Jim Tressel column: Hail to Ohio Senate for its plan to increase university funding
As our state legislators are hard at work hammering out a consensus state budget bill, Ohio’s public universities – and the students and families they serve – are watching with keen anticipation.
Thanks to the leadership and resolve of Senate President Keith Faber and Sen. Randy Gardner, the Senate version of the budget bill contains a 4.5 percent increase in basic state funding for higher education in fiscal year 2016 and a 4.0 percent increase in 2017.
The bill also freezes college tuition at current levels for the next two years for in-state undergraduate students. Further, it bars universities from increasing general and instructional fees and requires universities to develop plans for reducing overall student costs by 5 percent.
The Senate’s decision to increase funding for public universities is welcome news. It’s a solid step in the right direction after several years of underfunding as Ohio struggled to recover from the Great Recession.
Still, significant challenges remain.
Policymakers and the citizens they represent have challenged Ohio’s public universities to find ways to operate more efficiently to reduce the cost of college while continuing to improve quality. We are responding to this challenge with serious thought and action – and we have the numbers to prove it.
For example, Ohio’s new performance-based higher education funding formula links state funding directly to the number of degrees awarded, a much better indicator of productivity than the old formula that based funding largely on the number of students enrolled. Universities are rising to the challenge. Despite major cuts in state funding, the number of degrees awarded by Ohio’s public universities between 2010 and 2014 increased by 19.1 percent. At YSU, we conferred 2,270 degrees this past academic year, the most in 31 years, and the 1,696 bachelor’s degrees awarded were the highest in 41 years.
Those are textbook examples of improved efficiencies.
Here’s another example: Despite public perceptions to the contrary, over the past 10 years Ohio’s four-year public universities have led the nation in restraining growth of tuition and fees. Between 2004-05 and 2014-2015, Ohio had the lowest rate of growth in tuition and fees among all states. In fact, we are the only state where tuition and fees grew more slowly than the rate of inflation.
Good things are happening on our campus. For instance, this past academic year alone, our faculty earned the university’s first two patents, indicators of YSU’s continued pursuit of knowledge and discovery. In addition, through our continued partnerships with the Youngstown Business Incubator and America Makes, YSU’s research and educational initiatives in additive manufacturing rank among the best in the world.
As we strive for excellence, we also continue to find ways to operate more efficiently and to make YSU more affordable for our students. Our new Jump Start program, for instance, is designed to give incoming freshmen a head start on their academic careers, increasing their chances for success, helping them graduate on time and lowering their college-going costs. Also, the university is about to enter into a new energy- efficiency program that we estimate will save more than $2 million annually in utility costs, savings that can be used for improved programs and services to help our students succeed.
At Youngstown State, we fully understand Ohioans’ concern about the rising cost of a college education. College-level learning is the key to economic opportunity and prosperity – for both individuals and the state. However, as Sen. Faber has rightfully noted, we can’t expect to have a highly educated workforce and robust economic growth if the cost of a college degree makes it unattainable to large numbers of our young people.
Residents of Ohio are expecting more – and getting more – from the state’s public universities. But the bar is continually rising. To attract the best and brightest students, faculty and researchers, we need top-quality programs and services and state-of-the-art facilities and technologies. That requires continued investment in quality, making it an essential component of the efficiency and affordability equation.
Tuition restraint simply is not sustainable without increased state support for our universities. The version of the state budget bill released last week by the Ohio Senate is reason for optimism, suggesting as it does that state policymakers understand that dynamic. We urge all members of the Senate to support the higher education funding provisions that Sens. Faber and Gardner have worked so hard to bring forward for consideration.
Jim Tressel is president of Youngstown State University.