Where Does the Regional State University Go From Here?

I t’s a waiting game at Western Illinois University, and one with high stakes.

As Illinois’ budget standoff moves into its 11th month, people at the state’s public colleges are wondering: When the state turns on the financial tap, what kind of money will come back? Who will still have a job? What programs will still be open?

The impasse in Illinois is particularly drastic, but it is symptomatic of the instability of state support for higher education. That instability has raised fundamental questions about the future of the nation’s regional public universities, which educate nearly 30 percent of Americans who attend a four-year college.

What is their role? What should it be? Are they meant to bring a broad, liberal-arts education to the masses, close to home? Or should they hone a utilitarian focus, offering majors designed to funnel graduates straight to ready-made careers in the regional job market?

As enrollments decline, tuition rises, and budgets wither, do states have a strategy for the backbone of their higher-education systems? Where they don’t, de facto mission changes are happening. By happenstance, in some cases, states are reshaping the workhorses of public higher education and how they are educating the middle class.

At Western Illinois, nearly 150 employees, including nontenured faculty members, have been laid off. As enrollment drops, the university is taking a closer look at its academic programs, reviewing those with low enrollment. To save money, some may be closed, merged with others, or reduced to a handful of courses offered in other departments.

The fates of a relatively small cluster of majors and faculty jobs in this rural corner of Illinois hang in the balance, and so does the role of a regional public university in the 21st century.

Without the athletics or research activities that draw public and legislative attention to flagships, regional publics have often been left to flourish, or falter, on their own. Unlike flagships, regionals can’t count on significant research funding, large endowments, or abundant out-of-state tuition to insulate them from the kind of budget cuts most states have handed down since the recession hit, in 2008.

The neglect is no longer benign. The inattention to public regionals, and the limited spending on them, disproportionately hurts low-income and first-generation students, who make up a large portion of those colleges’ enrollment. And it threatens state and national goals for higher education, both those of broadening access and getting more Americans to a college degree.

I llinois’s budget feud has grabbed headlines for the past year, but the deeper challenges that beset Western Illinois have been looming on the horizon.

Like many other Midwestern states, Illinois is losing population. The total number of state residents shrank by 0.2 percent (about 22,000 in net population) in 2015, the second-biggest percentage drop, after West Virginia, last year. The number of high-school graduates in Illinois also is projected to decline over the next decade. Population losses have been especially steep in the rural counties of the state, including the sparsely populated farming region that encircles Macomb, where Western Illinois is located.

The university has been successful in recruiting students from outside its immediate region — nearly half of its students come from the Chicago area — but its enrollment over the past decade has echoed recent state population trends. Fall enrollment for undergraduates has fallen steadily, from 11,284 in 2005 to 9,141 in 2015.

It probably doesn’t help that tiny Macomb could be a tough sell for students interested in a more urban setting. The town boasts old-fashioned courthouse-square charm, but it’s sleepy and remote. The nearest Starbucks is nearly an hour’s drive on two-lane roads.

At the same time, state appropriations, which up until this past year provided about 40 percent of Western Illinois’s instructional budget, have been effectively flat against inflation for most of the past five years. Tight budgets and enrollment declines have led to tuition increases, which in turn hurts the university’s competitive position in the market. Total tuition, fees, and room and board for in-state students rose from $14,977 in the 2008 fiscal year to $22,469 in the 2016 fiscal year, an increase of 40 percent. (Western Illinois offers incoming students a cost guarantee that freezes the amount they pay for four years.)

When the university began the 2015-16 academic year with no state funds, administrators began laying the groundwork for furloughs and staff layoffs in case the budget impasse dragged on. In response to the enrollment losses and the accompanying revenue drops, administrators also began considering faculty layoffs and pondering what to do about academic programs with the lowest enrollments. The largest program on campus, law enforcement and justice administration, had 24 full-time faculty members and graduated 386 majors last year. Among those with low enrollments were African-American studies, which had five full-time faculty members and graduated three majors, and philosophy, which had five full-time professors and graduated two majors.

Western Illinois takes pride, says Jack Thomas, the president, in being “a comprehensive university that provides a quality and well-rounded education for students.” But to remain financially viable, he adds, the university has to bring the number of its faculty and academic programs in line with the number of students it actually has.

When all is said and done, about 30 nontenured faculty members will lose their jobs to layoffs. Nine programs are facing official review.

Each of those programs — philosophy, religious studies, geography, African-American studies, women’s studies, a bachelor’s in music, musical theater, bilingual/bicultural education, and health sciences — has had to submit a report, making a case for its contributions to the university. The Board of Trustees will decide the programs’ fates next month.

If any majors are eliminated, Mr. Thomas says, it doesn’t mean that all of the courses in the subject, or all of the professors in those departments, are going away. Some majors could be combined or redesigned to improve their appeal to students. Western Illinois remains deeply grounded in the liberal arts, he says, but in the state’s current higher-education landscape, “we can’t be everything to everybody.”

F or decades, regional public universities have, in fact, tried to be everything to the citizens of the regions they served. After World War II, states poured money into public colleges to educate the working and middle classes and stoke the postwar boom. Some states, like California, developed a clear plan for their growing higher-education enterprise, including setting out specific roles for their regionally oriented campuses. California State University institutions were designed, initially, to focus on equipping the state’s population with four-year degrees and to leave doctoral education and extensive research to the University of California. Other states adopted similar structures, but few applied the same rigor to defining missions for their regional universities.

What had often started out as state teachers’ colleges added more and more academic programs and graduate degrees over the decades. Some added research activities to their portfolio. Many began to resemble mini-flagships, reflecting the aspirations of their administrators and faculty as much as the needs of their regions.

As long as state budgets were flush and high-school graduates were abundant, regional universities could sustain that model, says Iris Palmer, a public-higher-education expert who works as a senior policy analyst at New America. But now, she says, with demographic shifts and tight state support, regional institutions can no longer sustain models in which they have emulated flagships.

Blame for any failures of the regional-university model lies with the states as much as the universities themselves, says Aims C. McGuinness Jr., a senior associate with the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. Keeping a state’s public institutions focused on their roles requires an effective, comprehensive statewide strategy. “I don’t think you see a lot of those around,” he says.

If you want to see the consequences of not having a statewide plan, Mr. McGuinness says, look at Georgia. The state is merging a number of its colleges in part, he says, because of decades of unchecked institutional sprawl. “They let their community-college system emerge into this mixture of associate and baccalaureate degrees sitting right next to four-year institutions and HBCUs.”

A representative from the University System of Georgia declined to comment.

Illinois dissolved its Board of Governors, which oversaw state higher education, back in 1997. The University of Illinois campuses operate as a system, but the individual regional universities were allowed their own boards to give them more autonomy, says James L. Applegate, executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

The layoffs and program reductions that Illinois public universities are going through have less to do with the lack of a plan and more to do with a lack of state support, Mr. Applegate says. Illinois has cut a total of $1.2 billion from its appropriations for higher education since 2000, he says, leaving the state’s colleges in “survival mode.”

The state board has been working with the individual regional colleges to evaluate their programs and better align their course offerings with what’s needed in each region, Mr. Applegate says, “to keep the work force healthy and drive our economy.”

Regional universities, Ms. Palmer says, may need to leave behind decades of aspiring to be like flagships and instead look to community colleges as their models. Focusing on applied degrees aligned with the regional work force can give a college a strong pull for students. “It’s definitely not prestigious,” she says, but if many regionals are going to remain sustainable, it may be the only course.

Some states have been refocusing their regional universities on work-force needs for years. Since 2010, the institutions that make up Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education have suspended or closed more than 400 programs, introduced more than 300 new programs, and updated or redesigned more than 100 others. The process has been guided by program reviews at the local level and by data from the system on employer needs and the existing work force, says Kathleen M. Howley, the system’s deputy vice chancellor for academic and student affairs. The system, she says, uses online courses and other methods to try to ensure that students can major in what they want, even if it isn’t offered at their local campus.

But too much focus on work-force needs may narrow regional universities too much. Students don’t always know what they want to study when they show up on their local campus, says Kenneth M. Mash, president of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties and a professor of political science at East Stroudsburg University. Further, he says, they may not find their way to disciplines that are minimized or too difficult to pursue. Too much emphasis on career-track offerings may also leave out some of the liberal-arts benefits many employers say they prize most: critical-thinking skills and the abilities to write well and work with others. After all, Mr. Mash says, there’s a reason “some of these disciplines have been around for thousands of years.”

W estern Illinois is using numbers to help guide its future. At the center is a metric put in place by the state last year and designed to identify “low-producing programs.” The current yardstick defines a low-producing program as a major with fewer than 25 students that fails to award an average of six degrees per year over five years. The board recently adjusted the metric so that, beginning next year, a program must have 40 students majoring in it and award an average of nine degrees per year over three years.

The department of philosophy is among those that fail to clear the bar. The number of students majoring in philosophy, though, has increased, up from 14 last year to 26 this year. Christopher Pynes, a professor of philosophy and chair of the Faculty Senate, says that there are only two public four-year institutions in the state, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Illinois State University, where the philosophy departments have 40 or more student majors. If Western Illinois continues to call itself a university, Mr. Pynes says, “it should provide students a university education, period.” And that, he says, means they can major in philosophy, religious studies, and other key liberal-arts majors now on the block.

The metric doesn’t capture the full contribution of the African-American-studies major either, says F. Erik Brooks, a professor of African-American studies and chair of the department. The department offices serve as a haven for African-American students on campus, Mr. Brooks says, and he and the other faculty members serve as de facto counselors. “A lot of that grooming and mentoring that we do that people don’t see, a lot of that will be lost,” he says, if the department is eliminated or downsized.

Western Illinois, like the state itself, is becoming more diverse. Nineteen percent of the university’s students are black and 9 percent are Latino. “How are we getting people prepared for that?” Mr. Brooks asks.

The faculty committee evaluating the arguments being made by colleagues like Mr. Pynes and Mr. Brooks has had “wrenching, intense” discussions, says David Banash, a professor of English and a member of the committee. The real question before the committee, he says, is “What is the nature of the university and its education?”

A traditional university education involves exploring different disciplines and ideas and “seeing the world in a bigger way,” Mr. Banash says. That experience used to be reserved for “the very wealthy, or at least the solidly middle class.” If access-oriented regional public universities keep moving toward a more utilitarian focus, he adds, “we’re going to have one kind of education for the wealthy and an entirely different kind of education for the poor.”

Does cash-strapped Western Illinois risk reducing its commitment to providing that traditional broad-based education to its students, almost half of whom are eligible for Pell Grants? Or, Mr. Banash asks, does it “pay for departments that essentially can’t pay for themselves because they’re so important?”

Some professors believe that a refocusing of mission is long overdue. Barton Jennings, a professor of supply-chain management and a member of the faculty committee, says that some of the self-proclaimed “core” university disciplines simply don’t have the numbers to prove it. Classes in law enforcement and justice administration are bulging, for example.

Mr. Jennings sees the value of a strong liberal-arts curriculum, but perhaps where it’s “a service” to other programs through general-education courses rather than through full-fledged majors. He refutes claims that the culture of the university would change without some of the majors under review. “It’s changed already,” he says. “They’re just not aware of it.”

W hatever decision the Board of Trustees makes, whatever level of state support eventually makes its way to the university’s accounts, Western Illinois is changing, perhaps permanently.

If administrators apply the new 40-major metric to programs there, Mr. Pynes says, about two dozen of the nearly 70 undergraduate programs wouldn’t be able to meet that level. Western Illinois’s English department would make it, Mr. Banash says, but he suspects that there are English programs elsewhere in the state that wouldn’t.

No one at the state board or at campuses themselves is out to get the liberal arts, Mr. Applegate says. The goal is to identify low-enrollment programs and, if they are indeed important to the university, find a way to redesign them or otherwise make sure that they enroll the students they should. “If you’re core, then you ought to have students actually learning your disciplines,” he says. “You ought not to be producing 1.6 graduates a year.”

State universities should not just eliminate standard areas of studies, says Kelly M. Burke, a Democratic state representative and chairwoman of the House of Representatives’ Higher Education Committee. Doing so would shortchange students. At the same time, she adds, universities can’t operate without appropriate scrutiny of what their departments are doing.

Judging which programs are worthy based on the numbers of majors and graduates may not be the best way to evaluate their productivity, says Ms. Palmer of New America. Looking at the amount of money going into a department for salaries and expenses versus the money coming back to the university in the form of tuition from its students can identify whether programs are cash-flow positive, and which should be. A program with few faculty members and low overhead that enrolls many students in general-education as well as major courses may not be the drain on a university’s resources that it might appear. At the same time, if a major like economics, which is popular at most colleges, isn’t attracting enough students to cover its expenses, it could be a sign that the program needs to work harder at recruiting.

Illinois’s regional universities may need to make other changes to better serve the state in years to come. The state will have to do a better job of getting adult learners back into college if it is to meet its goal of getting at least 60 percent of its population to having a college degree or career credential by 2025, Mr. Applegate says. About 40 percent of Illinois residents have a degree or credential now. Embracing adult education would benefit the state, Ms. Burke adds, and it could help the universities by increasing enrollment.

Regional publics across the country are struggling, and many aren’t far behind Western Illinois in facing hard calls about their future. Kansas has cut about $95 million from its support for higher education since 2008. April Mason, the provost and a senior vice president at Kansas State University, says that her institution has nationally ranked programs in its College of Architecture, Planning, and Design that operate at a cost to the university but that the university is “less able to bear it now.” A few more years of slashed support could leave the state’s regional universities “really, really struggling,” she says. The university is considering how best to evaluate its individual offerings to avoid continued cuts across all academic departments. “I don’t want to give up quality of programs, and I fear that we’re getting awfully close to that.”

At Western Illinois, some faculty members and students face an uncertain future. Many professors say they know colleagues who are looking for jobs elsewhere. Heather McIlvaine-Newsad, a professor of anthropology, has done research on how communities deal with the aftermath of natural disasters. The effect of the combination of the budget impasse, the declining enrollment, and the threat of program reviews sometimes reminds her of the situations she witnessed in post-Katrina Louisiana. Colleagues have lost jobs, and many of those who remain are worried about theirs. Others on campus are attempting to adjust to “a new normal,” Ms. McIlvaine-Newsad says, but morale is low. Fall enrollment is projected to drop by 10 percent.

Whatever the state board decides about programs at Western Illinois, and whatever the state government decides to do about the budget, will have ramifications for years, possibly decades. The combination of unclear state strategy and continued disinvestment is unlikely to produce positive results, in Illinois or in any other state. As more and more jobs require a college degree or technical skills, states should be building an agenda for higher education, says Thomas L. Harnisch, director of state relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. The budget cuts of the past eight years, he adds, have already done extensive damage.

The students attending Western Illinois and other cash-strapped regional universities will be fine. They’ll graduate and find good jobs. But Mr. Harnish worries about their children. What kind of public colleges will they inherit? Will the next generation be able to afford them? And will the educations they offer be any good?

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.