Board maps strategy for student surge

The state isn’t ready for the boom of about 50,000 additional students expected to hit Washington’s colleges and universities in the next four years.

But higher education leaders have devised a plan to guide the state’s colleges and universities through tight financial times and the expected wave of new freshmen.

Parts of the Higher Education Coordinating Board’s Strategic Master Plan, perhaps the board’s most ambitious effort to date, include changing the state’s way of funding education so colleges are paid more for producing more graduates. It asks the state to increase general funding specifically for training students in what the board believes are high-demand fields such as nursing and biotechnology.

The 10-member citizen board approved the 49-page document, which will be the state’s blueprint to education funding, at a meeting in Spokane last month.

While the board may be right in saying the state has undervalued and underfunded higher education, some schools say the plan is flawed.

“It’s not a complete picture of higher education,” said Spokane Community Colleges Chancellor Gary Livingston. By putting the priority on getting students through quickly and awarding degrees, he said the plan ignores the non-traditional learners who make up a large portion of the community college population at his schools and many of the other 34 technical and community colleges statewide. They’re not your average four-years-and-out students, he said. Instead they include 50-year-old women changing professions, young adults holding down jobs and supporting families, and laid-off workers who need a course or two of training to get their next job, he said.

Other schools agree, adding that pushing colleges and universities to graduate students faster, as the plan outlines, may not work.

“The HEC Board is pushing to fit everybody into a single model,” said Eastern Washington University President Steve Jordan. Students today are different, he said. At Eastern, few students want to get through in four years, he said. Only 11 have signed on to Eastern’s program guaranteeing graduation in four years.

“And even if we move the students through faster, it’s not clear the legislators are prepared to pay for them,” said Jordan. Last year, Washington’s schools took on thousands more students than state funding provided for, he said. This year, stating that they had limited resources and funding, many of the schools halted freshmen and transfer admissions, some for the first time ever.

The schools also worry that the prioritizing of more economically beneficial majors might harm some of the less lucrative programs like liberal arts.

Another problem in the plan, according to Jane Sherman, WSU’s associate vice provost for academic affairs, is the idea that schools should take a regional approach and focus on students in their immediate areas. That may work for some of the smaller colleges, branch campuses and technical programs, but WSU in Pullman is a school housed in a low-population rural area that serves a statewide population, she said. A regional approach devalues what WSU can do, she said.

But the board may be doing something right by bringing its arguments back to finances, several school officials said. The board is recognizing that in times of economic downturn, people focus on money, said Sherman. “It seems that the most effective way to get people behind this type of funding is to get to the state’s pocketbook,” she said.

In its plan, the board makes a simple argument; that a better educated population equals better wage earners who pay higher taxes. The plan notes that “on average, someone with a college degree spends 72 percent more annually – and contributes that much more to the state’s sales tax base – than someone without.”

“We think the whole plan spells change in a different way,” said James Sulton, executive director of the HEC Board. To meet demand, and the plan’s goals, the state would have to provide for 46,000 more state-funded full-time students by 2010.

To boil that down to three key ideas, it’s about “access, affordability and excellence,” he said, adding that the plan was flexible and could be changed to meet the schools’ concerns.