Fill in the blank: Faculty members and the leadership of _____ state-college system are at odds over a proposal that aims to streamline how the institutions work, to save money, and to improve student performance through technology and administrative cooperation.
That story is playing out in several states in the Northeast and Midwest, where falling enrollments and shrinking state dollars are putting an especially tight squeeze on regional colleges. In contrast to public flagships, the regional institutions have two strikes against them: They largely serve a place-bound student body, and they lack the prestige to build big endowments or research portfolios.
The most recent example was in Connecticut, where faculty members at both two- and four-year institutions in the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system have revolted against a plan that calls for enhancing online learning, aligning courses with the state’s work-force needs, and sharing some administrative functions.
Connecticut has plenty of company. A similar scenario is playing out in Minnesota, where students and faculty members in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities are resisting a plan, put forward by the system’s chancellor, that makes many recommendations similar to those in the Connecticut proposal.
Meanwhile, the same tensions are causing students and faculty members to protest program and staff cuts in the University of Maine system and in many of the universities that make up the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education.
The disagreements about those plans are “natural and not necessarily unhealthy,” and reflect some of the common differences between the approaches of faculty members and administrators, said Daniel J. Hurley, associate vice president for state relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
In both Connecticut and Minnesota, faculty members have also raised concerns about the involvement of private-sector consultants in developing the recommendations. “My reading is that the process is as important as the final product,” Mr. Hurley said.
Broken Processes
The processes in Connecticut, Maine, and Minnesota seem muddled, at the moment, by widespread discontent among both faculty members and students. On Monday, for example, students staged a protest at a meeting of the trustees of the University of Maine system, at one point even occupying the chairs of the trustees. Earlier this year, trustees had approved extensive cuts in academic programs and faculty jobs at the University of Southern Maine, which is facing a $16-million deficit in the coming fiscal year.
In Minnesota, the chancellor of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities is calling for mediation with the system’s two faculty unions to resolve disputes over his plan, called “Charting the Future.”
Faculty members were initially upset at revelations that the system had hired McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, at a cost of $2-million to help formulate the plan. Charting the Future calls for a systemwide transfer agreement between community colleges and four-year institutions in the system, the use of competency-based education and credit for prior learning, an increase in online courses, more courses and programs tailored to the state’s work-force needs, and shared administrative services among campuses.
Aside from feeling left out of the process, faculty members are also concerned that program cuts will leave some campuses unable to meet the needs of their parts of the state. And there are fears that a systemwide transfer agreement will not account for the widely varying quality of instruction among the institutions.
The chancellor, Steven J. Rosenstone, was not available for comment.
In Connecticut, the plan to overhaul the state-college system has a similarly vague and futuristic name, “Transform CSCU.” And many of the complaints from faculty members sound similar, too.
“I want to make it clear that faculty aren’t opposed to change per se,” said Patricia O’Neill, an associate professor of psychology at Western Connecticut State University and president of that campus’s’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “Our issue is that the initiatives were developed without us.”
Many of the proposals sound good, Ms. O’Neill said, but they may have unintended consequences. For example, she said, increasing online and blended learning could strip the institution’s faculty members of their role in setting curricula.
Over all, the tone of the initiative also seems to put a premium on efficiency at the price of academic excellence, she said. “The board president says this is supposed to help declining enrollment, to make higher education more streamlined and less expensive,” Ms. O’Neill said. “But this is another instance of education being treated as a business.”
Losing Battles
While the fights between administrators and faculty members get much of the news-media attention, the real battle is against forces neither side can control: the economy and the nation’s shifting demographics.
Those forces are more troublesome for regional colleges and universities than for the large public flagships, which have a greater ability to rake in new fund-raising and research revenue, and a leg up in attracting out-of-state students, who often pay full price to attend. Instead, the regional institutions depend heavily on local students and state appropriations.
Higher-education appropriations are rebounding in many states but often are below prerecession levels after sharp cuts following the economic downturn. And the states with university-system unrest tend to be feeling budgetary pain. In Pennsylvania, for example, tax dollars for higher education are down more than 20 percent from 2009, according to figures from the Grapevine Project of Illinois State University, which tracks state money in higher education.
In Minnesota, higher-education appropriations are just over 10 percent less than they were in 2009; in Connecticut, they are down a little more than 3 percent. In Maine, state appropriations for higher education remained largely flat over that period.
And then there are the enrollment issues. While many colleges across the country saw record enrollments during the most recent recession, the number of students in most institutions in the Connecticut and Minnesota systems either fell or grew only slightly, with the largest increases generally occurring in the community colleges of both systems.
The situation is unlikely to improve: The number of high-school graduates has peaked in both the Midwest and the Northeast, and is now on a long, slow decline, according to figures from the Western Interstate Compact for Higher Education.
In the Northeast, the number of high-school graduates has already fallen nearly 6 percent since the 2009-10 academic year, and it is projected to slide 5 percent more by 2028.
In the Midwest, the number of high-school graduates has fallen more than 7 percent since 2009-10, and is expected to decline 10 percent over the next 14 years.
It’s not just the declining numbers that are a challenge for regional systems, said Larry Isaak, president of the Midwestern Higher Education Compact, a regional advisory board for colleges and universities. The average student at a regional institution is no longer the typical 18-to-22-year-old, he said. He or she is now often older, and more likely to work and have a family.
That puts the public regional colleges in a bind, with a choice between clinging to familiar but unsuccessful methods or leaping to unfamiliar practices with uncertainty about success.
“The type of student being served is very different than it was 30 years ago,” Mr. Isaak said, “but we still have a system built for traditional students.”
