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Higher education faces unprecedented challenges. The confluence of changing economic and demographic tends; new patterns of federal and state spending; more explicit expectations by students and their families for affordable, accessible education; and heightened scrutiny by those who claim a legitimate interest in higher education is inescapably altering the environment in which this system operates. Higher education will never again be as it was before. Further, many believe that tinkering around the margins is no longer an adequate response to the new demands. Fundamental change is deemed necessary to meet the challenge of this melange of pressures. A number of commentators have observed that political and corporate America have responded to their challenges by instituting a fundamental restructuring of those institutions. The medical community is also in the midst of a similar basic restructuring of the health care delivery system in this country. Now its education's turn. People are questioning the historically expressed mission of higher education. They make the claim that we cost too much, spend carelessly, teach poorly, plan myopically, and when questioned, act defensively. Educational administrators, from department chairs up, are confronted with the task of simultaneously reforming and cutting back. They have no choice. They must establish politically sophisticated priority settings and effect a hard-nosed reallocation of resources in a social environment where competing public needs have equivalent--or stronger--emotional pulls.
Triage in a medical context involves confronting an emergency in which the demand for attention far outstrips available assistance by establishing a sequence of care in which one key individual orchestrates the application of harsh priorities which have been designed to maximize the number of survivors. In recent years, the decisions that have been made in some centers of higher education bear a striking similarity. The literature is replete with descriptions of budget cuts and the resultant reallocation of monies. For example, as the budget cuts of the last decade accumulated, maintenance was deferred, and the funds saved were used to shore-up key existing parts of the educational process, such as faculty salaries. State budgets are generally smaller now than they were when the cuts were made, which means that preventive maintenance will continue to be deferred and other resources must be found for capital improvements. Triage often operates in an environment that does not permit promising possibilities to develop. For example, the promise of interactive digital technologies on the learning process may never be fully realized in many institutions if the associated capital and operating costs cannot be accommodated within the cost containment measures being adopted. In an effort to offset part of the lost state support, tuition and fees have been increased at public institutions at a rate that far exceeds growth of the cost of living index. All this is occurring in the face of an increasingly diverse student body and the beginning of "Tidal Wave II," as the surge of new students who are the children of the baby boomers has been called. These demands, along with the expectations for an historically, good American education, will have to be met with fewer dollars.
Our ability to fund public higher education by the conventional mechanisms has been affected by a variety of tax reform initiatives. Although the details may vary locally, various kinds of initiatives, propositions, and referenda have severely limited the amount of revenue states can raise. Thus, caps on property taxes have transformed support patterns at the city and county levels. Initiatives, many of which have built-in escalators, that fix the percentages of state spending for various programs have created new kinds of budgetary entitlement groups. These mandates conspire to give government, i.e., governors and legislatures, less discretionary control over a dwindling portion of the state budget. Unfortunately, higher education often finds itself included in that ever-shrinking part of the budget. To keep businesses globally competitive there will be great pressure against raising corporate taxes. These pressures combined with the federal deficit and the growth in entitlements leave little hope for an infusion of the kinds of new public funds that have fueled previous changes in higher education.
Some institutions have succeeded in deriving new resources through the establishment of public-private partnerships and vigorous fund raising, activities that have not played a significant role in funding public education in the past. Monies from private sources now account for more than 50% of the budget components in the case of some of the more successful state university initiatives. Successes of this kind raise some interesting questions. For example, how will the evolution of fiscal interactions with the state be affected? How will faculty work loads and compensation patterns be affected?
It has become increasingly clear that a number of major issues need attention if we are to engage effectively in triage as a process to maximize what can--and should--be saved in higher education. The following list summarizes discussions that have appeared in a variety of disparate publications.
- Establish and prioritize the institution's educational goals.
- Establish value and reward systems for students and faculty that are consistent with the priority goals.
- Develop leverage and constraint mechanisms to effect change and improve student orientation to the new priorities.
- Establish a relationship between the price and cost of education and access to it, perhaps incorporating some sort of internal subsidy system.
- Develop a relationship between the demonstration of public accountability through the reallocation of resources and the measurement of tangible outcomes that justifies enhanced public and private investment.
- Devise a use of technology that improves productivity, which in turn requires the
definition of productivity in an academic setting.
Serious discussion of these issues and attempts to address them will undoubtedly prove uncomfortable, perhaps even threatening, to many in academia. Some may question whether the institutions of higher education that we now know as universities will still be "universities." But then, what is a university?
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