The post stemmed from a move at the
University of Oregon to accomplish this. Since
then, not only UO, but also Oregon State University and Portland State
University all headed in this direction, commencing last summer. The other then-existing
four state universities were given a similar option and some have moved to take
it.
These institutions no longer
participate in almost any state grouped settings, such as for risk management,
but handle most of their own organizational maintenance. Revenues generated by
participating schools now accrue to a separate fund that schools draw upon for
expenditures, including issuing revenue bonds for capital items. A minimal
state general fund contribution continues and they must ask the state’s
coordinating commission for higher education for any tuition increases above 5
percent. They also have independent boards to govern each, although their
members appointed by the governor. In short, they have almost entirely detached
themselves from state government, with its flagship UO able to do this on an endowment
only about 50 percent higher on a per student basis than LSU Baton Rouge’s.
Yet in the fiscal
year 2016 budget the LSU System (of which perhaps 10 percent of this total
would go to the schools in the system other than LSUBR) proportionally is
scheduled to receive about 44 percent of its funding through state sources;
just a few years ago, that figure was close to 60 percent. Even if none of the
supplemental budget revenue sources come to fruition, reducing the general fund
support of higher education as a whole from $763 million to $237 million, the
system still would be receiving 23 percent of its overall funding from state
sources. So why is it that UO, about half again better off in endowment than
LSUBR, can manage to run off a state contribution, at 5.4 percent of its total
revenues, less than a quarter of the proportion that the LSU System gets under
what is considered the apocalyptic budgeting scenario, and about one-eighth of
what is considered the undesirable but currently-budgeted scenario?
It’s partly because of tuition/fees
differentials; previously
noted has been Louisiana’s higher education system has been over-reliant on
taxpayer support despite more than adequate user ability to pay. This year, for
state residents tuition and fees are pegged at $8,758
for LSUBR (12 hours and above) yet (for 15 hours, a full-time load) at UO it’s
not much more, at $9,918.
But were LSUBR to increase its tuition for all undergraduate students by $1,160
a year to match (and it has about 4,700 more undergraduate students), it would
only generate another $27 million. And costs attributable to LSUBR in the
tuition area rise when considering that a large number of the state’s Taylor
Opportunity Program for Students recipients attend it and make up the majority
of the student body.
Most remarkably, in fiscal year
2013 UO budgeted $865 million in funds of which only $47 million came from
the state. By contrast, in FY
2013 the LSU System was budgeted for nearly $1 billion directly and (using
its proportion of self-generated revenues from the total Board of Regents money
budgeted) another $414 million indirectly (although some of this was from public
hospital money then administered by the system), where taxpayers ponied up $867
million. Again, a better endowment and higher tuition does not come close to
explaining this gap.
And this discrepancy between an
Oregon higher education system whose eight baccalaureate-and-above institutions
either have become or most of the remainder are in the process of becoming
essentially privatized and Louisiana’s fourteen such institutions becomes
starker when looking at total figures from the years. With similar state
populations (Louisiana has almost 700,000 more residents), in FY
2014 Oregon’s senior schools budgeted a total of $2.754 billion of which
taxpayers (and lottery players) were to pick only $269 million of it, while
Louisiana taxpayers for theirs were expected to pay $1.160
billion of the $2.465 billion.
With numbers like these, it’s
little wonder Oregon universities are opting to enjoy large autonomy from the
state. But it raises the question of why Louisiana universities are so
taxpayer-dependent. Even increasing tuition to the southern regional average
only will add somewhere in the range of $200 million in revenues for senior
institutions, once factoring in TOPS recipients and lower enrollments due to
higher costs.
Again, the answer leads back to the
overbuilt nature of the system, particularly concerning the senior
institutions. For the fall of 2013, Oregon’s schools had about 3,300 full-time
faculty members teaching around 87,000 total undergraduate students, while
Louisiana’s had over 4,700
full-time faculty members teaching about
122,000 total undergraduate students. That the student/faculty ratio is
about one more in Oregon than Louisiana is not as important as that its student/institution
ratio is about 25 percent higher (and this including the new upperclassman-and-above
institution Oregon State University-Cascades with only about 750 undergraduates)
and not nearly as revealing as that about 63 percent of Louisiana student
attend a senior institution while in Oregon, with (2011 data)
having around 188,000 students attending community colleges for credit, its
proportion (assuming 2013 figures are roughly the same) is only half of
Louisiana’s.
In other words, less efficient use
of instructional resources by having more instructors per student (likely a
consequence of counterproductive policies such as 12-hour cap on tuition and
later class dropping dates) and by having too many students shunted into senior
institutions because there are too many of those play some role in the higher
consumption of taxpayer resources in Louisiana’s higher education system. Which
tells us that quasi-privatization like Oregon’s would be risky, for while it
may work to wring out inefficiencies in the system, without major system change
of merging, demoting to junior institutions, or closing of senior institutions,
these would be set up for failure.
And also indicates something for
the current budgetary saga: any maneuvers that do not demand more rationality
and efficiency from Louisiana higher education only leave the state vulnerable
to more budgetary difficulties in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment