But the University of Hawaii at Mānoa looks to be more broken than others. Christie Wilcox writes about the budget cuts there: the place is being gouged to the bone — the College of Natural Sciences has a cohort of graduate students to whom they are failing to live up to their responsibilities (the university brought them in, these students made a commitment to UH Mānoa, you don’t get to suddenly decide midway through their training to abandon your obligations.)
For the spring semester, 81 students applied for TAships within the department of Biology. Only 35 of those have advisors within the College of Natural Sciences, leaving 46 students with no funding source less than two months before the end of the semester. The deadlines for applying for financial aid have long since passed. It’s not like anyone has dozens of research positions to hand out willy-nilly. So this email left the advisors of 46 students with no time to react. Without their TAships, most of these students would be forced to take a leave of absence or drop out, because the loss of a position means the loss of a tuition waiver, too. For out of state students, that means paying more than $10,000 in tuition as well as losing $8,500 in income. It’s hard enough to live in one of the most expensive cities in the country on a TA salary. It’s basically impossible without it. And as Dr. Cole wrote, a sudden drop in TAs would directly impact the number of courses offered to undergraduates, negatively impacting their education that they pay thousands for every year.
It’s specifically the sciences that are bearing the brunt of the cuts, and there is definitely a perception that that is unfair.
In the past few years, the College of Natural Sciences has been doing exactly what it should be: enrollment is up 35%. Faculty research funds are up 67%. The college—which teaches some 60% of all undergraduate majors on campus—has been booming, and now brings in 15% of all the tuition revenue at UH (and that’s including the professional tuition revenue from the law and medical schools). However, the budget allocation model, overseen by Vice Chancellor Reed Dasenbrock and Vice Chancellor Kathy Cutshaw, has remained stagnant, basing funds solely on historical allotments. The College of Natural Sciences has been expanding, but it’s budget hasn’t. Though it brings in 15% of the revenue, it receives 2% back. That’s it. I’ve seen the numbers—Ditto is right. He had two choices: cut TAs, or run in the red. He was explicitly ordered to balance his budget, so he cut TAs.
I’m going to disagree with Wilcox a little bit: the sciences do bring in more revenue at many universities — here at UMM, biology is the most popular major on campus, and our enrollments have been growing at a faster rate than other disciplines. However, the sciences are dependent on every other department: we expect our students to take courses in math, and English, and foreign languages, and art. It is only right that the wealthier disciplines help subsidize the less heavily populated, but no less essential, disciplines. We’re all in this together to provide a balanced, broadly based education.
But that doesn’t change the problem. It simplifies it. Universities are grossly underfunded. These are state institutions, set up to serve the needs of the people, and our budgets are easy targets for know-nothing legislators, who nibble at them every year, and they’re shrinking below maintenance levels. That’s exactly where we’re at now: fire essential staff needed to run the education mission of the college, or run in the red, because the state is starving them. I’ve seen the budget figures for the University of Minnesota, and it’s shocking — while demand for higher ed keeps growing, they keep cutting our budget, year after year, and telling us to throw more of the costs on the backs of our students, who already suffer from painful debt.
The problem isn’t in the universities, or the students, or the faculty. The problem is that state governments have been shirking their responsibility to maintain the educational infrastructure for decades, and it’s reaching a crisis point. First UH Mānoa, and then every other university will crumble into the same sewer of neglect.
It’s a larger problem than just “the states aren’t doing their jobs regarding education” though. US states are required by law to have a balanced budget, unlike the federal government. Without sufficient tax revenue, either from Republican anti-tax, anti-public service fiscal policies or the recession or usually the combination of both, the states have to cut something somewhere. Hence you get the deteriorating roads, infrastructure, emergency services, welfare, and education across the board. This is a systemic problem affecting a lot of areas including education.
Another legacy of St. Ronnie Raygun.
California used to have one of the top (if not the top) public education systems: Cal State and UC. When I attended UC last century, tuition was $400/quarter. (My dad paid $70/quarter in the 70s).
The joke goes that St. Ronnie (when he was governor) said something along the lines that we pay so much to be number one, so why not pay less and slip down just a notch? Cut taxes! Save money!!
And now the tuition is unaffordable. And the schools have no money.
American Taliban: Mission Accomplished.
Very frustrating. I’ll suggest two general contributing factors: 1.) an aging population which is less concerned with schools if they themselves don’t have a kid in school and 2.) the popular belief that all the learning and education in the world is meaningless if you don’t have God/Spirit at the center of your life.
That list can be added to, no doubt.
This is a feature, not a bug, of the Rethuglican economics plan. Keep the people dumb, keep them yelling at each other instead of us (rethugs), gain power and money. Soon the public universities fail while the rethugs scream “look at how horrible to government does at running everything!! Privatize Privatize!!” they can keep the people even dumber and funnel more money into their pockets. Their kids get quality education, while every other kid in this country gets the lowest bidder.
Thanks for this:
My wife teaches in a conservatory arts college in a university with “performance based budgeting”. When “performance” is based entirely on number of students registered for classes and number of grant dollars, the arts college is definitionally unable to compete. And colleges and programs shouldn’t be in that competition.
On the other hand, science funding shouldn’t be facing the brunt of budget cuts either. Which leave us with your final paragraph, which perfectly encapsulates the real issue with higher education funding:
Although, I’m sure we can also find some room in there to blame the federal government, too.
They could hire more administrators. That wold fix it.
@drst – True, but my state, at least, has for decades had legislatures and governors committed to continually cutting taxes, which has also continually meant cutting education spending, largely because it’s one of the biggest slices of the state budget pie, and somehow the one it’s easiest to convince the people should be cut. So in the end, even thought there are balanced budget requirements, this still comes down to the state failing to support education. They chose to cut taxes and they chose to cut education funding to do it.
Education should be funded by the federal government, which doesn’t have the budget constraints afflicting state governments. The states can still have the discretion to apportion those funds as they see fit (within reason), but the money needs to come from the feds.
Yep. I just don’t get what the point of a fragmented education system is supposed to be in the first place. Are the laws of physics different in Minnesota and Florida? Is there one kind of Renaissance literature in California and another kind in Ohio? You could of course teach things which are “locally interesting” for the most part, like the history of Alaska or the Kansas legal system or what have you, but it’s just absurd to apply that to the entire system.
@3 Sastra…I too bought into the “aging population” meme…until I looked at the numbers when I was researching abortion statistics.
The height of the Baby Boom was 1957 with 4.3 million births. And bottomed out in 1973 with 3.1 million births. And then steadily increased. Since 2000, every single year has seen no fewer than 3.9 million births. And 2007 was a record year with 4.3 million (slightly more than 1957). Those kids are now second graders.
The birth rate (babies per 1,000 women) has been trending downward. But the actual number of births is pretty darn high. And, of course, this does not count immigrants (of any legal status).
There is no shortage of children needing to be educated. And no shortage of parents who are having those children and for whom a strong educational system should be a political imperative.
In Quebec, the universities are continually screaming they are “short of funds” — yet they keep building new buildings (occasionally without having the cash on hand for them, then they need to get bailed out) and increasing administrator salaries.
Seems like the whole concept of universities being “places of learning” has been left by the wayside.
Granted, some of the building space might be necessary. At the university I work at, the classrooms are in use from 8 AM to 8 PM, and there’s talk of earlier/later classes. The physical sciences just got a new/renovated building, too.
(It is complicated by the fact the intro physics classes meet four hours a week, which means either you have a empty hour every week (so you need some course that doesn’t mind meeting once a week, possibly for several hours, and don’t require lab space), or you come up with some baroque cycling schedule.)
Terska @ #6 You’ve been reading ACCJC recommendations for City College of San Francisco, right?
@12 Becca
That’s true, of course. The college where I teach built a new aisle a few years ago, and it was a necessity if we were to meet the needs of our growing student body. However, numerobis is evoking some ventures by our universities that were horribly mismanaged from the start. If you’re curious, you can look into the “ilot voyageur” scandal, in which half a billion dollars were spent on a building that was never even completed, much less used by the university…
Still, tuition here in Quebec (and in Canada, as far as I know) is a few hundreds to a thousand or two per year. I was surprised to learn that just a few decades ago, higher education was just as accessible in the US. Prohibitively high tuition fees are like “under God” in the pledge, something that is so prevalent today that it’s easy to assume America has always been that way…
I’m with comment 9: why is the university budget a state matter? It’s a federal matter in other countries.
Where I come from, universities don’t have the power to do any of that.
They do, however, have other liberties, up to and including medieval privileges: police isn’t allowed to enter university space without permission from the rector…
That really sucks for those grad students, I’m guessing they aren’t unionized or there isn’t anything in their contracts about guaranteed tuition coverage.
I interviewed at an academic job at a public university in West Texas. Some fairly high administrator I interviewed with made it clear his focus was money, and how to get the most “butts in seats” for the most profit. Basically he wanted to transition most science courses (including lab classes) to an online only format to save money. I personally don’t see how a science lab class can be educationally valuable if there’s no hands-on experience I decided not to take that job, for several reasons (another being was that this public university wouldn’t offer health insurance to my husband because I’m also a man).
It’s not just the US. I went to grad school in the UK, where departments are closed entirely if they don’t have enough undergraduate enrolment or aren’t making enough profit. For instance, only 2 of Wales’ 8 universities actually have Chemistry departments, which isn’t really a niche subject.
As noted above, the dumbing down of the peons is a feature, not a bug, of the tax-starvation that the right wing is forcing on us. If people are educated, they might start recognizing that productivity is rising just as it has for the last 70 years, but that for the last 30 of those years, ALL THE GAINS from that productivity have gone to a tiny part of the population. Universities are, or should be, places where people learn how the world works, in all kinds of ways; the right wing would prefer that the masses should get all their information solely from their bespoke media sources, particularly Faux News, which gives out less than 20% true statements.
This isn’t unintended consequences. This is class warfare, against us.
I’d also point out that colleges and universities have not helped themselves with their financial management. Installing expensive luxuries on campus at the expense of education, the appalling waste of money that is athletics, the well documented problem of administrative bloat and so on.
gussnarp @ 7
Yep. This is the Republican policy, though. Taxes on the rich and corporations must be cut without exception. OK now we don’t have enough revenue to fund basic government functions. They’ll cut social services to, but they can justify cutting education by telling people it’s all scary socialist indoctrination programs run by horrible greedy union thug teachers spreading godless secularism and forcing kids into gay sex and abortions, etc. Public education is the enemy of a feudal system, which is what the right wing has been building here for three decades. This is not some instance of confused neglect, it’s a plan.
drewvogel @ 8 – the US Constitution doesn’t specify that education is a right or that it is the province of the federal government, therefore it’s treated as a state matter. And when you convince the Republicans to let the federal government of the US fund all education, pigs will be breaking the sound barrier.
Except that, if you look at best practices in online learning, those classes have to be smaller than in-person classes in order to have any kind of success rate. Start having lots of large-enrollment online courses, and the school will see enrollment plunge due to failouts.
drst @18
And yet we have a federal Department of Education. The federal government has had a role in public education for decades.
I’m aware of the political realities which make good policy difficult to achieve, but I think it’s important to advocate for good policies anyway. Public goods must be publicly funded or else they will be underfunded. State governments can’t do it. It’s got to be the feds.
I’m going to go and disagree with pretty much everyone else on this.
The College of Natural Sciences at UH Manoa has been expanding. Other areas of the campus have not. Natural sciences has historically been subsidizing other departments, in accordance with the ideas of PZ and others here that the University is a whole and the sciences can’t exist in isolation to the other departments; I agree with this. I’m not interested in the statistics that show that Natural Sciences generates a lot more revenue than any other group. But Natural Sciences has been expanding! Their allocations _have not_. This is the story. This is how they are being screwed. Not because they pay for other departments. But because they are _increasingly_ being asked to do so and it has got to the point where they can’t afford TAs. How is this fair to Natural Sciences? Is the law school being asked to teach Contracts and Torts without lecturers?
Changing the discussion to underfunding of universities and the importance of the university being a whole is just bringing in a separate issue to cloud over the fact that this department at this university is being treated like shit by the administration. It actually contributes to the shit that is already being flung in their direction.
Just another sign of an empire in decline. Sad, really.
But, but, but….the market will fix it.
Privatization ruins everything.
As a military spouse, I’ve seen our MWR services transition from being great, inexpensive services that were run by and for our military members to for-profit businesses that gouge their customers and have become too expensive for many military members and groups to use.
As an educator, I’ve watched our public schools losing money to budget cuts and to those awful charter schools that the privatization supporters want so much. First they came for K-12, now they are trying to destroy higher education.
There are times that I despair for the future of the US, and since my hubby is close to retirement, we contemplate retiring to a more sane country. Then, I begin to worry about the futures of my grandchildren, and I think that we need to keep fighting and voting in this country for their sake.
The biggest problem is the combination of resistance to higher tax increases at the state level along with the spread of other big state spending priorities that compete with higher education for funding. If it comes down to having a better Medicaid program or having lower tuition rates at the state colleges/universities, what are you going to choose? Again, that wouldn’t be a problem if the states were raising tax rates, but that’s not happening – not even in most Democratic states (cities on the other hand . . . ).
That leaves the federal government, and I do think they’ve fucked that up. Rather than subsidizing loans, it would have been better if federal education spending had either come as grants or transfers to state education institutions (in return for slower tuition hikes).
For the sake of completeness: for a few months now, studying at a university has been free in all of Germany (where, bizarrely enough, such things are a state matter, too!). That’s “free” as in “beer”, not just as in “speech”.
It’s not somehow impossible or something.
Hmmm, here it’s usually the humanities that get cut, exactly because they don’t bring in private money.
This is why the room I’m currently working in most of the time has a hole in the ceiling. In the library there are chains under the lights because if the ceiling should give way under the constant strain of a neon light then those chains should hold the lights long enough for people to get out of the way.
Currently they’re fixing some literal safety nets around the building so nobody will be killed (hopefully) when pieces of concrete fall off.
That’s the infrastructure.
For teaching, you currently can’t graduate in linguistics as a teacher because the old professor retired, the interim professor isn’t getting paid to supervise final thesises and there will only be a new one when the budget plans are through. The guy who’s doing the job right now (and who’d be a wonderful person for the job) does supervise those students who are doing a Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in his own time because they can’t wait another year or three.
Oh, of course not investing money is actually expensive. Some of the electric wireing should have been replaced 15 years ago, but it wasn’t, so when lightning struck the 60 years old system last year it didn’t only kill the wires but also lots of computers and servers and such…
I despair when I read things like this. Like was mentioned above it is not only the Universities that are showing signs of decay because of reduced spending it is all of government services and in all sectors.
Pick an area you outside of education say regulation of wall street and investment there is not money to higher enough people to enforce the regulations we have so we run into major problems.
Add to that the mismanagement brought on by reduced budgets and misplaced priorities of political appointees chosen to run departments and agencies for years. It is hard to see any thong ahead but a return to a new dark age with a crumbled infrastructure and feudal power, a perfect libertarian world !
uncle frogy
drewvogel @ 20
We have a federal department of transportation too, and energy and commerce. That doesn’t change the percentage of decisions and control at the state level. What’s your point?
You’re advocating for something nonsensical that will never, ever happen. You may want to consider advocating for actual productive policies that might happen, like changing at the state-level the use of property taxes to fund K-12 education, or lowering the interest rate on federal student loans rather than “Well the federal government should just fund it all.”
You’re also blindly and foolishly assuming that if the federal government funds something it will be guaranteed. Have you paid the slightest attention to the situation at the Post Office lately?
When I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley a million years ago, the tuition charge was $50/semester, regardless of the number of credit hours taken. Today, it is becoming hard to distinguish between Berkeley and Stanford relative to tuition charges.
Effectively, what’s going on is privatization of college education on the installment plan with the state’s contribution continually falling percentage-wise as time goes on. For instance, the higher education system in California was greatly responsible for the state’s economic prosperity; now it is being thrown away in a classic example of penny wise and pound foolish. The same is happening in other states, including Virginia where I currently reside.
As a former colleague of mine observed, what we have in this country is private affluence and public squalor s higher education becomes more and more inaccessible to the lower and middle classes and the infrastructure deteriorates.
Nonsensical? There’s a contradiction somewhere? The words just don’t have any meaning? It violates physics?
Who assumed that? It wouldn’t be fucking unconstitutional to do it whenever necessary, like it is for the states. Do you see how that’s a problem? Is there some reason why we shouldn’t consider it a problem?
@11 Numerobis
Well, at least they were a year or two ago. Now that they’re slashing university funding instead of hiking tuition fees, university administrators have gone completely silent.
Vous rappelez-vous du sous-financement universitaire? (French)
Many legislatures are all too happy to provide money for buildings – it gives the local economy a boost due to the contractors building it, it’s a huge permanent advertisement for the local legislator, and it makes pretty pictures on tv. But they don’t increase the operating budget of the university, so then the school has to heat, cool, clean, maintain, and staff that new building with zero extra funds.
Meanwhile, UH-Manoa’s athletic department is $3.5 million in the red. There has been talk of dropping football — quelle horreur! — but instead the administration’s plan appears to be to take more money from state coffers.
http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/20141110_UH_athletics_deficit_of_35_million_expected.html?id=282231131
drst @ 18 — Didn’t get anything from your link re: administrative bloat. Is this what you were after? http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-paid-250-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs.html
Say it ain’t so. Universities being grossly underfunded in blue states like Hawaii, California, and Minnesota. Meanwhile this isn’t the case, at least to not as near a dire extent, in “flyover country” like Ohio, where I was born and went to college, or Pennsylvania, where I currently reside. All right, OH and PA aren’t die-hard red states either. But maybe we realize to a better extent that education should be a priority and we also gotta pay for it…
In California, the University of California is constitutionally part of the state’s government. The involvement of the USofA federal government in higher education is newfangled here and was mostly in response to the launch of Sputnik.
—
I went to a university that was not UC, and in between the time of me going and my nephew & niece being old enough to go, yes there were several new expensive fancy buildings and not a single one of them was used as classrooms they were CHOCK FULL of administrators. WTH? Didn’t need those to learn 3 decades ago. Furthermore, the top administrative positions were paying way way higher, even accounting for absurd cost-of-books-inflation. At the same time, there were less classes and full time faculty. This particular university when there were budget cuts, cut science first and foremost.
To me, it doesn’t seem like money is the issue, it’s the systematic decision to not-educate with the money.
@neuroguy (#35) – Ohio isn’t so rosy. State funding has dropped and budgets at major universities are extremely tight. Tuition rates are rising rapidly. The reason California tends to make such big news is that the system was founded to be extremely affordable, so the tuition increases to make up for Reagan and later governors’ budget cuts are completely out of line even with the rapid rate of increase in the rest of the nation. Plus, it’s a huge state and a leading indicator for the rest of the nation on many issues. Hawaii has its own special issues basically because it’s an island. It’s very hard for them to draw in students and it’s very expensive to do everything. Minnesota – I doubt is any worse off than Ohio. Seriously, I’ve heard lots of budget discussions in person and second hand at a state university in Ohio. It’s the same picture all over.
consciousness razor @ 31
@MHiggo (#34):
Interesting. Many universities argue (at least, when not discussing player’s unions or pay) that big time college athletics is a net gain for the rest of the University in funds. I’ve seen data from different schools and sources at different times that sometimes support that argument and sometimes refute it. I think it all depends on what you count and how you do the budget math. But Hawaii’s a special case. I’m not sure which campus or university it was, but when I was a grad student one of the students in the lab course I taught was the equipment manager or some such for the football team and had to arrange some scheduling around an away game in Hawaii. The thing is that nobody wants to play Hawaii at Hawaii. Sure, the players do, in theory, want to go to Hawaii, but the time out of the schedule and the cost of getting the team to Hawaii means coaches and administrators are opposed to it. So Hawaii pays other colleges to come play them. Enough to cover the travel costs and a good bit extra to make up for the hassle. When Hawaii plays at other colleges, their travel costs are through the roof. If ever there were a case where athletics do not, and probably can not, contribute a net financial benefit to the university, it’s Hawaii.
Apropos of many of the comments here about the loss of state funding by state universities here’s some late breaking news about tuition increases in the Un. of California system. Pretty soon only the wealthy will be able to afford the “public” universities in California, which was not what they were founded for.
http://goo.gl/aUeZTD
@Gussnarp #39
I’d be curious how schools make the case that big-time athletics provide a net gain. At the Division I level, only the biggest of the big-time manage to be self-sufficient, and even then they still receive help.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2013/05/07/ncaa-finances-subsidies/2142443/
As for Hawaii, you’re right that playing in Hawaii is much more of a draw for players than coaches and administrators. I imagine that’s why the NCAA put in the rule of allowing an extra game for teams that play at UH in a season — an extra home game of revenue to soothe their aching budget. They do a similar thing for hockey teams playing in Alaska against UA Anchorage or Fairbanks.
I’m not sure there are any good options for UH-Manoa. Football likely will remain a money pit for some time, even without upgrades to their facilities. Dropping football would help address the budget shortfall, but you’d get tons of public backlash (it’d be like Nebraska dropping football, losing the one thing on which most everyone in the state can agree) as well as administrators moaning about losing their most obvious fund-raising tool. Going Division II would give UH-Manoa the chance to play in-state schools (UH-Hilo, Chaminade, Hawaii Pacific and BYU-Hawaii), but it would also be a big hit to men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball, which all do reasonably well at the D-I level. I don’t envy the people who have to make that call.