Governors rethinking how to run colleges
By Richard Benedetto
Gannett News Service
With many colleges and universities preparing to open for the fall semester later this month, harried parents are scrambling to come up with the cash to pay the bills to send their child back to campus.
Advertiser editorial cartoon • July 7, 1999
No less harried, however, are the nation's governors, who oversee large state university systems and find that the demand for services, staff and facilities is growing dramatically while tax revenues are shrinking or leveling off.
The nation's governors are finding tax revenues falling behind the growing demand for services, staff and facilities in higher education.
In many states this year, budget requests by state universities have had to be scaled back or frozen, while tuition, the share of the cost borne by the students themselves, has gone up — in some cases faster than the rate of inflation.
The conundrum for the governors is particularly vexing because they all agree that the quality of their colleges and universities helps drive the economic engines of their states. And they constantly are being told by everyone from college administrators to editorial writers that the only way to make their state universities better is to spend more money.
So it was against this backdrop that the National Governors Association came together in Providence, R.I., this past week to discuss issues of common concern, one being higher education. And the focus of their talks about colleges centered not on how money could be more effectively directed, but how to get greater productivity out a system that many feel has become highly inefficient and resistive to change.
As a result, the governors will embark on a three-year study of higher education systems and how to make state colleges and universities better able to meet the challenges of a global economy. And judging from the tone of their discussion, the study could produce a push for higher standards, more efficiency and greater accountability, much like those being imposed now on K-12 public schools.
"When it comes to higher education, we talk a lot about money, but we don't often talk of standards and accountability. With tuition rising faster than the rate of inflation and students taking longer and longer to finish college, one of these days the public is going to say, 'Enough!"' Pennsylvania Republican Gov. Tom Ridge said.
Ridge and his fellow governors came away from the meetings resolute in the belief that higher education needs a fresh look and possibly a major boost in productivity to meet demands of new technologies and a changing work force.
Several governors noted that establishment of clearer standards, greater efficiencies in providing services, and more student competency testing might be needed, in addition to curriculum overhauls.
Such proposals would be sure to shake up those who protect the status quo and trigger a major public debate, just as they did for K-12 changes now under way. Education establishments that often believe that they know best tend to get nervous when elected officials seek to become involved.
Utah GOP Gov. Mike Leavitt said the governors' discussion represented a "major shift" in the way they address higher education and signaled their desire for greater direct involvement by the state chief executives in the oversight of their state university systems.
"Higher education is an institution that operates with a lot of autonomy that in some ways may have insulated it from accountability," he said.
