Governor’s commission on higher ed more of the same

When Gov. John Kasich announced the creation of a nine-person commission to examine the operations of higher education in Ohio, my reaction could be summed up by Yogi Berra’s famous quote “its d j vu all over again.”

This is the fourth such commission that has been charged since the early ’90s, including one that focused specifically on Northeast Ohio. Each duly met, heard testimony from inside and outside higher education, and developed recommendations. The recommendations were then largely ignored.

For example, previous commissions recommended that the administration of higher education be consolidated and simplified. Eastern Gateway Community College and the Kent State branches in Trumbull and Columbiana counties offer two-year degrees, yet there are separate administrations and governing boards. Ohio State shares a campus in Mansfield with North Central State College with a combined enrollment of 4,000 students yet each as a separate administration and governing board.

The commission should take a fresh look at administrative duplication throughout Ohio’s higher education system.

The governor makes a plea for cultural change in higher education. He, however, should be mindful of the most profound cultural change in the past 30 years. Students rather than the state are now paying most of the bill. In fiscal year 2015, state appropriations accounted for 25 percent of the operating budget at YSU, with students accounting for 72 percent.

Minority partner

In other words, while the politicians and their allies in the business community place increasing demands on higher education, the state is essentially a minority partner in its operation. The majority shareholders are the now the students and their parents, who are increasingly going into debt to finance their education. The commission should examine higher education finance from this perspective.

One way to accomplish this is to acknowledge that public universities in Ohio have diverse missions. One size doesn’t fit all. At one end of the spectrum is Miami of Ohio, the self-styled “public ivy”, highly selective in admissions and residential in character, with a graduation rate of 84 percent. In contrast, YSU is an access university serving the local region. Its graduation rate is 35 percent, not because of anything that it does, but because of the population that it serves

Yet, state funding formulas oriented toward graduation and course completion rates, are actually punitive to universities like YSU and ignore their valuable mission. The commission should consider that access universities, who serve a place bound, poorer student population, be funded at a higher rate so that they can work to keep their costs to students low.

One of most important reasons that graduation rates at YSU are low is that students have to work to pay for their education and consequently drop out temporarily or take fewer classes than necessary for timely progress toward a degree.

Paid internships

If the business community truly wants to serve the students at public universities and accelerate the rate of degree completion particularly in regions like the Mahoning Valley, it should consider doing more of the following. First, only offer paid internships so that students do not have to choose between a potentially valuable internship and a paid job. Second, provide substantial tuition support directly to employees seeking degrees. Third, do not change a student’s work schedule during an academic term so that students do not have to withdraw from classes in order to maintain a needed job.

Finally, the 400 faculty of YSU are highly educated professionals who are come from across the country and around the world. They not only pay millions in state and local taxes, but they enhance the community through their service in countless ways. Most importantly the outcomes of their hard work are more educated professionals most of whom remain in the Valley. This pattern of value is also repeated wherever higher education is found in Ohio.

If that’s not economic development, I don’t know what is. Yet the message communicated by the governor and others outside academia, perhaps unintentionally, is that higher education and its faculty are burdens on the state that need to be shaped up and somehow become more productive. That’s not only wrong, but the wrong way to get the necessary buy-in to implement lasting change.

No response

It is further disappointing that the senior leadership of Ohio’s colleges and universities and their boards have been publically silent in response to this implicit assault on their institutions and faculty. Does silence represent assent or is it a political strategy? I hope it’s the latter.

Dr. Thomas Maraffa retired from YSU after nearly 30 years as a faculty member in the Department of Geography. Between 2002 and 2010 he served as a member of President David Sweet’s Cabinet where he was a member of the planning team that led to the development of Eastern Gateway Community College.