The state of Arizona proposes to cut community college funding by 50%. Texas is cutting also, and closing four campuses.

No, this is not a larger-scale Walnut College Case Study; it's real-world 2011.

"Dean Dad" asks you, what would you cut if you were a community college CFO in Arizona?

To get a sense of just how bad this is, you could reduce every salary at the college by 25 percent, and still not make up the gap. (That's because labor isn't the only cost.) Alternately, you could lay off 25 percent of the employees and still not make up the gap.

The 'squishy' things would be the first to go. That means travel, professional development, and food for college functions. This adds up to well under 1 percent.

Obviously, any new full-time hiring for non-unique positions is out of the question. Normal attrition, unreplaced on the staff side and adjuncted-out on the faculty side, might get you another percentage or two.

Ivy Tech's president, Thomas J. Snyder, shares in University Business magazine a brief summary of his institution's implementation of one of the four key strategies in its strategic plan: outsourcing bookstore management; a statewide agreement with Dell; similar consolidation of copiers and services; an outsourced, statewide prospective student calling center; consolidation of furniture purchases; and a guaranteed energy savings contract. 

Overall, since 2008, Ivy Tech has improved purchasing practices to create nearly $19 million of one-time savings, plus $12 million in recurring annual savings. Even more important than these bottom-line savings are what they enable: We recently hired nearly 300 faculty and staff to accommodate our growing enrollment—and we did so without adding to our budget. The new employees aren’t administrators; they’re faculty and staff who work directly with students.

Our trustees understand this connection between cost savings and growth. Ivy Tech also recognizes that its role as the state’s largest workforce development provider means that state support represents an investment in Indiana’s future, and we’re confident we offer an unparalleled rate of return.

Ivy Tech's strategic plan is titled Accelerating Greatness.

In Change magazine's current issue, John Seely Brown, Ann Pendleton-Jullian, and Richard Adler, examine the role of land-grant universities and their part in the "now" and the "future." While keeping a very broad perspective, they eventually examine as a case study North Carolina State University, its Centennial Campus, and review a number of learning and research initiatives, such as: Red Hat Software, MedWestvaco, and NC Textile Connect - digging even deeper into some of the latter's projects: William Shinn's Aorta, Mansour Mohammed's process, LAAMScience and APJet - as well as the North Carolina Program for Forensic Science.

In search of new models of learning for the 21st century, we visited North Carolina State University, a 120-year-old land-grant institution located in Raleigh, North Carolina. NC State provides some interesting clues about how America's land-grant colleges and universities might reinvent their mission for the 21st century. While initiatives similar to the ones at NC State can be found at other institutions, the school is worth studying because of its relatively long history of innovation and its commitment to expanding the meaning of “engagement.”

NC State has developed a reputation for pioneering an expanded definition of the university around the concept of actively engaging with the larger community and the regional economy. The pursuit of greater engagement has inspired the development of new academic practices that blend old and new forms of learning—practices that honor both the traditional transmission of codified knowledge and new forms of knowledge building through inquiry, speculation, and problem-solving.

This “blended” model of education is the foundation of an ecosystem in which students and faculty operate in the territory between the intellectual activity associated with the academy's imperative to ask questions in a manner that does not typically happen elsewhere and the pragmatism necessary to create impact in real-world settings. This is a complex territory, because it is often conflictive by nature. Yet it is precisely in the negotiation of conflicts that resiliency is formed.

Robert J. Sternberg worked at private, elite institutions for 40 years. He's now the provost at Oklahoma State University and has a new appreciation of land-grant universities. In this essay from Inside Higher Ed, he shares seven reasons to value them, ending with questions:

Whereas some of us may think of land-grant institutions as needing to emulate the most elite institutions, perhaps these elite institutions would benefit as much or more from adopting some of the land-grant values. As our society becomes ever more socially and economically stratified and the middle class vanishes, with high correlations between educational opportunities and socioeconomic status, we have an obligation, as a society, to ask whether things are going where we want them to go. What kinds of leaders do we want to develop? Is it possible that the huge emphasis on memory and analytical skills reflected by tests such as the SAT and ACT, and embodied in college-admissions processes, are having effects opposite to what we as a society might hope for? Are we producing leaders who are analytically adept but who fail in a wise and emotionally connected way to engage deeply with the crises our society currently is facing? Do we want a society in which we care more about how narrowly smart people are than about how wise and ethical they are? Land-grant institutions in many ways reflect the ideals of the American dream. They have a unique role in helping to achieve that dream that is not being captured by magazine ratings based on narrow criteria that have led our society to a precipice.

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 ... .

If you operate a campus in South Carolina, and your institution has raised its tuition more than the national average, then that state's Budget & Control Board has put your capital projects on hold and forbidden new ones. Is this essentially toothless and symbolic, or does it really matter?

The University of South Carolina’s Columbia campus, where tuition was increased 6.9 percent this year, is not affected by the moratorium. Nor is S.C. State University, which increased its tuition 5.2 percent.

But many of the state’s other schools, including Clemson University, The Citadel, the College of Charleston, all of the regional campuses in USC’s system and several technical schools, will be under the moratorium. Figures included in the packet of information board members used to make their decision included an average tuition increase of 9 percent at the Medical University of South Carolina, but that school has many different tuition rates for its wide range of programs and it was not clear whether the university would be subject to the moratorium.

Budget board members carved out several exceptions to the moratorium. Projects that have already been fully approved can continue. Deferred maintenance projects can go forward. Others that deal with health and safety — projects that, say, install fire alarms or fire sprinkler systems — are also exempted from the moratorium. And projects that are paid for with private money are not covered by the moratorium. 

Dennis Jones, of NCHEMS, seems to be all over the place. We've seen him recently at a SCUP board meeting, at the second Action Analytics Symposium, at SCUP-45, and now he has this piece in The New England Journal of Higher Education:

In all states, state governments decide how much of their budget goes to direct support of institutions and how much to student financial aid. In some states, elected officials also set (or must approve) tuition levels; in others, tuition policy is within the purview of institutional governing boards. Legislatures also affect institutional finances by mandates regarding the use of institutional resources devoted to student financial aid. In some cases, this takes the form of requiring that institutions waive tuition for certain groups of students (war veterans, families of protective service personnel killed in the line of duty, etc). In other cases, states put limits on the use of tuition waivers.

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Given the lack of attention given to alignment of the pieces, the fact that different policies are often the responsibility of different decision-making groups, and the different constituencies that line up behind different parts of the policy framework, it is little wonder that coherent policy is hard to achieve. The secret is aligning policy with goals; if this can be accomplished, aligning the various components with one another other becomes much easier.

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.