Katharine Lyall UW Pres Emeritus

Katharine Lyall and Kathleen Sell ask --The True Genius of America at Risk: Are We Losing Our Public Universities to de Facto Privatization? (January 6, 2006)

    Katharine Lyall, the University of Wisconsin System's President Emeritus, and Kathleen Sell, its former chief budget officer through their just published book, The True Genius of America at Risk: Are We Losing Our Public Universities to de Facto Privatization?, have opened a candid public policy discussion about the future of public higher education in America.

Lyall and Sell describe the market forces that are eroding the traditional partnership between the US state and public universities and seek to explain how the search for new revenue sources is forcing a refocusing of their basic mission. They examine several state experiments in higher education funding systems and structures being attempted to redress the problem of balancing the need for additional funding while maintaining the ethos of public universities.

This past April Professor Lyall wrote in an article for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching:

Public colleges and universities, which enroll 77 percent of all students in higher education, drew more than half of their operating support from taxpayer sources in the 1980s; today money from state coffers provides about 30 percent of funding. At some of the nation's most prominent public universities, such as the University of Virginia and the University of Colorado, state funding contributes less than 10 percent of university operating support. This steady disinvestment in higher education by the states does not seem to reflect a clear public policy decision to reduce higher education opportunities. It indicates instead structural problems in state budgets and budgeting practices. Indeed, the criticism of higher education for "exorbitant" tuition increases demonstrates a continuing belief by legislators that access to higher education is more essential than ever, both for individuals and for the state's economic future, and that somehow universities should find a way to maintain access despite the steady erosion of funding.

 

[Today overall] state funds provide 30 percent, tuition supplies about 20 percent, and gifts, grants, and contracts (mostly for research) constitute 50 percent or more. In effect, state taxpayers have become minority shareholders in their public colleges and universities.

Lyall describes several of the current "experiments" being trialled to overcome the funding crises:

As some state leaders begin to pay attention and realize that solutions are needed, they are creating interesting experiments in higher education funding. For example:

 

Charter universities are being created. The Virginia state legislature has just adopted legislation providing for three tiers of charter status that permit public universities to obtain greater operating autonomy in exchange for meeting specified state performance goals. This relationship more honestly recognizes the state's minority stakeholder status and frees the university to obtain management efficiencies outside the contractual constraints of state government.

 

Hybrid universities like Cornell University and the University of Virginia operate with a mix of publicly supported and privately endowed units within the same university structure. This permits focusing scarce state funding on units and programs that state decision makers designate as of critical state interest, leaving the operation and funding of remaining units/programs to the university operating privately.

 

Full-cost pricing experiments, like Miami University in Ohio where tuition is set to cover full costs of operation, and financial aid set-asides from the tuition revenues are used to ensure access for low-income students.

Lyall then concludes with the rather vaguely expressed view, "The core public purposes of higher education must be collectively achieved (if they can be sustained at all) through specialization and allocation of resources across all higher education institutions. In this new model, both research and teaching missions will become more focused, and more collaborative activity will occur between and among "public" and "private" institutions, coordinated by statewide university systems."

What is apparent in the US is the formation of a dichotomy between views as expressed 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 delineate the importance of the public university for the nation's good and why it must be properly publicly supported and the views of those who believe that elected governments in the US can hence forth never be persuaded that public support for higher education is a worthwhile, essential, and profitable investment.

Katharine Lyall's 50 minute radio interview with Joy Cardin (Wisconsin Public Radio,  Jan. 3, 2006) is available on line.