Cutting higher education can be done intelligently

Opinion: July 19, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Jay Schalin

McClatchy-Tribune

State legislatures, caught between the still-sluggish economy and the loss of federal stimulus funds, are slashing university budgets: more than $1 billion in California, $406 million in North Carolina, and so on.

This is causing anguish among academics and politicians who claim the cuts will wreak havoc with higher education’s basic missions: education, research and community service.

Yet, by making cuts strategically this scenario could greatly benefit public higher education. Schools can now rid themselves of superfluous programs and become more focused and rigorous, just as private firms routinely use lean times to become stronger through innovation, management efficiencies, and the sale or closure of underperforming units.

So, what criteria should public university administrators use to improve education while reducing expenditures?

Some reductions are self-evident, such as cutting administrative bloat and delaying unnecessary construction projects. Other easy targets are redundant or low-enrollment courses and programs.

Ordinarily, such measures would be sufficient. But not this year — administrators must now make difficult choices beyond the obvious. Everything on campus should be questioned and some long-favored policies cast aside.

Look at enrollment

To start, they should consider capping enrollment. In many states, recent enrollment increases have far outpaced population growth. In North Carolina, for instance, full-time enrollment in the state university system grew twice as fast as the population between 1998 and 2009. With graduation rates hovering around 54 percent nationally, limiting enrollment by raising admission standards could improve public university systems while concurrently lowering expenditures.

Something else universities can do is concentrate their focus. When money flows easily, schools tend to add nonessential programs and yield to mission creep. Administrators should look at every program, institute and center and decide whether it serves the university’s core purposes — and unload the nonessential.

The universities’ mission to educate also should receive higher priority than research and community service. After all, without education, there is no reason for the universities to exist, while the others can be achieved by other agencies.

But even after re-emphasizing education, administrators may still have to cut deeper and go after academics.

One strategy for prioritizing academics is to retain programs that provide students with tangible job skills. Teaching students specific scientific, technical and financial skills needed by the economy is perhaps the strongest justification for subsidizing higher education in the first place. In frugal times, practical concerns deserve greater weight.

This does not mean turning universities into vocational institutions. Some low-enrollment courses in the humanities or sciences can be spared to maintain academic integrity — to instill in modern students those “habits of mind,” as Cardinal John Henry Newman described them, that benefit both students and society.

Today, large universities offer so much choice that a student’s education can focus on minutiae rather than the major ideas that influence society and history. Obviously, sticking to subjects that focus on the most important bodies of knowledge and eschewing narrower topics will produce better-educated students. Cuts should be made accordingly.

Look for bias

Another possible criterion for eliminating a course or program depends on whether it is based on a political agenda, is overtly one-sided, or serves a narrow constituency. Usually, programs such as gender studies were created in response to political pressure and therefore emphasize advocacy rather than free inquiry. Perhaps there can be no greater gain for the academy than eliminating programs that conflict with the mandate to pursue knowledge impartially.

Administrators also should look closely at so-called “interdisciplinary” programs, which typically mix a variety of topics — a little science, a little economics, a little culture, and a huge helping of political correctness — so that they provide neither skills for future employment nor rigorous habits of mind.

This is the time for boldness. Some schools may want to drop entire departments so they can protect special areas of strength.

Prioritizing budget cuts according to the above guidelines would result in universities that are more efficient, have higher standards, are more focused on their primary mission, and are more immune to political trendiness and bias.

The need to make deep spending cuts gives university administrators a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reform the system in ways that would be politically unfeasible under ordinary circumstances. They need to go for it; the alternative is to merely become less than before.

Jay Schalin is the director of state policy at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit institute in Raleigh, N.C. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.