The Chronicle of Higher Education's most recent listing, by Nina C. Ayoub, includes several books we thought might be of interest to SCUP members:

 In The New York Times, Tamar Lewin writes about how tuition payments are exceeding state appropriations, and some of the possible consequences foreseen by higher education professionals. Examples in this article focus on California and South Caroline.

Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers:

“The difference between this downturn and others in the past is that this time I don’t think higher education will be able to recover the ground it’s lost,” said Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers. “I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see that money coming back. And with tuition already out of reach for many folks, I don’t think there’s much ability to keep raising it.”

Mark Yudoff, president of the University of California system:

“If approved, this budget will mean that for the first time in our long history, tuition paid by University of California students and their families will exceed the state’s contribution to the core fund,” Mark Yudof, the president of the University of California system, told the Board of Regents. “For those who believe what we provide is a public good, not a private one, this is a sad threshold to cross.”

The University of Oregon is engaging in a big-stakes transformation that challenges assumptions about what is a public and what is a private institution.From this page, you can download an executive summary, or the entire white paper, "Preserving Our Public Mission Through a New Partnership With the State." Selected paragraphs:

Many states across America, including Oregon, are struggling with the current higher education paradox—a broad consensus, fueled by the lessons of our own history, that postsecondary opportunity is critical to our collective prosperity, but challenged to sustain the investments needed in public higher education to support such prosperity. As a result of this paradox, state policies have been adopted across the United States that have fundamentally restructured public higher education systems as states and their public institutions negotiate a new balance of autonomy and accountability ... .

In Oregon, there is growing consensus that the state must move aggressively to enact real reform that supports our collective goal to help more Oregonians earn college degrees—reform that fundamentally changes the state’s role so that each institution is better able to fulfill its public mission through increased autonomy and greater accountability to meet the state’s needs ... .

At the University of Oregon, discussions about how we can better serve the state, and enhance our capacity to meet our public responsibility are well under way and include faculty members, students, staff members, alumni, and other stakeholders. We hold a collective view, joined by the University of Oregon Foundation and the University of Oregon Alumni Association Board of Directors, that the University of Oregon must continue to meet its responsibilities as a public university despite the funding environment that makes it difficult to do so. However, to accomplish this goal we need fundamental change to the governance and funding structure of our public university system. The university’s future is fundamentally predicated on our ability to enhance our capacity to provide greater educational opportunities through increased flexibility, autonomy, and stable funding support from the state ... .

The Darden School at the University of Virginia did it. Now, the Anderson School of Management at UCLA wants to do it? Are "ideals" at risk? Imagine the planning going on behind the scenes! Here are:

An Inside Higher Ed story by Scott Jaschik;

A report on the Darden School's change from The Public Interest; and

Hhere's the Anderson school's strategic plan, which may be of interest, although we have been unable to find a draft copy of the specific plan for changing funding methods ... yet.

"The driver here is the decline in state support," said Judy D. Olian, dean of the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. She stressed that she did not view the shift as changing the business school's mission or its connection to the rest of UCLA or the UC system. At this point, she said, state support makes up only about 18 percent of the business school's $96 million annual budget, and she said that percentage overstates the contribution because much of the state support is tuition revenue that must go to the state first now before it is returned to the school. In a new model, that revenue would never leave the business school. In the end, the business school would truly lose less than $6 million a year, Olian said. In the 1970s, she said, about 70 percent of the business school's budget came from the state. "The decline makes it easier to say that the gap is not going to be large and we could overcome it," Olian said. And there's more to it than the dollars. Olian noted that California does not have a state budget for 2010-11 so she doesn't know what her budget will be for the year. It would be much better, she said, to have that information and plan accordingly -- and to raise more money from private sources to offset whatever is lost.

This article from National Journal magazine synthesizes some of what we've been watching as a trend that may strongly impact the future political willingness of states to support higher education as a public good. It could have a major retardation effect on the federal and foundational efforts to increase the numbers of American college graduates.

Already, some observers see the tension between the older white and younger nonwhite populations in disputes as varied as Arizona's controversial immigration law and a California lawsuit that successfully blocked teacher layoffs this year at predominantly minority schools. The 2008 election presented another angle on this dynamic, with young people (especially minorities) strongly preferring Democrat Barack Obama, and seniors (especially whites) breaking solidly for Republican John McCain.

Over time, the major focus in this struggle is likely to be the tension between an aging white population that appears increasingly resistant to taxes and dubious of public spending, and a minority population that overwhelmingly views government education, health, and social-welfare programs as the best ladder of opportunity for its children. "Anything to do with children in the public arena is going to generate a stark competition for resources," Frey says.

The twist is that graying white voters who are skeptical of public spending may have more in common with the young minorities clamoring for it than either side now recognizes. Today's minority students will represent an increasing share of tomorrow's workforce and thus pay more of the payroll taxes that will be required to fund Social Security and Medicare benefits for the mostly white Baby Boomers. Many analysts warn that if the U.S. doesn't improve educational performance among African-American and Hispanic children, who now lag badly behind whites in both high school and college graduation rates, the nation will have difficulty producing enough high-paying jobs to generate the tax revenue to maintain a robust retirement safety net.

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!

Click on the title, Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About Higher Ed Finance, to access the resource described, below.

Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman describe this paper:

America faces a growing crisis in public postsecondary education, as an unprecedented fiscal meltdown plays out at a time of growing consensus about the urgent need to nearly double levels of degree attainment. Instead of taking steps to develop an investment strategy to reduce access and achievement gaps, we are moving in the opposite direction: reductions in state finances, increases in tuition, cutbacks in enrollments, and reductions in courses and programs students need to succeed.

In an effort to advance the conversation about improving performance in higher education, we’ve identified our ‘top ten’ list of conventional wisdoms about higher education finance.

That list, explained in the white paper linked to above, includes:

Conventional Wisdom #1: Spending increases in higher education are inevitable, because there is no way to improve the productivity of teaching and learning without sacrificing quality.

Conventional Wisdom #2: More money means more quality, and quality means higher performance.

Conventional Wisdom #3: Institutions can make up for lost public subsidies by increasing research revenue.

Conventional Wisdom #4: Because state governments are now minority shareholders in higher education, public policy goals should take a backseat to market rules in steering institutions.

Conventional Wisdom #5: Colleges and universities cannot be expected to invest in change or to pursue state priorities without new money. Any reductions in funds must be replaced before funds can be considered as “new.”

Conventional Wisdom #6: Instructional costs rise by the level of the student taught...upper division students are more expensive than lowerdivision students, graduate students are more expensive than undergraduates, and doctoral candidates are the most expensive of all.

Conventional Wisdom #7: An expansive undergraduate curriculum is a symbol of quality, and necessary to attract students.

Conventional Wisdom #8: States can improve postsecondary productivity if they direct more students to community colleges.

Conventional Wisdom #9: The state financing mechanism for higher education is broken, and we should turn to the federal government to generate the resources needed for the future.

Conventional Wisdom #10: American higher education is grossly overfunded, and the investments needed to increase attainment can be achieved entirely by reallocating resources within existing institutions.

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 "U Mich Revenue Streams: 1980-2010"

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nifty, interactive chart showing how the revenue streams for the University of Michigan have changed (and grown) over time. You can click your way through 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 - and also see (below) the entire time frame at once.

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.

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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.

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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.