Ken O’Donnell, an administrator in the California State University system, says life without a statewide coordinating board “ain’t that bad.”
But that doesn’t mean some things aren’t lost without such an agency, he says. And it doesn’t mean there won’t be a role for a coordinating group in the future.
Mr. O’Donnell, senior director of student engagement and academic initiatives and partnerships, spoke here on Tuesday at a meeting of the State Higher Education Executive Officers. He delivered a frank assessment of the California Postsecondary Education Commission, which was eliminated by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2011, as an easy way to cut $2 million from a state budget reeling from the impact of the recession.
The presentation on Tuesday was more than just a history lesson. Although California is one of few states without a statewide coordinating agency, both Oregon and Washington have taken steps in recent years to limit the roles and responsibilities of such bodies.
California’s commission was created in 1960 by the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education in order to eliminate waste and duplication in the state’s three postsecondary systems, to coordinate the systems’ educational efforts, and to provide advice and information to lawmakers. But when the governor axed the commission, Mr. O’Donnell said, he called it “ineffective” and asserted that many in the state viewed it as a bureaucratic barrier.
Mixed Results
The effects of the commission’s demise have been mixed, Mr. O’Donnell said. The commission’s research was often unhelpful, he said, and there is no shortage of public and private entities that study higher-education policy.
In the commission’s absence, the three public-college systems have joined efforts to enact major policies such as statewide articulation agreements between the California Community Colleges and the California State system, new bachelor’s-degree programs in the community colleges, and a website to share best practices in administrative services.
But the systems have also had to make an extra effort to join the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement — a set of national standards for states to approve online and distance-learning programs offered by institutions in other states. Without a coordinating council, a state must create a new nonprofit entity to sign the agreement.
The most valuable thing the commission provided, Mr. O’Donnell said, was a unified message and communication from the systems to lawmakers about the value of investing in higher education.
In the absence of the agency, the University of California’s president, Janet Napolitano, negotiated one on one with Governor Brown to increase state appropriations for public colleges. While that approach worked out well for the systems in the current budget, the lack of a unified voice for public colleges could pit the systems against each other in the future, Mr. O’Donnell said.
In the meantime, there have been calls to revive a statewide coordinating board. And there may be a future role for such an entity, Mr. O’Donnell said, as an advocate for public higher education.
But any new statewide council would have to be formulated with the needs of the future in mind, he said, not the expectations of higher education in the middle of the 20th century.
“Designing such a commission means focusing more on the world ahead of us than the one from half a century ago,” he said. “There are more ways to get it wrong than right, and we’d be better off doing this well than quickly.”
Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.
