Over the past fortnight Donald Kennedy, former president of Stanford University and current Editor-in-Chief of the AAAS' scientific weekly, Science, has examined the "Academic Health" of the US, focusing on higher education, and initially, on the effect of the US government's pressuring researchers with regard to limiting access to their research findings but being unwilling to come out publicly with a 'stamped' classification, e.g. restricted or secret. Of passing interest to Australian based Academics perhaps, but not much more. However, in the week that intervened between the first and second parts of his musings the rumblings of a far more powerful destructive force has shaken him.

It now is becoming clear that the biggest problem in higher education in the United States is the steady erosion in the economic health of its great state-supported public universities. There was a time when these institutions dominated the sector. When William Rainey Harper became president of the University of Chicago in 1890, he described his fledgling but handsomely endowed [private] institution as "surrounded by the great engines of public instruction." This politically adroit, poor-me bow to the Big Ten [mid-west public] universities echoes strangely in 2004, when the faculty of the University of Illinois would surely like to have The University of Chicago's salary structure.

Kennedy then refers to a September 2003 policy brief (#124) from the Brookings Institute in which T.J. Kane and P.R. Orszag point to the current recession and the increasing costs to the states of Medicaid¹ as the primary reasons for the sharp decline in state support for public higher education. They go on to say,

[T]he short term crisis should not be allowed to obscure a longer-term shift in state financing of higher education, which began more than a decade ago. ... Public colleges and universities should not expect much respite when the current crisis recedes. In many states, the cuts imposed on higher education during the last recession in 1990-91 were not made up in the subsequent recovery. ... [and] state support for higher education is likely to come under increasing pressure, even as state revenues recover. Since roughly three-quarters of all college students in the United States attend public institutions, the implications for the nation’s higher education system are profound.

And they then make an observation that ought to send chills through that part of the Australian public that considers the university sector of consequence where, whatever the rationalisations, the support per student in our universities has been in steady decline.

Fearful of the political consequences, state governors and legislators have been reluctant to allow the larger tuition increases which would be necessary to fully offset the state cuts to higher education and to allow public institutions to keep pace with private ones. As a result, educational spending per full-time equivalent student has declined at public institutions relative to private institutions: the ratio fell from about 70 percent in 1977 to about 58 percent in 1996. These differential spending trends have begun to manifest themselves in indirect measures of quality in public higher education.

Kennedy then takes up the matter, "there has also been an adverse effect on student recruitment [by the public universities], as candidates in the highest categories of the usual admissions criteria have increasingly preferred private to public universities. Finally, and perhaps most troublesome, faculty satisfaction in the public universities has also dropped. Small wonder: In 1981, the ratio of public to private university professorial salaries stood right about at parity; by 2000, it had dropped to about 0.85."

Of course Australia has no private cashed up universities to which the best staff and students can turn so they either move off-shore not to return or suffer increasing decline and mediocrity.

In the case of the US Kennedy pleads the states, "need to recognize what a powerful economic engine higher education represents, and consider the long-term costs of failing to fuel it." We can only hope that he has more receptive listeners than he would find in the Australian Federal Cabinet."

1. Medicaid, became law in 1965 as a jointly funded cooperative venture between the Federal and State governments to assist states in the provision of adequate medical care to eligible needy persons. Medicaid is the largest program providing medical and health-related services to America's poorest people.

    Within broad national guidelines which the Federal government provides, each of the states: establishes its own eligibility standards; determines the type, amount, duration, and scope of services; sets the rate of payment for services; and administers its own program. Thus, the Medicaid varies considerably from state to state.

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web