A continuación se ofrecen tres enfoques sobre el impacto de la crisis financiera en las instituciones de educación superior de los EE.UU., tomados de la edición de The Chronicle of Higher Education del día 6 de enero 2009.
El primero da cuenta de un reciente informe de Moody’s sobre las nuevas condiciones en que se desenvolverán las instituciones de educación superior durante el año 2009.
El segundo es un comentario de William Massy que llama a ocuparse no solo de la productividad adminsitrativa sino a mejorar la productividad académica de estas instituciones.
Por último, el tercer enfoque se refiere a las iniciativas que están adoptando algunas instituciones para enfrentar este tiempo de presupuestos restrictivos.
Moody’s Sees Stiff Challenges for Colleges—Especially Private Ones—in Next Year
By SCOTT CARLSON
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 January 2009
A new annual-outlook report from Moody’s Investors Service says that higher-education institutions are facing a range of challenges in the next year and a half. Although all colleges will face hardship, private colleges will be especially stressed compared with public colleges and community colleges.
Roger Goodman, a Moody’s vice president and author of the report, said that this was the first negative outlook for all sectors of higher education since the credit-rating agency started publishing higher-education outlooks in the mid-1990s.
The outlook is consistent with trends that Moody’s has been marking over the past year. Last January, Moody’s released an outlook that said that the climate for colleges was stable, but that several factors, like lower investment returns and higher energy costs, could lead to problems for colleges (The Chronicle, January 25, 2008). In August, as the economy got significantly weaker, Moody’s released an update that maintained a stable outlook, but cited more risks amid an eroding housing market and fund-raising climate (The Chronicle, August 1, 2008).
In those reports, Moody’s noted that private colleges were especially vulnerable as families look for lower-cost alternatives among public colleges and community colleges, a point reiterated in this report.
The new report, “2009 U.S. Higher Education Outlook,” says that colleges face risks in four crucial areas:
The first is increasing pressure on tuition and financial aid, with declines in household income, investments, and home equity. Access to loans is also scarcer. However, Moody’s considers college education to be “a nondiscretionary expense,” which means that families will generally not postpone enrolling children in college.
Second is loss in endowments, which will probably be the largest in recent decades—down perhaps as much as 35 percent since June. The report says those losses will not necessarily lead to rating downgrades.
Third, many colleges are facing pressure on liquidity. “Investments in hedge funds, private equity, and other private investment vehicles are generally proving even more illiquid than originally thought,” the report says.
Lastly, many colleges are exposed to volatility in variable-rate debt markets.
The short-term risks from these four challenges outweigh risks from longer-term challenges, like changing demographic trends, Mr. Goodman said.
Fortunately, colleges plan with long lead times, he added. “That is why there is so much in the report mentioning management and governance as being extremely critical for how colleges weather this cycle,” he said, speaking over the phone from Florida, where he is attending a leadership conference organized by the Council of Independent Colleges. “If a college goes into the next year’s budget without some kind of contingency plan if enrollment or tuition were to come in below expectations, that is a big red flag.”
College leaders at the conference seemed to show an intense interest in financial issues, he said. “I think there are some institutions that feel locked in,” he said. “They now recognize the risks of the variable-rate debt that they took on, but they are not quite sure how to get out of it when a lot of the outs that would normally be there just aren’t there in this environment.”
Copyright © 2009 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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It’s Time to Improve Academic, Not Just Administrative, Productivity
By WILLIAM F. MASSY
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 January 2009
Events since September leave no doubt that the American economy is in the midst of a major restructuring. While the consequences are not yet fully apparent, two powerful implications for higher education have become clear.
First, because solutions to the nation’s problems will require a highly educated work force, the demands on colleges can only increase. Second, because of the financial meltdown, colleges will have to meet those demands in an environment characterized by constrained state and federal support, more resistance to tuition increases, greater need for financial aid, and reduced returns from endowments. Meeting such challenges will require colleges to get the best possible results from what they spend — that is, to maximize their productivity. Few would disagree with that basic notion, but the “how” can elicit great controversy.
Clearly we will continue to seek productivity increases in administration, facilities management, and other areas. That’s good, but it doesn’t get at the core productivity question: What is happening on the academic side of the enterprise? We simply can’t afford to dodge the hard questions of academic productivity any longer. Continuing to do so will lead to an accelerating decline in educational quality, not to mention dereliction-of-duty charges by our critics.
I visited a campus recently that has been subject to chronic shortfalls in state appropriations and that, so far at least, has continued business as usual in terms of learning formats. Administrators have boosted efficiency and increased enrollments in order to garner tuition revenue but still have had to cut faculty positions. In one department, for example, regular faculty numbers have declined from 42 to 28 over the past 10 years — even as the number of credit hours taught has increased. The department continues to use the same teaching paradigms, so what has had to give is small class sizes, courses taught by tenured professors (replaced by largely unsupervised adjuncts), the number of writing assignments (which require grading by faculty members), student advising, and other key drivers of quality. That is what we can look forward to, writ large, if we try to meet the coming challenges with business as usual.
Let me emphasize that I’m not talking about how hard professors work or about institutions’ commitment to research. Faculty workloads can be debated endlessly, but the questions we in higher education should be asking aren’t “How hard is hard?” or “Is the right balance being struck between teaching and research?” Rather, we should ask, “Are we analyzing the real drivers of quality and cost and then vigorously exploiting the opportunities that we’ve unearthed?” My experience with colleges, along with my training as an economist, convinces me that, too often, the answer to the last question is “no.”
To see why, just consider the time and effort most faculty members and academic leaders spend on understanding the activities and cost structures for teaching and learning, studying best practices inside and outside the institution, and organizing innovative ways to use technology and human resources. Of course one can point to such programs — and to the real gains that they have achieved — but the examples are not at all widespread.
What is needed is for most, if not all, colleges to mount systematic and well-resourced programs for analyzing and continuously improving the processes of teaching and learning. Because the “devil is in the details” at each institution, one can’t know in advance how much such programs will contribute to cost savings and the overall quality of educational offerings. But one thing is certain: We won’t find out if we don’t look, and looking requires faculty time. Until that time commitment is forthcoming and well supported by institutions, the improvement of learning productivity will remain a slogan rather than a reality.
Whether faculty members use some of the time that they would normally use for research to work on ways to improve learning productivity is an important but not fundamental detail. That’s because, in the end, a policy of shortchanging an institution’s teaching responsibilities in favor of research would be disastrous intrinsically and politically. The issue is not how hard professors work (I believe most work very hard) or whether they engage in research (most do and should), but whether they are tackling learning productivity in a meaningful way.
What faculty members can do to improve teaching and learning productivity is no longer a mystery. What is missing, besides time on task, is a passion to shed old ways and attitudes. Professors who engage in the change process report that the quest is eminently worthwhile and the work satisfying. Yet most campuses lack the incentives and resources to achieve critical mass. Building momentum will require concerted action by presidents, provosts, deans, department heads, and senior faculty members.
Three examples demonstrate the efficacy of such action and illustrate how it can be initiated. First is the course-redesign program conducted since 1999, initially with support by the Pew Charitable Trusts, by the National Center for Academic Transformation. The center works with teams of faculty members to analyze the activities associated with teaching and learning in large courses on campuses, to document course objectives and develop assessment measures for them, and to identify and test alternative formats that promise to improve cost-effectiveness. The center’s results have been impressive. For example, the 30 initial Pew-financed projects reduced per-student cost by 37 percent on average, with a range of 15 percent to 77 percent, while improving learning performance in 25 of the 30 projects (with the other five showing no significant difference). Similar positive results have been obtained in subsequent course-redesign programs conducted by the center.
The new formats often involve information technology, but technology is a tool rather than an objective. Carol A. Twigg, the center’s founder and chief executive, describes the approach as movement toward a more activity-focused and assessment-driven pedagogy, usually accompanied by applications of technology.
The focus on activity deals directly with the learning process — one that pushes students to take a more active role — while assessment supplies faculty members with the feedback necessary to diagnose and correct learning problems. Technology allows such active learning processes to be expanded to large courses and, as learning software and databases become better, to use faculty time more effectively.
At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute during the 1990s, for example, professors used simulation and problem-solving software to achieve learning increases in physics, chemistry, and calculus with significantly fewer faculty and teaching-assistant hours. That “studio” approach to teaching has been adopted by institutions around the world.
Another example is a program that the University of Minnesota at Rochester is developing through its Center for Learning Innovation: a bachelor’s degree in health sciences that reflects the application of such principles on a curriculumwide basis. The university will offer the curriculum in a distinct format in which faculty members engage students in structured, integrated ways that illustrate key connections among biological sciences, quantitative sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.
The goal is to personalize the learning experience — students are supported through one-on-one peer mentoring, for example — while being cost-effective by using scalable, technology-facilitated pedagogy and deploying faculty members in innovative ways. Rather than assigning professors to individual courses, for example, so-called “design faculty” organize and monitor the learning experience while “student-based faculty” (a type of adjunct) operate learning centers in the various subject areas to provide personalized assistance when the software falls short.
As a third example, department-level audit programs also illustrate what can be done to improve productivity within the context of traditional academic departments. I have worked with Steven W. Graham, director of the President’s Academic Leadership Institute at the University of Missouri system, and Paula Myrick Short, vice chancellor for academic affairs at the Tennessee Board of Regents, to help put such programs in place in their state systems. In both cases, academic leaders began by working with willing departments to self-study their teaching and learning activities, identify evaluation measures, and propose changes designed to improve quality and contain costs — which then were reviewed by peers from within the system.
The academic-audit process is well positioned to encourage the introduction at various campuses across the country of more course redesigns using technology, like those of the National Center for Academic Transformation. The juxtaposition of self-study with peer review assures the effort’s integrity, imposes useful deadlines, and propagates best practices across the institution through the experience of auditors. Auditors and those being audited both give the process high marks. The 20 campuses within Tennessee reviewed some 143 programs between 2005 and 2008, with an additional 37 scheduled for 2009. The state now accepts academic audit as part of its performance-accountability program.
Tennessee’s experience shows that people outside academe can support the development of sophisticated academic-quality work within institutions. The impetus for improvement came from within the Board of Regents, but the state provided a major boost by embracing the results — thus avoiding a duplication and dilution of quality-improvement efforts.
I fervently hope that this historic economic crisis will spur the creation of more systematic and well-resourced programs for analyzing and continuously improving teaching and learning productivity. Without doubt, in the longer term, the colleges that provide exemplary education will be those that have learned how to harness learning technology for the benefit of their students. To paraphrase the reflections of President-elect Barack Obama’s new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and other observers on how our nation should respond to the current financial difficulties, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
William F. Massy is a professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University and a consultant to colleges on education-quality processes. He is the author of several books, including (with Steven W. Graham and Paula Myrick Short) Academic Quality Work: A Handbook for Improvement (Jossey-Bass, 2007).
Copyright © 2009 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Colleges Press New Ideas as They Brace for Bumpy State-Budget Sessions
By ERIC KELDERMAN
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 January 2009
As state legislatures convene in the coming days and weeks, colleges will be battling to stave off large cuts, with governors in places like Arizona, Missouri, and Ohio asking public colleges to prepare for budget reductions of as much as 25 percent.
Nearly every state is now projecting a revenue shortfall for both the current budget year and the next fiscal year, and few public-college officials expect to dodge the budget ax. But some higher-education leaders and state policy makers see the bleak economic outlook as an opportunity to press for broad changes in college policy and operations that haven’t had much traction under better financial circumstances.
The bad budget times are also leading college and government officials to suggest ideas for paring costs that have been too politically unpopular to even put on the table in past years, such as merging institutions, eliminating tenure, and even turning a major public research university into a private one.
Among the college officials who say lawmakers seem to be listening to their plans more carefully now that they are grappling with bad budgets is John B. Simpson, president of the State University of New York at Buffalo.
In December he told state senators that New York’s top-tier public universities could save money and operate more efficiently without regulations that require state approval for contracts and purchases. The institutions should also have more control over tuition and be able to borrow private money for building projects and to lease or purchase land, say Mr. Simpson and other SUNY leaders who have long pressed for such changes, without success.
“In the midst of this economic crisis, we should not lose sight of the opportunities and solutions available to us,” Mr. Simpson said at a legislative hearing. New York officials have cut $210-million, about 6 percent of state appropriations, from the SUNY budget in the current fiscal year. Gov. David A. Paterson’s proposed budget for next year would cut $40-million more from the system.
Elsewhere, Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, a Republican, changed his tune in the midst of his state’s budget downturn after years of fighting with university leaders over tuition. With the state’s 11 public universities slammed by recent budget cuts, the governor proposed in November to allow the institutions to raise tuition by as much as 15 percent and to gradually bring their prices up to the national average.
The universities and the state’s Board of Governors have fought with the Legislature in recent years over who has the power to set tuition. The state reduced higher-education spending by 6 percent for the current fiscal year, and the governor is warning that colleges could face another cut, of 4 percent, in this year’s budget.
Accountability Push
Faced with difficult choices as they draft budgets for the next fiscal year, which begins in July in most states, legislators may have different ideas than college leaders about what changes are due for higher education. Over all, states could face budget gaps that total as much as $200-billion for the current and next fiscal years, according to a survey of state fiscal conditions by the National Governors Association, released last month.
The National Conference of State Legislatures has released recommendations that call on legislators to seek more accountability, such as by basing appropriations for colleges on the number of people they graduate, instead of the number they enroll.
“They’ve got to start putting their money where it matters,” said Joni E. Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, a California-based nonprofit group.
Lawmakers in many states are especially concerned about loosening restrictions on tuition, especially in the throes of a recession when some families are likely to have a harder time scraping together money to pay for the rising price of college.
“If it goes any higher we’re going to lose a lot of students, especially middle-income and lower-middle income,” said State Rep. Phyllis Gutierrez Kenney, Democrat of Washington, where four-year public colleges are limited to increasing tuition by no more than 7 percent each year. Washington’s governor, Christine O. Gregoire, a Democrat, has told public colleges to plan for a budget cut of up to 20 percent for next year.
Representative Kenney said colleges should look to save money not by sidestepping state regulations but by cutting underenrolled or redundant programs. “They’ve been told for a number of years they have to get rid of programs that aren’t working,” she said. “There’s no room for basket weaving anymore, anywhere.”
Responses to Budget Cuts
The dire economic conditions have also inspired an array of ideas from lawmakers and college officials about how they might cut costs by significant amounts. Proposals have included capping enrollment, consolidating campuses, slashing state-aid programs, and eliminating tenure.
Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the California State University system, has announced he will cut enrollment by 10,000 students next year if state lawmakers don’t increase appropriations. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has cut more than $31-million from Cal State since the 2009 budget was adopted and has recommended nearly $66-million more in cuts for the current fiscal year to help close the fast-growing state budget gap.
In Georgia, State Sen. Seth Harp, a Republican and chairman of the Senate higher-education committee, suggested that two of the state’s historically black universities merge with two predominantly white institutions after Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican, took back the increase of nearly 8 percent the state had originally allocated to the university system for the current year. The Board of Regents for the University System of Georgia, which would have to approve such a merger, is not likely to consider that suggestion, which has sparked outrage among many educators at historically black colleges.
Among other proposals to absorb cuts and trim costs, Idaho State University is considering lowering the number of general-education credits students need to graduate in order to reduce the need for some faculty members. Gov. C.L. (Butch) Otter, a Republican, has ordered state agencies to cut spending by 3 percent for the current fiscal year.
In Michigan, a legislative panel has suggested eliminating a $200-million merit-scholarship program that accounts for about 40 percent of the money the state spends on student aid. The nine-member Legislative Commission on Government Efficiency also suggested turning the University of Michigan into a private institution to save the state money, an idea that even members of the commission have said is unwise. It would require voter approval, since the proposal would amend the state’s Constitution, and there is likely to be little public support for such a plan.
Lawmakers in New Jersey have already voted to tighten eligibility for two of its merit-scholarship programs for students who attend or earn degrees from community colleges. One program, which provides full scholarships to community colleges for high-school graduates in the top 20 percent of their class, would be limited to graduates in the top 15 percent if Gov. Jon S. Corzine, a Democrat, signs the measure as expected. The same legislation would also alter a program that provides $4,000 per year to students who go on to a four-year institution after completing a community-college degree. Students who earned a grade-point average of at least 3.0 in their community-college program are now eligible, but that requirement would rise to 3.25 if the bill is signed.
The Kentucky Community and Technical College system, meanwhile, is weighing the possibility of eliminating the tenure track for newly hired professors and instead offering them four-year contracts. The system’s Board of Regents has not indicated whether it will approve the idea, which has sparked a flurry of protests from faculty members.
Colleges in some states are also being drawn into partisan debates over taxes. Gov. Steven L. Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat, is asking college officials to back a 70-cent increase in cigarette taxes to reduce a proposed 4-percent, or $41-million, budget cut next year for higher education, to 2 percent, or $20.5-million.
Colleges and universities have traditionally stayed out of the debate over revenues, but these are “desperate times,” said Richard A. Crofts, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education. .
The measure appears to face long odds. A plan to increase the tobacco tax by a lesser amount failed to win enough legislative support to pass last year.
In most states, however, whether higher taxes are on the table or not, college advocates say they will seek to persuade lawmakers to protect them from the worst of the fiscal blows, with the argument that higher education plays a key role in bolstering state economies, many of which are in dire need of help.
“We’re looking at huge budget cuts,” said Susan M. Lehr, vice president for government relations at Florida Community College at Jacksonville. “We’re just hoping that somehow, by some miracle, we’ll be spared since we’re so involved in economic development.”
Copyright © 2009 by The Chronicle of Higher Education