In Oklahoma, public higher education and elementary and secondary education share a fate that neither would wish upon the other, or itself.
Both sectors have historically been financed poorly.
“Oh, that’s an understatement,” says V. Burns Hargis, president of Oklahoma State University at Stillwater. With cuts totaling 21 percent from the 2014 to the 2019 fiscal years, “by percentage Oklahoma has disinvested in higher education more than any other state in the country.” Until Alaska’s drastic cut this summer, that is.
As for education spending per elementary or secondary student, Oklahoma ranks near the bottom among the 50 states.
Oklahoma’s legislators dislike taxes and expenditures. Five years ago, shrugging off the global economic crisis of 2008, they used an oil-boom surplus to continue slashing the state’s income tax. They cut the oil-and-gas gross-production tax sharply as well. “Our economic structure is such that there is just not enough money to go around,” says Hargis.
The impact of the scarcity of state funds for education can be observed on campuses: in the number of students who start college underprepared to do college-level work, in the number who drop out because they can’t afford the tuition, and in the state’s rank at No. 44 for the percentage of the adult population with a bachelor’s degree or above.
Consequences for the state’s public colleges — two research universities, one liberal-arts university, 10 regional universities, and 12 community colleges, all overseen by the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education — have included sharp increases in tuition and fees, and pleas for more private donations. The whole situation, says Hargis, “creates a real strain on our students and families, and to stay competitive with faculty hiring.”
In 2017-18, Oklahoma ranked 38th among the 50 states for the average pay of full professors at public institutions.
The scenario is only worsened by disinvestment in schools. Many schools have moved to four-day weeks in the hope of cutting costs and recruiting teachers; others have closed, or will close. Last year hundreds of teachers walked out to protest school conditions, while others have jumped to better-paying states. Leaders of public colleges in Oklahoma have a lot to make up for, and they are seeking innovative approaches by, for instance, easing progression from high schools to college, matching general-education requirements to students’ likely majors, and improving success in required mathematics courses.
“What affects public education, K through 12, of course affects higher education; so we do have to compensate for that, some,” is the understated assessment of Lana Reynolds, president of the two-year, midstate Seminole State College. The problems begin with finding students. When recruiters visit high schools, she says, they spend a lot of time explaining to overtaxed, underprepared counselors even the basic steps of applying to and enrolling in college.
Colleges must compete not only with one another but also with the state’s boom-and-bust oil-and-gas sector, which, with its high initial wages, lures young Oklahomans away from higher education. Another factor hurting college enrollment is that Oklahoma has one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation.
Seminole State’s community-engagement efforts have helped potential students become familiar with the campus. Four years ago, after a local school’s main building had deteriorated to the point of being unsafe, the college stepped in to host the school’s dances and other activities, and soon even offered its sports fields for use. All that brought busloads of school students to the college — a recruiting bonus, says Reynolds.
Oklahoma’s community colleges have gained visibility by enrolling many high-school juniors and seniors in courses. At Rose State College, a two-year college just east of Oklahoma City, those concurrent enrollments have jumped from 373 in the fall of 2015 to well over 600. The community colleges are seeing thousands of such enrollments, although in some years the program has been available only to seniors.
One of the state’s most selective colleges is the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. Its liberal-arts curriculum appeals to “an underserved market of extremely bright young Oklahomans” who could not afford to attend elite private institutions, says its president, John Feaver. “We are getting the kind of students we want,” he says. But because of budget constraints that limit outreach and marketing, “we’re not known in some of the far reaches of the state.” Poor recognition, he says, is “one of the banes of this institution.”
To compensate for what he calls an excessive emphasis on quantitative testing in Oklahoma high schools, the university has adopted a “holistic” admission standard that takes into account demonstrated “will and determination” to take on the curriculum, says Feaver. “We’re now getting about 10 to 15 percent of our students in this more nebulous, qualitative category.” The university is also using data analysis to track how well those students and their classmates persist and advance.
In contrast, Oklahoma State, as one of the state’s two land-grant institutions, manages to draw from all around the state, says Hargis, the president. This is in part thanks to the activities of the National FFA Organization (Future Farmers of America), which promotes education in the science, business, and technology of agriculture among middle- and high-school students. Hargis allows, however, that the qualifications of Oklahoma State’s incoming classes are bolstered by heavy recruitment from other states, particularly Texas, which has “funded common education a lot better than Oklahoma has.” In 2016 more than 900 recent high-school graduates from Texas matriculated at his university.
Of course, most of the new first-time students at Oklahoma State are Oklahomans. “Our belief is that we should not set standards higher than is required to do the work,” says Hargis. He believes that too many land-grant institutions around the country have lost sight of that valid admissions yardstick, and that as a result they exclude many capable students by setting standards too high.
Mathematics seems to be the subject that most troubles the students who end up leaving college for academic reasons. For example, “calculus had become an enormous hurdle for students wanting to major in engineering,” says Hargis, but that wasn’t the only general-education math course that made students stumble.
Challenged to devise more-engaging teaching methods, Oklahoma State’s mathematics department set out to align math requirements with students’ intended majors and career interests — setting the bar higher for, say, engineering than for merchandising.
Not all students need to take college algebra anymore. They may take courses in quantitative reasoning or mathematical modeling instead. Students who in the past would have needed to enroll in remedial math now take courses that blend developmental or preparatory math principles with more advanced, college-level material. At the same time, they receive support in both mathematical processes and study skills. More than 70 percent of those corequisite students got a C or higher in their college-level courses. And, in a testament to the effectiveness of the approach, about 70 percent of those opt to take a second math course.
The significantly increased completion of math courses has “astounded me,” says Hargis.
The promising results helped five faculty members in the mathematics department win a five-year, $3-million grant from the National Science Foundation to improve and standardize instruction in entry-level mathematics courses across the state. One component of the effort, known as the Mathematical Inquiry Project, involves tracking students’ math performance from high-school through college years and analyzing the data to see what works.
Across departments, Oklahoma State is aligning subject requirements to students’ intended majors. And if students find any of those requirements too difficult, they can turn to a branch of Northern Oklahoma College, a community college right on Oklahoma State’s campus. “They’re a lot better at remediation than we are,” says Hargis.
The exchange of students between the two-year and four-year institutions goes both ways. To ease the transition to the four-year campus, Northern Oklahoma’s students are given access to Oklahoma State’s facilities, including dorms if available.
Other colleges in the state have their own strategies for helping students who arrive unprepared. In the fall of 2018, at Rose State, more than 60 percent of its 8,000 students arrived deficient in one or more core areas. Students with two or more deficiencies must take a “College and Life Strategies” course in addition to developmental-education offerings.
Seminole State has a similar course, says Reynolds, the president. Serving on the American Association of Community Colleges’ Commission on Small and Rural Colleges, she says, has allayed her worries that Oklahoma’s students were unusually ill-prepared. On the commission, she says, she hears that “everybody struggles with preparedness.”
But, as college leaders in Oklahoma seek to help students progress, it’s not just the academically challenged who are at risk. At the community colleges, many departments, particularly in the health sciences, cannot afford to admit even all of their better applicants.
“It’s not always academics” that holds students back, Hargis says. “A lot of times it’s just finances.” In a state where about 25 percent of adults have earned a bachelor’s degree or above, versus a national average of 32 percent, he says, many students arrive at Oklahoma State as the first college student in the family. A high percentage qualify for Pell Grants. No other state has more American Indians enrolled in college. Oklahoma State, like three other colleges in the state, enrolls more than 1,000 members of the state’s 39 registered Native American tribes.
Tuition costs, along with academic struggles, drive many students into part-time attendance, or out of the classroom entirely.
The need is there, and it’s high time that state legislators did more to help, college leaders say.
Hargis says: “We try to make the case that for Oklahoma to move forward and prosper, we have to have a larger percentage of college graduates. Without that, we cannot recruit and keep companies that require educated employees.”
With large mining and aerospace industries in the state, “our engineering school has doubled in size in the last six or seven years,” he says. “We could double it again and that still wouldn’t be enough.”
Peter Monaghan is a correspondent for The Chronicle.
Tyler Davis contributed data analysis for this article, which introduces the States section of Almanac 2019.