for the 09-10 academic year to be the biggest for private colleges since the late 1980s.

The Second Fiscal Crisis: Preparing for the Funding Cliff

This link goes to an executive summary. The longer article is available as a PDF, from a link on that page:

The current recession—the worst in 60 years—has blown open gaps in states’ budgets. States had to close a $102 billion budget shortfall in wrapping up their fiscal year 2009 balance sheets, which ended June 30 in all but four states. Cutting funding to higher education was a strategy used in 31 states to mend these shortfalls. Yet states face another $121 billion in deficits in fiscal year 2010, and already a few state budget directors have predicted $45 billion in awaiting deficits for the following year. Tax revenues from all sources—sales, personal and corporate income—are down, dramatically in many cases, in most states. So far in this recession, the number of jobs lost is more than twice that of the downturn in 1981 and 1982.

- Daniel J. Hurley, The Second Fiscal Crisis: Preparing for the Funding Cliff, Public Purpose, September/October 2009

Saluting a New Cadre of Students

We've been following the development of the new GI Bill for some time now. This article from Business Officer magazine reports on a summit held by the American Council on Education (ACE) for senior campus officials coping with making the most of this funding for our veterans: 

Summit participants presented innovative programs, promising practices, and creative solutions to educational roadblocks for veterans. And while the specifics of their activities varied, at a minimum, higher education institutions that succeed in attracting and retaining veterans provide greater access to accurate and timely information, a streamlined process for accessing education benefits, academic credit for military training and experience, and veteran-specific transitional support programs on campus. In essence, they have changed their culture to accommodate a new phenomenon.

From statewide systems to a small community college, from an institution with a long association with the military to one with a famous history of war protests, here are some examples of creative ideas for transitioning veteran students.

Who's Getting Money from the State and Why? How?

Scott Jaschik reports on two new studies, each of which aims to understand the how and why of state funding for institutions. Does lobbying work? Apparently so. Who's in the best position? Apparently, campuses located in proximity to a state capitol with democratic control.

"Two new studies suggest that strategy may go only so far and that, in some respects, public universities are like real estate: They benefit from location, location, location. The best locations may be in states led by Democrats (and with other political conditions) and in cities in or near statehouses. The studies don't contest the way research universities receive more per student than do other kinds of institutions, although they suggest that in states with a flagship and multiple research universities, flagship status may be less important than believed, and that research universities tend to be favored."

Read the full article here:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/10/approps

$120M Competition for Research Construction Grants

The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced the availability of approximately $120 million in competitive grants for the construction of new or expanded scientific research buildings at higher education institutions and nonprofit organizations. Approximately eight to 12 projects will be funded by these grants, which are part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act). Possible projects include laboratories, test facilities, measurement facilities, research computing facilities, and observatories:

"Interested organizations must provide NIST with a Letter of Intent outlining the proposed project by 3 p.m. EDT, Thursday, June 25, 2009. Organizations that submit timely Letters of Intent may then submit full proposals, which must be received by 3 p.m. EDT, Monday, Aug. 10, 2009. Review, selection and grant award processing is expected to be completed by the end of February 2010."

Read about it here:
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/research_con_grants_052609.html

New Study: University of Maryland Adds $3.4B to State Economy

A new, 39-page report from the University of Maryland College Park Foundation, Inc., titled "Impacts of the University of Maryland College Park," finds that for every dollar of taxpayer money the state provides to the university, more than $8 of economy benefit is created.

We have a link to the full report in the SCUP Links blog:
http://www.foundation.umd.edu/foundation/images/stories/sagereport.pdf

SHEEO's 'SHEF': State Higher Education Finance Report

What might have been the beginning of a financial recovery in 2008 for public higher education ended prematurely with the growing awareness, late in the year, of the depths of the current financial crisis. The State Higher Education Executive Officers organization (SHEO) has been publishing this annual "state of finance for public higher ed" for quite some time now. The most recent report - PDF of report here, PDF of press release here - is not optimistic:

[T]he current recession is likely to renew and intensify a long term trend of declining state support and higher tuition and fees for students in public colleges and universities. “Despite progress over the past three years, per student state and local support for public higher education has only recovered about half of the funding lost during the sharp downturn from 2002 to 2005,” noted Paul Lingenfelter, president of SHEEO. “All the signs in the current recession point toward further decline, renewing and accelerating the long term trend for public higher education to become more expensive for students and their families.”
Recessions tend to be particularly harsh on public higher education and on its students. The data for the past 20 years clearly outline the pattern and its consequences. Constant dollar state support per student fell by 13 percent from 1988 to 1993, two recessions ago. (All financial comparisons are in 2008 dollars.) During that period, tuition jumped from 25 percent to 30 percent of total revenues. In the late 1990s, state support recovered and the rate of annual tuition increases slowed down, but tuition remained near 30 percent of total revenues.

Don't Let the Downturn Get You Down

We were noticing this week, on the RPG discussion list, that the California community colleges are reporting very large increases in matriculation in the current semester. It made us wince, because we know that tuition does not cover expenses at community colleges, not even close. This article helps you to make a good case for more public support for community colleges, even in times of financial crisis:

As community colleges across the country defend themselves against across-the-board budget cuts, they need to go on the offense by mobilizing key constituency groups to make the case that community colleges offer the best hope of turning the U.S. economy around.

Our extensive work with community college systems in seven states and two in-depth opinion research projects reveals that few people understand the value of public two-year colleges and the huge impact they have on economic success. Similarly, too few community colleges have organized effective advocacy efforts, and when they do speak out, they often use messages that don’t resonate with their target audiences.

While those at community colleges feel beaten down by unfavorable comparisons with four-year institutions, they need to realize that a huge reservoir of good will exists and should be tapped. Our poll findings show that the public holds community colleges in high esteem, but they don’t understand two critical issues that undermine the support of these institutions on the state policy front:

College Affordability: The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Anthony P. Carnevale explores some of the ways that he suggest are better ways to examine the issue of college costs:

A major flaw in the popular narrative on rising tuitions is the failure to distinguish public from private colleges. Tuition increases affect private and public colleges differently. Public enrollments are less affected by tuition increases because of their lower threshold prices. As tuitions rise, college enrollments shift from private colleges to the lower priced publics creating an increasing public funding burden, especially in recessions when families are looking for bargains. Private tuitions distort the data on rising tuitions as illustrated by this statistic: College tuition rates have risen more than 300 percent since 1987, when overall prices have only risen by a little more than 80 percent. Look closer and you will see that the big tuition increases come at the high-priced private institutions, not the public colleges. Tuition increases in public colleges have been relatively constrained and competitive. According to the College Board Trends in College Pricing survey in 2007, tuitions at four-year public colleges have risen by a little more than 50 percent in the last ten years and by about 20 percent in public two-year colleges – a far cry form 300%.

A deeper confusion stems from the fact that the dominant narrative on affordability fails to distinguish between college tuition and college cost. Tuition is the price that students and families pay for college. Cost is what colleges pay to educate students.

Higher Education Makes Its Case to Be Part of the Economic Stimulus Package

Led by the American Council on Education (ACE), a group of higher education organizations recently began introducing the concept that a portion of any Obama stimulus package should support higher education institutions. Read the full press release here.

Elements of the proposal include:

• Increase in student aid funding to provide immediate financial relief to families struggling to pay tuition during the economic downturn. This request includes an immediate increase in the Pell Grant maximum award by $700 and retirement of the shortfall the program has amassed, as well as doubling the funding for the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (SEOG) Program.
• Creation of Higher Education Infrastructure Block Grants (HEIBG) to support campus projects that provide jobs now and strengthen the academic capacity of colleges and universities. The grants would be available for “shovel ready” projects capable of starting within 180 days.

As Credit Crisis Freezes Colleges, Worries Mount

Many thanks to our friends at The Chronicle of Higher Education for allowing us to share this comprehensive report with SCUPers free of password protection.

When the stock market plunged 778 points this week, losing almost 9 percent of its value in one day, higher education responded in an uncharacteristic way: It began to buckle.

Colleges have often considered themselves recession-proof. But this week’s events compounded an already difficult year for many institutions, which have suffered from declining state support, tightening credit, and losses on endowment earnings. As a result, the financial meltdown—with its promise of a prolonged economic downturn—prompted some institutions to take radical steps and wreaked havoc on the way colleges do business.

Crumbling French Universities Look for Help

The article, "Crumbling French Universities Look for Help," is from the Boston Globe by Anna Willard:

The ugly concrete campus of Paris 6 university is dominated by a tower that has been a building site for eleven years as asbestos is removed. Nobody seems to be able to pinpoint when the work will finish.

The government tried to brighten the dreary site with a modernistic red and yellow science building but forgot to put in air conditioning, a mistake because the laboratory machines heat up to temperatures that damage the research.

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France's 85 universities are struggling. They have slipped down international league tables, many are overcrowded, lacking funds and facilities and losing their best staff to better paid jobs in the United States or elsewhere.