Board pushes for more college graduates
VANCOUVER – Over the next few weeks, the state agency that oversees Washington’s public colleges and universities is going on the road touting a radical idea: funding colleges on the basis of how many students graduate rather than how many enroll.
“Somehow, we have to get people through to certification or degrees quicker,” said Bob Craves, chairman of Washington’s Higher Education Coordinating Board. “I don’t want it to be that way, all right? But I have to be practical.”
The HEC board’s proposal has raised eyebrows – and a few hackles – at colleges. But the idea’s proponents say the state badly needs to find a way to free up more space in colleges, given a looming “baby boom echo” to students.
The funding change is one of several recommended changes listed in the board’s proposed new “Master Plan for Higher Education.” Re-written every four years, it serves as the state’s policy blueprint for its colleges and universities.
A Spokane hearing is slated for June 2.
The idea is to “fund results,” said James Sulton Jr., the new executive director of the HEC board. “We have to realize that our resources are scarce and will continue to grow scarcer,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “Reality is staring us in the face.”
It’s a provocative idea, winning Sulton praise in a couple of recent newspaper editorials – and uneasy rumblings at colleges and universities.
Central Washington University professor James Huckabay likened the proposal to an auto factory paid for each car it churns out.
“That isn’t our vision of the enterprise in which we’re involved,” he said.
The funding proposal is one of nearly a dozen changes recommended in the new master plan, which should be finished in late July.
“We just want to see if it gets some traction, to have people thinking in terms of finishers instead of starters,” said Rep. Don Cox, R-Colfax.
Similarly, colleges seem to be holding their fire, for now. During public testimony at the HEC board’s meeting in Vancouver on Thursday, some speakers warned that funding based on graduation wouldn’t work for colleges serving older working students taking a few classes to increase literacy or improve job skills. Privately, college officials say they’re not sure what to make of the proposal yet. And they don’t want to take it on in public until they know more about what they’re dealing with.
The draft version is short on specifics but lists two guiding goals. One: HEC wants to boost by 20 percent the number of students graduating annually by 2010. The other: “Greater responsiveness by the higher education system to the state’s economic development needs and strategies.”
What’s that mean? State lawmakers and HEC Board officials want to boost the number of students getting high-demand degrees like engineering or nursing, instead of degrees like sociology, liberal arts or Washington students’ current No. 1 major: a bachelor’s degree in psychology.
“The mix of degrees that we produce is not the mix of degrees we’d produce if we thought about it,” said state Rep. Fred Jarrett, R-Mercer Island.
As things stand now, however, colleges have a great reason to encourage such degrees. They’re cheap. It’s much more expensive for colleges to train engineers and nurses. A bachelor’s in sociology, he said, costs a college about one-third the cost of a bachelor’s in engineering, or one-fourth the cost of a bachelor’s in nursing.
The result: It’s very easy to get accepted to a psychology or sociology program at Washington’s public colleges and much harder to get into engineering or nursing programs.
Jarrett and other proponents hope to change that by offering colleges more money – $250 million more per year – for high-demand degree programs. They hope to win over Republican budget hawks in the Legislature by pointing out that the new graduates help the state’s economy.
The HEC Board proposal also calls for new three-year bachelor’s degrees in some fields, as a way to cut down on the time that taxpayers subsidize students. (Tuition only accounts for about half the actual cost of a degree at the state’s largest colleges.)
Such proposals make some students uneasy. Scholars shouldn’t be rushed out of their classrooms, they say, and the state’s public colleges shouldn’t be forced to act like trade schools.
“Universities should be about the experience of learning and picking up as much knowledge as you can,” said Timothy Hogg, who’s been working on his bachelor’s degree in New York and Pullman for five and a half years. He’s majoring in English, with a minor in history.
“When I first got here, I was going to do it the way I guess they want you to,” the WSU senior said. “You get here for your journalism degree, you take all your journalism classes and then you get out of here.”
But Hogg has included classes that have nothing to do with his degree. He took a class in African American cinema and another called “Comparative Genocide.” He’s studied French and Spanish, the history of art and the history of the Middle East.
“People need a very well-rounded education,” he said. “It just makes them that much more of a citizen.”
And the extra time has come at a cost. When Hogg graduates this summer, he enters the job market with $40,000 in debt. He’ll be writing monthly $489 checks for a decade.
Proponents of the changes say they’ll help students, as well. Colleges paid by the graduate will have more incentive to avoid registration bottlenecks and improve advising and counseling, they say.
In fact, as described by proponents, the changes are mostly carrot, not stick. As Cox sees it, the changes would get colleges more money, not less. The draft master plan proposes setting the current college budgets and graduation rates as a baseline, with more high-demand degrees meriting more state money.
Still, Sulton predicts that the master plan won’t be merely the latest in Olympia’s long tradition of ordering up a fat report, praising all involved, then relegating it to some dusty shelf.
“I think it will have teeth,” Sulton said, although he wouldn’t indicate what they might be. “These are measurable goals, and if they are, we want to become the yardstick.”
State lawmakers are also watching closely. Last year, lawmakers approved a bill requiring college policies to ensure that students graduate “in a timely manner.” The bill was aimed at students who amass more than 125 percent of the credits necessary to graduate.
“There’s got to be a way that people are rewarded for a speedier process,” said Craves, the HEC board chairman. “If there’s one thing everyone agrees on, it’s that we have demand (for college slots) building and building.”