Just how grim is the fate of higher education in Nevada? Francisco Hernandez can tell you. The 26-year-old senior at the University of Nevada at Reno had saved nearly $7,000 to get himself settled after graduating this summer. But that money’s almost gone because of the nearly 60-percent increase in tuition and fees at Reno in the past few years. He has worked part time at a local hotel to pay his way through college, but Nevada’s sluggish economy will very likely force him to leave his home state for full-time work.
Lynn Comella, an assistant professor of women’s studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has a story, too. Every faculty member she knows under age 50 is looking for a job outside the state. She came here in 2007, a time when UNLV seemed to be on the rise. Now she thinks the state’s antipathy toward academe has undermined the university’s future.
Then there’s the university president, Neal Smatresk, wedged between the budget-slashers and the workers. He’s cut 400 positions, or about 20 percent of his employees, as lawmakers have slowly starved his institution. “The overarching climate, where you’ve cut for three years, has created almost like a slow-moving post-traumatic-stress disorder,” he says.
Stories like theirs are easy to find throughout Nevada, where it’s not just the research universities feeling the pain. State cutbacks—30 percent since 2009—have shut thousands of students out of courses in rural areas. At one point, legislators were calling for the closure of some remote branch campuses of community colleges. While Arizona and Florida, two other states hit hard by the recession, are building more capacity for colleges, many of Nevada’s institutions are slashing classes and scrambling for money simply to hire instructors.
Gambling and tourism—the backbone of this state’s economy—have suffered mightily. From 2007 to 2010, revenues from those sources fell by nearly a quarter, and they have failed to bounce back. Unemployment has shot up to nearly 13 percent. And Nevada, which for years had been one of the nation’s fastest-growing states, is now a leader in home foreclosures.
The reliance on gambling and tourism has limited higher education’s role in the economy: You don’t need a college degree, or even a high-school diploma, to wait tables or park cars at the Mirage. In the high-flying days of the past, state leaders had little incentive to woo other businesses or build a top-flight education system.
Now, with the decline of tourism, Nevada needs a life preserver. Despite their past failures to collaborate, will lawmakers, business leaders, and campus officials come together to foster an expanded role for higher education? Some think it’s possible. But they’ll have to do it with a lot less money than they had in the past. And they’re far behind other states in the effort.
A Tale of 2 Cities
Nevada is largely a place of empty spaces: About 70 percent of its 2.7 million residents live in Clark County, which surrounds Las Vegas at the state’s southern edge. A nine-hour drive will get you to Owyhee, which has a small branch campus of Great Basin College in Elko County, where there are fewer than three residents per square mile. Great Basin is among the four community colleges that serve Nevada’s rural areas, along with one four-year state college. Some have branch locations that are nothing more than a room in a local high school where students take online classes.
UNLV, founded less than 60 years ago, is now larger than the land-grant university in Reno, enrolling more than 28,000, nearly a quarter of all college students in Nevada.
The Las Vegas campus, just a mile from the excess and glitz of the famed Strip, is full of lush lawns, even in the 100-degree temperatures of late July. The student union bustles with a mix of children attending summer camps and students taking summer courses.
One person who hasn’t spent much time on the campus since May is Ms. Comella. Sitting behind a desk piled with files and loose papers from spring semester, the women’s-studies professor was too discouraged by this year’s session of the Legislature to return to her small fourth-floor office all summer. “For some of us, we needed the summer to regroup,” she says.
The legislative session featured a proposal by Gov. Brian E. Sandoval, a Republican, to cut 29 percent from higher-education appropriations. That cut was eventually halved, but state spending on higher education is little more than it was in 2006.
In the resulting cuts at UNLV, the women’s-studies department was to be eliminated but eventually was made a subdiscipline in the College of Liberal Arts. After spending the past two springs preparing for the possibility of losing her job, Ms. Comella says two semesters of her research have already been “obliterated.” She will spend this year trying to prepare for her tenure review, in the fall of 2012.
Nearly 90 percent of the jobs lost on the campus were administrative and support staff. Mr. Smatresk, the president, explains that the university has done its best to preserve academics, and that no tenured faculty members have been laid off. Instead, to reduce long-term expenses, it offered buyouts to tenured faculty members: They could receive 150 percent of their salaries for one year. Nearly 50 accepted.
Salaries and health benefits have also been reduced, making the university a less appealing place to work. “When you live in a world where every year you get cut, it makes people feel like their state doesn’t value them and they don’t support the noble, lofty goals of higher education,” Mr. Smatresk says. “Who leaves in those kinds of environments? Your best people tend to go.”
Northwest of Las Vegas, Reno gives visitors a very different view of Nevada. With about 220,000 residents, the city is less than half the size of Las Vegas. There are a handful of casinos downtown, but several have closed in recent years as gambling has declined. There is no replica of an Egyptian pyramid, no nightly Cirque du Soleil shows. The fastest-growing business around Reno is warehouse storage.
The university campus and its 17,000 students are a few blocks north of downtown. With more than 2,000 staff and faculty, it is the city’s largest employer.
Budget cuts have taken their toll here as well. The university has eliminated nearly 200 positions and more than 20 degree programs since 2009. Instead of making small cuts in a broad range of academic fields, Reno chose to eliminate more programs and leave those remaining at full strength, says the acting president, Marc Johnson. Some of the remaining programs will even be able to hire faculty members to fill empty positions.
The increases in tuition and fees have taken a toll on students. Eating lunch one afternoon in the student union, Mr. Hernandez, the senior, says the rising cost has added to the difficulty of his already long path toward a degree.
After finishing high school in nearby Lake Tahoe, he worked for a year before enrolling at Truckee Meadows Community College, where he went to class while holding down a job. After nearly three years, he went to Reno and double-majored in marketing and international business, which required two extra semesters of courses. Meanwhile, he has continued to work part time throughout his studies. This summer Mr. Hernandez will wrap up his last class, in economics. He hopes to find a job in hotel management.
Casey Stiteler, 22, president of Reno’s student government and a senior studying political science, says that students understand the need to share in the sacrifice—but that the cuts are making college unaffordable for many.
In response, they are taking care of their own: The student government approved spending $20,000 in emergency scholarships and set aside $60,000 a year to support work-study programs. An additional student fee was approved to keep open a support center for math and writing.
But given the state’s economic base, many students are questioning if the increased costs of earning a degree are worth it, Mr. Stiteler says. “For a lot of students it is almost a little bit of a contradiction to think that it will help you get a job in the current economic climate.”
Who Needs College?
Improving the prospects for higher education in Nevada will take a lot more than just adapting to the latest round of budget cuts.
To rebuild the college system, which some see as a necessity if Nevada is to come out of its economic tailspin, will require cooperation from lawmakers, especially in changing the way the state doles out money for public colleges. Campuses now turn over their tuition money to the state and get back various amounts, based on a state formula. Some campus officials say the arrangement penalizes colleges that attract more nonresident students, because those colleges aren’t able to keep the extra money they generate from out-of-staters.
A legislative committee has been formed to examine the disbursement formula, but a bill to allow the colleges to keep tuition from nonresidents died in the Legislature this year.
A much larger problem for higher education is how to make itself relevant in a state where, until recently, having a college degree hasn’t been essential to having a good job.
Gambling and tourism have been a central part of the state’s economy since the 1930s. Those industries still employ more than a quarter of the state’s population, attract more than 50 million visitors in good years, and pay more than 40 percent of the state’s general-fund taxes, according to figures from the Nevada Resort Association.
Low taxes and a warm, sunny climate have also attracted plenty of residents. For nearly 20 years, Nevada had been the country’s fastest-growing state, with a booming construction industry.
With those kinds of jobs available, residents haven’t needed higher education for higher wages. In Las Vegas, for example, the percentage of people who work in computer- or math-related fields is less than half that nationwide. But the ratio of workers in food preparation and serving is almost twice as high as in the rest of country.
Even in Reno, the stories of high-school graduates making easy money at the casinos are common, says Mr. Stiteler, who was tempted to continue waiting tables at a local steakhouse rather than put his time and money into a college education. At the restaurant, he says, he would often make $100 a night. The money added up: As a high-school graduation present, he bought himself a late-model SUV. Luckily, he says, his parents persuaded him to go to college—otherwise he’d be like all the other dreamers who look at the bright lights and imagine a future for themselves without a college education.
Less than 24 percent of adults in Las Vegas have bachelor’s degrees—the second-lowest proportion among metropolitan areas with more than a million residents. And the state has the highest percentage of residents ages 16 to 19 who are not in high school and who have not earned diplomas.
While gambling and tourism have sustained Nevada in the past, the risk of relying on the casinos became painfully clear after the most recent recession. What better time for higher education to step up its role?
Lost Opportunities
About 10 miles from the glamour and wealth of the Las Vegas Strip are two large signs that mark the entrance to the research part of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Aside from the bold, red letters of “UNLV,” there is little to see at the Harry Reid Research and Technology Park, named for the longtime U.S. senator. In fact, there is not a single building on the site of the five-year-old project. The entrance road and sidewalks to nowhere were paid for with a $2-million federal grant.
The research park was opened not long before the country went into recession, says Mr. Smatresk, who expects to announce a major tenant at the park within the next two years. But until that happens, the 122 acres of desert landscape embody the state’s inability to coordinate the efforts of government, industry, and higher education in building an economy that can rely on something besides slot machines and craps tables.
Mark H. Brennan, who runs a private equity firm that invests in fledgling companies, thinks the university could have accomplished more at the research park, which is managed by UNLV’s fund-raising foundation. And he questions whether leaders of the state universities are committed to encouraging more businesses to spring up around academe. “I’m not sure they believe entrepreneurship is the direction they need to go,” he says. “I’m not sure they know what to do to support entrepreneurship.”
Mr. Brennan isn’t just a critic of the university. He’s one of a group of local business leaders working to pair off business and engineering students at UNLV to think about starting their own enterprises.
That’s one of the projects being promoted by the university’s new Center for Entrepreneurship, which also coordinates a business-plan competition. Andrew Hardin, director and sole employee of the center—which is paid for entirely by private money—says the university is on the right track but far behind those elsewhere in the country. “It’s small,” he acknowledges of the center. “It’s just me.”
University leaders are also trying to communicate more with business people. For example, Mr. Smatresk is a board member of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, the first time a university president has been a part of that group, he says. He also serves on the executive committee of the Nevada Development Authority.
The University of Nevada at Reno is also working to spur business by encouraging faculty to think more about commercializing their research through technology transfer. Ryan A. Heck, who directs the technology-transfer office at Reno, says one of the challenges has been to get researchers to think more about how they can become partners with businesses. Academics have to meet businesses halfway, he says.
With the economy in such dire straits, the state government, too, has begun an attempt to bring new business to the state. This time the plans involve higher education, sort of. A bill passed during the most recent legislative session creates a cabinet-level Office of Economic Development in the governor’s office, along with a $10-million fund to spur business innovations.
For higher education, the bill was supposed to replicate similar efforts in Utah, where lawmakers have spent $14-million to $25-million per year since 2006 to pay the costs of start-up packages for top-notch faculty researchers in newly created positions.
In Nevada, lawmakers did not put any money in the pot for higher education’s “Knowledge Fund.” Still, Heidi Gansert, the governor’s chief of staff, says economic development is the one area of the state budget that got more money this year.
Improving higher education’s performance and its role in economic development doesn’t necessarily depend on spending a lot more money, she argues. “It’s about using your resources the best you can.”
Without a concerted effort in this area, however, Nevada is likely to fall further behind not only neighboring states competing for business, but also states across the country that are already spending heavily to promote higher education as an economic-development tool. New York has put tens of millions of dollars into the State University of New York at Albany’s NanoTech Complex, which has attracted 250 companies and grown into a facility with $7.5-billion of construction. South Carolina regularly pays for job training of workers at companies that move to the state, a measure that helped it land a Boeing manufacturing site that will employ thousands.
Nevada’s half-hearted efforts have made some faculty members cynical about whether the governor is merely paying lip service to higher education. But at least one higher-education leader in the state still believes that higher education can survive there—if not thrive—if it is willing to change how it operates.
“There’s got to be a culture change in higher education,” says Daniel J. Klaich, chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education. “We have to stop asking what Nevada can do for higher education and ask what higher education can do for Nevada.”
