Bad budgets are old news in the Sunshine State. While colleges across the nation are coping with the recession, public universities in Florida, a state with finances that resemble a Ponzi scheme, have spent years doing without.
Ask Paul Outka, an assistant professor in Florida State University’s highly regarded English department. But don’t call him on his office phone this fall. He won’t have one anymore —it’s among the latest victims of cost-cutting.
He says he prefers forced frugality to its alternatives.
“You get rid of the phone lines and you save some of my comrades,” says Mr. Outka, who has had a ringside seat at one of the worst financial catastrophes in higher education today.
The recession hit Florida early, and in a big way. Without an income tax, state government has long depended on property and sales taxes. As real estate and tourism have tanked, however, the state’s annual revenue has shed more than $12-billion from a 2006 peak of $74-billion. But Florida’s conservative politicians have remained steadfast in refusing new taxes. They also fought to keep the university system’s tuition at rock-bottom levels.
The result for the state’s 11 public universities has been cutbacks in state money, which have led to gutted programs, faculty departures, low salaries for professors, and the nation’s highest student-to-faculty ratio. University leaders say this is by far the worst chapter in a long history of chronic underfinancing.
Mr. Outka got there just in time for this round. Described as a rising star by colleagues, his hiring was a coup for the university, which lured him away from the University of Virginia in 2007, as the cuts were beginning. In addition to having his phone line removed, Mr. Outka has had to ration his copier paper and sits in a non-air-conditioned office on weekends. He has too many students to meet with any of them individually until at least their junior year, and he never teaches classes smaller than 35 students.
“They wanted us to take out a bulb from our fluorescent lights,” he says during an interview in his spartan office. He points to two reams of paper on a shelf and says, “There’s my stash.”
Yet the anxiety and annoyances have yet to defeat Mr. Outka, who says he can still do his job, and even enjoy it.
His resolve is evidence that while Florida’s universities have been battered by the cuts, they have yet to fall apart. A common refrain emerges during visits to Florida State, the University of Florida, and the University of Central Florida: While it may be a miracle, academic quality and student access remain largely intact —so far.
After all, public universities are remarkably resilient.
“It takes a long time for a university to make or lose a national reputation,” says Terry L. Hickey, provost of the University of Central Florida.
Florida’s tuition rates, which are among the nation’s cheapest, and generous, merit-based Bright Futures Scholarships have made public higher education an irresistible option for its high-school graduates. Over the past decade, enrollment in the system grew by 38 percent, now topping 300,000.
The crucial question is how much longer Florida’s universities will have to run on fumes.
The budget passed by the Legislature this month was better than many had feared. Dropped were a proposed 25-percent reduction in the state’s higher-education contribution and across-the-board salary cuts for university employees. The approved reduction of 10.5 percent, or $207-million, will be partially offset by $159-million in federal stimulus money. And lawmakers finally budged on allowing tuition increases, which will bring in new revenue.
But higher education in Florida is far from in the clear. The stimulus money is only a temporary fix, and economists say the state’s finances remain fundamentally flawed. Barring a tax overhaul or a serious economic recovery, a few more lean years could mean a slide into mediocrity for the state’s top universities.
“Now it’s getting down to the bone,” says Ryan J. O’Mara, a graduate assistant at the University of Florida.
Dateline: Tallahassee
In 2005 it looked like Florida’s universities were poised to finally become worthy of the nation’s fourth-most-populous state.
People were pouring into Florida, and the resulting real-estate boom led to a rapid increase in the state’s budget. University leaders were dreaming big about how to use the new money. The public system’s two flagship universities had become legitimate national players. The University of Florida had just topped $500-million in annual research support, and Florida State had recruited many faculty stars, some in bunches for interdisciplinary programs.
At the same time, formerly sleepy commuter institutions, like the University of Central Florida, Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University, and the University of South Florida, had ridden a wave of student demand and become large, comprehensive universities. Central Florida, for example, with 50,000 students, is now one of the nation’s largest universities.
But the swings of the pendulum in a boom-and-bust state can be cruel.
Florida “is where dreamers come to die,” says Erin C. Belieu, an associate professor of English at Florida State.
Ms. Belieu, an accomplished poet, is one of 10 full-time faculty members in the creative-writing program. One night last month she joined other Florida State professors and graduate assistants at a restaurant here. Over drinks they commiserated about the swelling numbers of students in their classes, and how persistent money problems have cut into morale.
“You’re constantly waiting,” she says. “The storm is coming.”
The English department is one of the university’s proudest strengths, and an area administrators say they want to protect. For the most part, they have succeeded.
In addition to Mr. Outka, the department two years ago landed David H. Ikard, an assistant professor of English, who came from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
But with two steps forward came two steps back. The creative-writing program lost two professors whom their colleagues described as “extraordinary.” Neither is being replaced. David Vann, a best-selling author, left for the University of San Francisco, and Mark G. Cooper went to the University of South Carolina.
The department’s chairman, Ralph M. Berry, says the university has worked hard to head off attempts to hire away talent, sometimes through counteroffers or well-timed raises. But those two departures, he acknowledges, were a major hit. “We’re just doing without,” he says. “It’s really nip and tuck.”
Mr. Vann has nothing but praise for Florida State’s English department and his colleagues there. But the low pay, rare raises, and looming threat of layoffs sent him out on the job market this year.
He will start this fall as an assistant professor at San Francisco. Reached by e-mail (he was hiking in Australia’s outback), Mr. Vann says the new job will pay 50 percent more than he made at Florida State, and more than most full professors make there. (The average salary for Florida State’s full professors is $103,000, while assistant professors earn $69,000, according to the American Association of University Professors.)
“It’s amazing to see what FSU has done with so little funding,” he says. “It’s a great university, and it’s terrible to see how quickly its achievements can be torn apart.”
Part of the reason Florida State is able to hang on, Mr. Vann’s former colleagues say, results from planning by its leaders. In fact, many professors there say they approve of how the administration is handling the crisis. That good will is rare for a university rocked by budget cuts, which generally increase tension between faculty members and administrators.
Lawrence G. Abele, provost since 1994, is a big source of the trust on the campus. An alumnus and oceanographer, he has spent four decades at the university. He is the sort of provost who feels that his job description around the during a walk on the campus includes picking up trash, running off scam artists who try to collect sensitive personal information from students, and steering lost visitors in the right direction.
His philosophy on budget cuts is, “We don’t BS our colleagues. It’s all out there.”
The latest round of cuts began after he and T.K. Wetherell, Florida State’s president, took a hard look at the state’s budget outlook in 2006. Mr. Abele’s response to the projections: “This is insane.”
They moved quickly to save money, telling deans to trim their budgets by as much as 10 percent.
“We did it quietly,” Mr. Abele says, adding that before the bottom fell out of the state’s economy, “we had $100-million stuffed everywhere.”
At a campus meeting last month to discuss the gloomy budget, Mr. Wetherell talked about threatened programs and jobs.
While the worst-case scenario did not materialize, Florida State faces a sobering future. The state has trimmed $82-million since 2007, with a $44-million cut coming this year alone. Increased tuition revenue and $22-million in federal stimulus money will help but won’t come close to matching that amount. Faculty and staff jobs may be eliminated, and Mr. Abele says many departments and programs will have to pay for themselves by drawing more undergraduate tuition dollars.
The provost is confident that Florida State will preserve its core strengths, particularly at the graduate level. In the humanities, that includes philosophy, history, religion, and creative writing. Also in good shape are ventures related to the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, which the university runs with the University of Florida and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
But other departments are on notice, including the one from Mr. Abele’s own fielddiscipline —oceanography —which he says he told: “I don’t think you’re doing enough.”
Florida State can probably weather the storm without enduring fundamental disruptions, he says, but not if the budget woes continue for another five years. “We’re going to stall a little bit,” says Mr. Abele. “The goal would be to hold our ground through this.”
Dateline: Gainesville
Florida’s public universities might be short of money, but they are never short of students. Particularly not the University of Florida, which is literally trampled each spring by hordes of touring applicants and their parents.
With a freshman class that sported a median SAT score of 1293 and a weighted high-school grade-point average of 4.18, Florida’s most selective public university is creeping closer to the likes of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of California at Berkeley.
This month a group of 160 aspiring Florida students and their parents file into a room in the campus welcome center. It’s spring break for most Florida high schools, and the university has doubled its number of tours. All four are fully booked this day.
After the visitors watch a slick, university-produced film, a young woman who works for the admissions office delivers her spiel. It includes little of the usual bragging about facilities or student life, sticking almost entirely to how to beat the long odds of admission.
The high schoolers seem to appreciate the advice, listening raptly and taking notes on tips like which advanced-placement classes help most.
Florida is not the same university that many of the parents on the tour knew as students. In their day, the socially lively campus with a fear-inspiring football stadium was a safe bet for most applicants, even ones with mediocre grades or SAT scores. But the acceptance rate has dipped to 39 percent from about 65 percent as recently as a decade ago. Last year 28,000 students applied for 6,600 spots, as Florida continued its climb up the popular college rankings.
One thing hasn’t changed: The University of Florida is still cheap. Floridians pay $3,800 in tuition and fees, and 95 percent of incoming students qualify for the lottery-financed Bright Futures Scholarships, which cover 75 percent of tuition. (Tuition and fees at Florida and Florida State are the lowest among major research universities. Berkeley, by comparison, costs twice as much, while Michigan charges nearly three times as much.)
The university’s enhanced academic reputation is a source of pride, but it also causes tension. Campus officials hear from angry alumni who don’t understand why their progeny’s applications were rejected.
J. Bernard Machen, the president, says Florida lawmakers take the flagship university’s admissions process personally. On his trips to Tallahassee, they ask if he can help children of friends and relatives. “Every time I go there, I get a name or a list,” he says.
That anxiety hits close to home for some professors. Ken P. Mercer, director of guidance at Gainesville High School, which is in the university’s backyard, says faculty members’ kids no longer can count on a sure thing when they apply to Florida.
“Students adjust and lower their goals,” he says of the university’s increasing selectivity. Parents, however, “are the bunch that really has a hard time adjusting.”
Stiff admissions standards and growing research clout, with $562-million in sponsored research last year, have led to grumbling around the state that the university does not serve Florida’s most pressing needs.
That is a common challenge for public flagships. But the charge is a stretch here, where a whopping 94 percent of undergraduates are state residents.
A more relevant beef, university leaders acknowledge, is that Florida could do a better job serving the students it does admit. As the money woes mount, Mr. Machen says the university has become “supersized” with 35,000 undergraduates: “We’re probably bigger than we ought to be.”
Even before the latest budget trauma, including a $42-million cut in the state’s net contribution this year, Mr. Machen and the Board of Trustees had decided to emphasize and protect graduate programs and research. Theirs is the state’s only public university to limit undergraduate enrollment in recent years, and is actually seeking a reduction of 1,000 students in each of the next four years.
The university may also look to cut back on undergraduate programs. This year the president questioned whether Florida should continue to offer a bachelor’s degree in education, as do all of the state’s other public universities and some community colleges. Instead, he suggested, the university could concentrate on its doctoral strength in training school psychologists and principals. But he backed off in the ensuing backlash.
It’s tough to shift focus when a university’s programs are well established, successful, and hard to cut.
The faculty and graduate unions have been scathing in their criticism of campus leaders. They do not believe that the money shortage is as dire as claimed, and argue that Mr. Machen is using the budget woes as an excuse to remake the university.
John Biro, a philosophy professor who is president of the campus chapter of the statewide faculty union, United Faculty of Florida, says last year’s layoffs were tough to swallow while the university was still hiring and spending money on new projects, particularly in professional schools.
“We are lurching from one administrative whim to another,” he says.
Ryan J. O’Mara disagrees. Mr. O’Mara, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in health and human performance, is one of the university’s 15,000 graduate assistants. He thinks the budget crisis is real and says some restructuring might help in the long run.
“People can’t see past their own backyards,” Mr. O’Mara says in an interview in his office, which is in the basement of a gymnasium built in 1946. He was the 2002 valedictorian of Venice High School, on the state’s Gulf Coast, and says he came to the university because of the Bright Futures Scholarships. The affordability of his alma mater limits what it can do, he argues. He says the university should raise tuition and “make the undergraduate education smaller, more special, and more focused.”
But to do so, Mr. O’Mara says, Bright Futures must change. The state is too broke to have the program cover tuition increases. In May the Legislature voted to cap the scholarship amount, separating it from tuition levels, which by law the state’s public universities can now raise by up to 15 percent per year, until they reach the national average of $6,585.
But even with that major concession by the state’s policy makers, which seemed unlikely even two years ago, the universities have a long way to go on tuition. In several years, when they catch up to the current national average, it will have changed, and Florida will no doubt remain a bargain.
Dateline: Orlando
You can’t lose what you never had. Or so goes the response at the University of Central Florida to the state’s financial straits.
Officials here say they have long been forced to run lean, even more so than the better-established University of Florida and Florida State, which they say were lawmakers’'s golden children during flush times. So Central Florida has turned to private money to fuel its rapid growth. It made much of corporate partnerships and fund raising while seeking to align itself with the interests of the metropolitan Orlando, which is they referred to here as a “city state.”
The result is a nimble, business-friendly university with little risky debt. And the entrepreneurial approach may be a glimpse of the future for the rest of Florida’s public universities.
“We were able to treat this as a big business where we were protecting shareholders,” says Richard J. Walsh, chairman of the Board of Trustees. “We’re in really good shape.
The city-state strategy does not mean that the university avoids working lawmakers for money. They do, sometimes successfully. A “medical city” that the university is building has been partially paid for by the state, drawing grumbles from elsewhere in the system.
Furthermore, higher-education observers in Florida say, UCF and Florida State have avoided some of the acrimony that has stung the University of Florida, because, unlike the flagship, they have yet to start layoffs and program cuts.
But the university’s fixation on Orlando rather than Tallahassee looks smart now, with the state budget in ruins.
Business in this city is more than the shell-shocked tourism and real-estate industries. High tech has long thrived here, and UCF was created to tap into that strength. It was built in 1968, at the end of a dirt road about 15 miles east of downtown Orlando, with a goal of splitting the distance between the Space Coast —anchored by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center —and military compounds in Orlando.
These days academic researchers work closely with industry, government, and the military, and 115 companies pay for space on the university’s 1,027-acre research park.
The partnership push accelerated in 1992, the beginning of the tenure of John C. Hitt as president. Mr. Hitt, who is among the nation’s longest-serving public-university chiefs, announced that Central Florida was to become “America’s leading partnership university.”
To the surprise of many in the state and beyond, that is a claim UCF can now make seriously. For example, a consortium of the university and five community colleges, including Valencia Community College, has drawn national attention. At the university’s Center for Emerging Media, in which the gaming giant Electronic Arts is a partner, students work on video games in a remodeled former showplace for livestock. Down the hall is a motion-capture room where Tiger Woods recently filmed a television commercial.
The university, however, has not escaped budget pain. Its margins are tight, and a $38-million reduction in state support this year will probably lead to cuts. The tight times come as the university is beginning to slow its growth.
“This campus will only handle 50,000 students,” Mr. Hitt says. “We will be built out within the next 10 years.”
A next step for the university is to enhance its national profile.
“We’re the biggest place that you never heard of,” says Randall P. Shumaker, executive director of the university’s Institute for Simulation and Training, a computer-modeling and virtual-reality center.
Being a lesser-known quantity has its advantages. Unlike its neighbor up the highway in Gainesville, UCF lacks long-held traditions that can make change difficult.
In fact, this is a campus that is still fiddling with its brand. While Central Florida plays with the big boys in Division I athletics, it settled on a name for its teams only two years ago, dropping “Golden” from “Golden Knights.”
Its mascot, Knightro, might not be a household name. But Knightro is a decided improvement from a predecessor, the Citronaut, which featured an astronaut’s head with an orange for a body.
The university has just built a full set of expensive sports facilities, including a 10,000-seat arena and 45,000-seat football stadium. The private sector covered the entire $300-million price tag for that development,of the projects and surrounding developments, with retail deals, naming rights, and rental fees taking the place of state money and student fees.
Mr. Walsh, the boardtrustees’ chairman, says the construction would have run longer and cost more with public financing, and might have left the university holding more debt.
The building at UCF continues, most notably on the medical campus near Orlando International Airport. As the centerpiece of a 7,000-acre development that features housing and schools, the campus will include a medical school, children’s and veterans’ hospitals, and research centers.
Critics have argued that the cash-strapped state can ill afford the money for new medical centers, including $21-million allocated this year to Central Florida and a complex at Florida International University.
Charles B. Reed, chancellor of California State University, who led Florida’s public-university system from 1985 to 1998, calls the Legislature’s financing of those projects “insane.” He says a stronger Board of Governors of the university system could prevent campuses from competing unwisely for state money.
“They don’t govern anything out there,” Mr. Reed says. “It is a politicized free-for-all among 11 institutions.”
Central Florida officials defend the ambitious development, saying Orlando is the largest U.S. metropolitan area without a medical school.
During a tour of the site, where bulldozers work the sandy turf and former pastureland, Mr. Hickey, the provost, says the medical city has pulled in more than its share of private money, although giving has slowed.
In a rainstorm, Mr. Hickey points through a car window at a classic example of Florida development: palm trees trucked in fully grown and planted beside gleaming new buildings. He says most of the new programs and high-tech facilities pay for themselves. Given the state’s budget mess, he predicts, all of Florida’s universities will need to earn their own keep.
“There’s got to be a good return on our investment,” he says, because money from the state “just isn’t going to return.”
But Mr. Hickey believes that Florida will bounce back eventually, with real estate and a boost from high tech, and that the universities that tap into student demand and the needs of local businesses will make it through the dark days.
“We’ll recover,” he says. “Florida will go back to being a growth economy.”
For the state’s universities, any other outcome is unthinkable.
