Dive Brief:
- Massachusetts is lauded as being one of the nation's leaders in education, but its public schools are lagging behind top-notch private institutions as the state is one of many to cut funding for public colleges by over 30% per full-time student since the economic recession of 2008, writes The Hechinger Report.
- The lack of state support has experts wondering whether it will be able to support all four UMass institutions — Boston, Amherst, Lowell and Dartmouth — as the cost of tuition rises and each campus faces its own issues. A $10 million deficit at UMass Boston, for instance, has administrators struggling with having to offer cash buyouts to faculty, delay important projects, and likely raise tuition as much as 3% for the fall.
- The financial state of Massachusetts' public colleges highlights a national lack of focus on these institutions, which are meant to provide quality education to students who cannot afford elite private tuition, and public college leaders will need to work with their states and be resourceful to stay ahead and reinforce their value, especially as policymakers increasingly consider university mergers.
Dive Insight:
Declining public funding is a frightening trend in higher education that has already been widely discussed among education leaders. In fact, at a panel during the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities last year, college leaders around the nation agreed that dwindling state support is one of the biggest challenges facing their institutions. Some, like Stephen Jordan, president of Metropolitan State University of Denver, even predict that there will be no funding for higher ed somewhere around 2025.
Already many college presidents are realizing that lack of state funding means that the higher ed business model is changing, and, subsequently, their jobs are changing as well. Presidents and leaders in the industry must be proactive strategists rather than just executives and look for alternative sources of funding to balance their bottom-lines and stay ahead. University of Maryland System Chancellor Bob Caret, who was also on the panel, said that the real challenges ahead for presidents will be the need to "reinforce and re-establish the trust and belief in us as an enterprise," especially as mergers increase and other forms of disruptive innovation, like online education, take over the industry.
To stay afloat amid dwindling public resources, presidents can take steps to be innovative and seek alternative forms of revenue. These can include using campus resources, such as building a hospital or contracting spaces out to other industries and developing campus testing centers. Revenue increases can also be garnered by focusing heavily on student retention rates, as dropouts also hurt institutions financially. At the same time, leaders will need to prepare themselves to work with state policymakers as they increasingly open up conversations on university mergers. And as this reality becomes more evident, presidents will need to tap into these alternative sources of revenue to show that they are already cutting costs.