Let us say first that SCUP is proud to note that the new president of the Arizona Board of Regents is Thomas K. Anderes, a long time SCUP member and leader who is currently the convener of SCUP's Resource and Budget Planning Academy.

The Lumina Foundation's Focus magazine for July 2010 (PDF) is focused on "The Productivity Push: System-Wide Reform Allows Arizona to Serve More Students." An excerpt:

Arizona is among a growing number of states that are expanding their capacity to graduate more students (see map, Pages 8 and 9). They’re doing this by spending money differently and by delivering education in new ways and in new places.

The plan Burnand shared with Cecilia that day — a joint initiative of the Maricopa Community College District and Arizona State University that jump-starts productivity even before a student sets foot in a college classroom — is but one piece of the statewide reform effort.

Once competitors for student minds — and public dollars — the schools in the state community college system and Arizona’s three four-year universities are now full-fledged partners. They’re working together to streamline transfer policies, expand student opportunity at “no-frills” regional educational centers, and keep costs down for both institutions and students — all in an effort to improve the system’s productivity and cre- ate new paths to learning.

The driving force behind this change is the 12-member Arizona Board of Regents, the panel that governs the state’s three research universities from its headquarters just a few miles from Alhambra High School. In a blunt comprehensive strategic plan released in 2008, the board called out Arizona for failing to keep pace with other states in the effort to recruit and retain low- income, first-generation and other 21st century students.

This Boston Globe article by Robert Gavin includes a video interview with University of Massachusetts president Jack M. Wilson, which begins with him talking about the $1.9B of building the university has done in the last few years.

Underlying all the construction is the university’s growth. State funding pays for 14 percent of this year’s $2.8 billion budget, down from 28 percent a little more than a decade ago. But since 2003, enrollment has risen nearly 15 percent systemwide, to about 66,000 students, while revenue from tuition, fees, and other non-state sources has doubled to $2.3 billion. Federal and corporate funding of UMass research has jumped 50 percent to nearly $500 million last year. Fees from licensing technologies developed at UMass nearly quadrupled to more than $70 million.

Just as important has been a cultural shift borne of dwindling state support. University officials say, they have had to take an entrepreneurial approach to make the most of available resources.

The PACE project took a fundamentally different approach from cost-cutting exercises typically used on college campuses. Rather than simply reducing budgets by a certain percentage to meet a specific goal, PACE called first for cost identification. Core faculty functions—instruction, research, and public service—were not within the scope of this project.

The remaining costs, dubbed “enabling activities,” were then divided into 12 functional categories:

• Academic administration and support.
• Accountability activities.
• Advancement activities.
• Auxiliary services.
• Enrollment-related activities.
• External activities.
• Facilities management.
• Fiscal activities.
• Human resources.
• Information technology.
• Sponsored-project activities.
• Student-service activities.

Notably, the committee did not dismiss these enabling activities—many of which directly support students—as mere administrative overhead. As Barbara Carroll, vice chancellor for human resources at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, observed, “Employees perform such functions so that faculty members don’t have to—thereby freeing faculty to teach, conduct research, and extend public service.”

Next, the committee asked managers at each campus and within the general administration office to match employees’ time and effort against the range of enabling functions. PACE’s six-month schedule didn’t permit detailed time-and-effort analyses, so managers provided their best estimates of how employees allocated time among the functions. For example, if a dean spent 20 percent of his or her time on development, that portion of the full-time-equivalent position and the proportional cost was reported under the category of advancement activities, rather than academic administration.

Not surprisingly, this exercise of matching time and effort to core and enabling functions produced mountains of data. On behalf of all the campuses, North Carolina State University hosted the information-gathering process and built a database that allowed the committee to see where UNC was spending its money based on what employees were actually doing—not on chart of accounts definitions or on employees’ roles in their particular organizations.