Editorial: Corporate model undermines goals of higher education

Last week marked Frank Brogan’s one-year anniversary as chancellor of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education.

On looking back on his first year in office, Brogan said, “We are not the same university system we used to be.”

He’s spot on — we aren’t the same, and a lot of this change has to do with Brogan’s efforts in the past year. But that’s not what is at debate here. Rather, what is controversial is how, exactly, our state’s university system has changed and continues to change.

What hasn’t changed is state funding for education — it’s still not stellar, as any Tom Wolf attack ad will tell you. But coming into office a year ago, while state funding for education was what Brogan called “the elephant in the room,” retrenchment for state universities was not necessarily considered a bad thing. In fact, according to Brogan, it helped the state university system evolve for the better.

Rather, the change Brogan has pursued while in office has been to make state universities more independent from state authorities. The goal is to reduce regulations the state bureaucracy has traditionally placed on universities, thus making them more flexible to compete in the market.

For instance, because of the newfound emphasis on flexibility, Edinboro University has lowered its tuition price for out-of-state students to within a few hundred dollars of what in-state students pay, at $4,937.20 for out-of-state students. Now, Edinboro is better able to compete with other state universities that already lower their rates for Pennsylvanians.

While more flexibility may provide benefits for universities like Edinboro, there is a fundamental problem with encouraging competition among universities by giving them more autonomy: Universities should not have to act like corporations.

By decreasing funding and leaving state universities to a match of survival of the fittest, the state does just that, which poses many long-term problems for students.

For example, the current system has allowed universities more control regarding curriculum. With a lack of funding from the state, universities have naturally chosen to support more profitable areas of study. There has and continues to be a shift in campus resources toward STEM majors and away from humanities. STEM —  fields of science, technology, engineering and math — offers higher returns of investment via research grants and student demand.

Pitt has been no stranger to this phenomenon, either. On Jan. 30, Provost Patricia Beeson accepted proposals to eliminate the religious studies program and continue the suspension of admissions to Pitt’s graduate programs for German and classics.

“As good stewards of the resources entrusted to us, we are responsible for continuously evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of our programs,” Beeson said.

This makes sense in a market setting. But in an institution of higher learning, where students should gain exposure to ideas they wouldn’t have otherwise experienced, we’re not so sure.

Using resources effectively and efficiently in this competitive market of higher education has triggered an increase in spending on administration. More focus on administration equates to a better business model  and, thus, has increased focus on marketing and attracting investment, something humanities professors simply cannot do.

In fact, from 1998 to 2008, private colleges increased spending 22 percent on curriculum, while increasing spending on administration by 36 percent, according to a study published by the Delta Cost Project in 2010. Consequently, the number of administrative staffers has risen by 240 percent over the past 40 years, while the instructor-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at about 15 or 16 students per instructor.

As funding dropped, and the competitive edge sharpened, universities have focused less on being universities and more on being businesses, as the trends show.

There remains an obvious solution, one that is so overused and overstated, it is almost a cliché at this point: The state needs to increase education funding. Period.

As any government official will tell you, this is much easier said than done. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

Rather than encourage wasteful spending, the state needs to create more efficient budgets that take advantage of the resources we have and transfer the money made from them into education. For instance, the state can use profits made from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board for education, rather than marketing new liquors. Or, Pennsylvania can charge a severance tax on the extraction of natural gas from shale, like many other states currently do. And, perhaps most controversial, yet most effective, the state can increase income tax on those who make more than $100,000 a year — after all, higher education is technically a public service, so those who utilize it should, ideally, pay their fair share.

The state doesn’t need to tell universities to compete with each other because it has the resources to help them. It’s just a matter of using them efficiently and getting its priorities straight.