Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis"

Dennis Jones, president of NCHEMS, is known to many as a scholar of US higher education for 40+ years. SCUP's Board of Directors began its April 2010 meeting with a presentation by Jones, to the board, in Ann Arbor, about many of the thoughts and facts that are in this excellent piece from Change magazine, which he wrote with Jane Wellman, the executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability.

As promising as these long-overdue developments may be, the reality is that public higher education can't resolve its funding challenges simply by looking for new revenues, turning to the federal government, or cutting costs. Although each of these strategies can pay off in small ways, the fiscal challenge can't be solved by higher education acting on its own. This recession has clearly demonstrated that the financing problems affecting higher education are not short-term but structural. They are also born of bad habits and an inattention to strategic financing and resource allocation.

---

The mantra of the moment is that the “cost model is broken” and that the “new normal” will require attention to cost management and efficiency on a continuing basis.

---

Responsibility for creating the problem—and for its eventual solution—falls equally on both the state and institutions. It's a leadership and policy conversation that the two parties need to have with each other. Although no one would have wished for it to happen this way, the depth of the recession offers the opportunity for the two sides, working in tandem, to find new ways to fund the enterprise that might have been unimaginable under other circumstances.