What to do For and With the United States' Public State Universities, James Garland's Solution. (January 3, 2006)

    On September 19, 2005 U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced the formation of the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. The nineteen member commission* has been charged with answering questions such as: "What skills will students need to succeed in the 21^st century? How can [America] make sure [it] stays the world's leader in academic research? And, how can [it] make sure opportunities for quality higher education and the best jobs are open to all students?"

Now James Garland, professor of physics and President of Miami University, Ohio, has written an opinion piece for the Washington Post in which he suggests when the "Commission on the Future of Higher Education gets to work, it might do well to begin by acknowledging this fact: The historical business model for public higher education is broken and cannot be fixed."

Professor Garland puts it quite simply, "[T]he compact between public universities and state governments has degenerated into a shouting match of accusation and finger-pointing. Legislators see colleges as bastions of inefficiency, while frustrated college presidents see elected officials as buck-passers who use their colleges as whipping boys. The result is that public colleges are increasingly staring into the abyss.

    "[The current situation is one of] budget cutbacks, crowded classrooms, dilapidated buildings, angry faculty unions and armies of underpaid temporary instructors. In Ohio, for example, deferred maintenance at public campuses is a US$5 billion problem, about 20 times the state's yearly maintenance budget... At many schools public funding has fallen below 20 percent of total revenue. At my own school, it is about 10 percent."

And Garland summarises, "Public higher education is moving down the track toward privatisation, and the train is not coming back." But in his view there is a solution; "states could break the cycle by investing their higher education dollars strategically," and he goes on to outline the following "roadmap".

1. Turn all or part of each public four-year university into a private, non-profit corporation, with legislation to protect research grants and centres and to honour personnel and pension obligations.

2. Phase out each school's subsidy over, say, six years, to enable campuses to grandfather in current students and adjust to the new environment.

3. Reallocate the freed-up subsidy dollars to scholarships for new undergraduate and graduate students.

4. The scholarships, valid at any accredited four-year college in the state, would go primarily to middle- and low-income students, with some reserved for engineering majors, math teachers and other groups that meet state needs.

It is Garland's belief that Universities would work hard to attract scholarship-holding students and the students in turn would choose schools that offered them the highest-quality programs at competitive tuition and institutions that lost market share would have to  improve their offerings, lower their prices or close their doors.

And he concludes, "Lacking an automatic pricing advantage, formerly public colleges would raise tuition to make up their revenue shortfall, but no more than the market would allow. Competition would force campuses to become increasingly lean, efficient and strategic.

Professor Garland's approach to overcome the funding crisis bears a resemblance to that proposed by University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Glyn Davis' but is in stark contrast to proposals put forward by former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt (a member of the Commission of the Future of Higher Education, see below) who has called on US Midwestern universities and colleges to pressure legislators for funding to help move the region from a manufacturing-based economy to one that’s knowledge-based in A Roadmap to Michigan’s Future: Meeting the Challenge of a Global Knowledge-Driven Economy -- A Strategic Roadmapping Exercise, or the University of California, Berkeley's Survey Research Center's analysis Return on Investment: Educational Choices and Demographic Change in California's Future, which opens with the rhetorical question, "Investing in higher education: how much is it worth to California?"

January 4, 2006 Letter to the Editor of the San Jose Mercury which had reprinted Prof Garland's opinion piece