ACTA's Must-Reads
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) exists to empower trustees, alumni, and policymakers who share our concern for academic freedom, academic excellence, and accountability in higher education. On this blog, we highlight important current happenings on those issues for our constituents.
Responsible giving to higher education
Yesterday morning, ACTA hosted a conference on protecting donor intent in college giving, in conjunction with the Federalist Society and the Philanthropy Roundtable. First we heard from directors of three programs across the country: the Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown, the James Madison Program at Princeton, and the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government at the University of Illinois. The panelists discussed how their programs successfully separated their fundraising from their host universities, as well as how these sorts of programs can serve as outlets for donors seeking to improve their alma maters.
Our second panel consisted of a quartet of lawyers who all have unique expertise in advising clients on ensuring that the intent of their gifts is respected. Some of their suggestions included avoiding making gifts in perpetuity, considering donating to a legally distinct "supporting organization," and appointing an outside ombudsman. Other suggestions can be found in ACTA's Intelligent Donor's Guide to College Giving.
Posted by Noah Mamis on February 04, 2010 at 01:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
How Mr. Carey aced college
ACTA friend Kevin Carey has an absolutely masterful piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on his undergraduate experience. After commenting on the kinds of problems in general education made clear on WhatWillTheyLearn.com, he delves into his political science concentration, where he now sees similar problems:
But the poli-sci department didn't exactly enforce a rigorous, coherent curriculum. You had to take political philosophy, for example, but you could take it at any point during your undergraduate career. I waited until my final semester, when, despite a carefully planned strategy of non-course-taking, I still needed eight credits to finish. I signed up for "Gender, Policy, and Law" because I figured there would be a lot of women in the class. (There were, but not the kind I had hoped for.) It also met in the middle of the afternoon on Tuesdays, perfect for a lifestyle centered on four-day weekends and the 2 a.m. broadcast of ESPN SportsCenter.And I took that pesky philosophy course, where I read The Republic, On Liberty, and a number of other great books that colleges have traditionally required students to read in their first semester, not the last, in that they pretty much lay the groundwork for everything else.
Who's to blame for this? First and foremost, I am. I was an adult at the time, technically, and I could have chosen to work much harder. Plenty of other students did, and do. As time goes by, my squandered undergraduate education stands as one of my bigger life regrets. The more the demands of career and family build, the more wistful I become when I look at the pile of unread volumes on my nightstand and linger in the philosophy and literature sections of my favorite bookstore--knowing with more certainty each year that you can read only so much in life, and that some of my chances to experience great artistic and intellectual beauty are simply gone and won't return.
At the same time, this kind of wisdom tends to accumulate with age and experience, things I had in short supply when I pulled up in front of my freshman dorm two months shy of my 18th birthday, stereo system and Pink Floyd posters in hand. That's why colleges are run by people who are more than technically adults.
The link above will allow you to read the whole piece. Don't miss it.
Posted by Charles Mitchell on February 04, 2010 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
President to higher ed: cut costs
In his first State of the Union address last night, President Obama touched upon one key ACTA issue directly, and raised another one indirectly. In his remarks on education, the President recognized the role that colleges and universities have to play in making higher education "more affordable":
it's time for colleges and universities to get serious about cutting their own costs because they, too, have a responsibility to help solve this problem.
As universities hire and ever-expanding army of administrators, and as tuition increases continue to spiral out of control causing two-thirds of college freshmen to worry about their ability to pay for their degrees, ACTA welcomes the President's belt-tightening message.
The President also returned to one of his campaign promises when he pledged to work this year to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Many of our elite universities continue to invoke DADT to justify their opposition to on-campus ROTC programs and it will be interesting to see, if the law is repealed, whether they will adopt a more welcoming attitude toward the military.
On the question of a ROTC participation, as on the need to cut costs, the buck of course ultimately stops with the trustees. They are the key levers of change and they have the fiduciary authority to act--now.
Posted by David Azerrad on January 28, 2010 at 03:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Governance in the news
Trustees are from Mars, and faculty are from Venus, if the Association of Governing Board's latest report is any indication. As both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed report today, both groups supposedly display a lack of understanding of the others' roles in university affairs--adding yet another layer of confusion in the already murky business of shared governance. But is that all? ACTA president Anne D. Neal weighed in and found fault with the survey's methodology and the study's conclusions--particularly the fact that most of the survey's respondents were administrators rather than trustees. This unfortunately seems to reflect the common view that when it comes to university governance, administrators should be running the show at the expense of the board's authority. While education about all aspects of university governance and operations is crucial for trustees to be able to do their jobs well, their fiduciary role requires them to have the final word.
Posted by Sandra Diaz on January 25, 2010 at 05:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Higher ed costs: still going up!
There's still a dirty little secret in higher education and it's called ever-spiraling costs. At a time when families are cutting back and taking out loans to send their kids to college, higher ed costs continue to rise.
You wouldn't know it from the headlines of course, since we are told, in today's Chronicle of Higher Education for example, that "Paychecks Stagnate for Presidents of Many Public Universities." In reality, executive salaries are not staying put -- they are merely increasing at a slower rate. Whereas median salaries increased by 7.6 percent last year, they only rose by 2.3 percent this year.
The same article also tells us that base "salaries stopped growing last year for more than one-third of the 185 public-university chief executives" surveyed by the Chronicle. According to my old-fashioned math, this still means that nearly two-thirds of these CEO's saw their base pay grow! Yes, it's great that some CEO's are declining their bonuses or donating some of their pay, but let's get real.
During economic downturns, most businesses don't increase costs and raise prices. Instead, they find ways to cut overhead and reduce administrative expenditures to make their products more affordable. That's what should happen in higher ed. And yet all too often, journalists, policymakers and families seem to take it for granted that tuition increases are inevitable in times of economic downturn and that higher ed costs -- which are, wouldn't you know, governed by their own inflationary measure -- must always rise.
At a certain point, the cost of a college education will exceed its value. Some would argue we're already well past that point. Isn't it time we started expecting colleges and universities to cut costs and live more like the rest of us?
Posted by Anne D. Neal on January 19, 2010 at 11:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Lessons from Stevens
Sweeping governance changes just imposed by the attorney general of New Jersey in a case involving the Stevens Institute of Technology Board of Trustees underscore why trustees need to get their houses in order: If you don't, someone may do it for you! Here are some lessons, for starters.
The full board -- not just the executive committee -- needs to set the pay level of the president and resist the temptation to raise presidential salaries higher and higher. It is interesting to remember that the New York Board of Regents once removed almost an entire college governing board for permitting enormous presidential compensation (of which the full board was ignorant) on the grounds that it was the trustees' legal obligation to conduct adequate oversight.
Boards must insist on clear conflict of interest policies. Self-policing measures will obviate the need for intervention. While outside trustee involvements can sometimes be valuable and informative, they can give rise to inappropriate transactions if the potential conflict is not disclosed. Accordingly, it is imperative that higher education governing boards adopt clear conflict policies that ensure transparency in university operations.
Presidential leadership does not depend on being a member of the board. Presidents of private colleges today commonly have voting rights on their boards. However, this status confuses the governance relationship. Presidents, after all, work for the board and frequently bring proposals to the board; sometimes presidents are also members of the faculty, where various conflicts of interest can arise. Permitting the president to serve as a nonvoting, ex officio member, or to attend board meetings upon the call of the board, can eliminate this problem.
Boards of trustees should insist on their own staff and budget. Currently, most boards of trustees have no staff and no budget. They are, for the most part, entirely dependent on the president's staff for support and for continuing education. It is not surprising that, given this fiscal arrangement, most boards are not independent.
Boards of trustees should regularly ensure donor intent is being followed. As a general practice, trustees should review restricted gifts and ensure the donors' terms are followed as part of their fiduciary responsibility.
Bylaws should provide for trustee term limits, and for removal of trustees for lack of attendance, misconduct, and conflicts of interest. The audit committee (whose members should be financially literate) can be responsible for ensuring that policies are adhered to and conflicts of interest avoided, reviewing compensation (including the 990s) and publicly disclosing top administrative salaries each year.
Posted by Anne D. Neal on January 15, 2010 at 06:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Big-time college athletics and the question of priorities
At a time when a number of colleges and universities have resorted to drastic cost-reducing measures (by higher education standards), such as freezing faculty pay and even cutting entire degree programs, it seems that some big sports programs are being exempted. According to an article in USA Today, many institutions saw large increases in direct college subsidies between 2005 and 2008. Salaries of football coaches have also skyrocketed and some now net several million dollars a year.
While athletics does have a legitimate place in the university, its overemphasis has led some colleges to be "more focused on beer and spectacle than on teaching and learning," in Anne Neal's words. When one reads about the University of Alabama cancelling classes so that students could attend a football championship, or Binghamton University dismissing--then reinstating after an outcry--an adjunct after she revealed having been pressured to grade basketball players more leniently, one begins to wonder: what exactly is the highest priority on our campuses these days?
Posted by Sandra Diaz on January 15, 2010 at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Trouble in paradise?
In today's Chronicle of Higher Education, the spotlight is on a battle involving faculty contracts at the University of Hawaii. Like many other state governments at this time, Hawaii is dealing with a major budget shortfall and has had to rein in spending in a number of sectors, including higher education. In response, the University of Hawaii has been taking a scalpel to its own budget, and among its incisions is a temporary 6.7 percent pay cut for faculty. Naturally, this has the faculty union up in arms, and they are prepared to fight this pay cut in court if necessary.
While a pay cut, even a temporary one, is certainly not welcome news, it must be viewed in the context not just of Hawaii's budget difficulties, but also of our national economy. Contract issues notwithstanding, this pay cut is a weak measure compared to the scores of layoffs sustained in other industries (not to mention being comparable to what the university administration has already done for itself). It is also one part of the collective wake-up call many colleges and universities are receiving after spending too freely during the good years.
Posted by Sandra Diaz on January 11, 2010 at 05:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Letting in the sunshine
Over the past few decades, administrative and other non-instructional spending in universities has exploded relative to instructional expenditures. In fact, much of the increase in staff-per-student ratio since the 1970s has come from non-instructional personnel, helping to drive up costs without appreciably affecting the quality of education. Also grabbing headlines have been reports of generous--some would say exorbitant--salaries for college presidents and other administrators. All of these factors contribute to college costs that continue to outplace inflation, a situation that has received a great deal of attention from the Louisiana Postsecondary Education Review Commission, to which ACTA submitted testimony in December.
With this national backdrop, it is not surprising that during its 2009 session, the Arkansas state legislature passed Senate Bill 55 (renamed ACT 321) in order to "increase salary transparency for administrators in state-supported institutions of higher education." The act stipulates that a "state-supported institution of higher education shall submit a report listing each administrator at the state-supported institution of higher education who earns a salary of one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) or more to the Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Department of Higher Education by July 1 each year, beginning July 1, 2010."
One can surely sympathize with the legislators' desire for transparency; but it shouldn't take a statute! In 2006, ACTA testified before the Senate Finance Committee Roundtable and called upon boards to take the first steps themselves toward accountability. We recommended boards voluntarily publishing annual reports outlining such information as: compensation of the president and all senior administrative officials, whether conflict of interest policies are in place, board member attendance records, board compensation and the names and addresses of all trustees. "Self-policing measures by the higher education community," we noted, "...will obviate the need for legislative intervention." The higher education community should take note.
Posted by Sandra Diaz on January 07, 2010 at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Raising tuition in the Bayou State
ACTA recently had the pleasure of touching base with Louisiana policymakers and submitting testimony to the state's Postsecondary Education Review Commission concerning higher education quality and affordability. Shortly thereafter, the Commission recommended that the Louisiana State Legislature relinquish its authority to set tuition for the state's public colleges and universities. According to this news report, if the Legislature approves this recommendation, tuition and fees at Louisiana State University could rise nearly 25 percent, and there could be increases of almost 60 percent at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
This response to the governor's call to increase cost efficiency and streamline budgets ignores a very real problem that ACTA highlighted in our testimony -- high administrative expenditures relative to instructional spending. According to data supplied to the U.S. Department of Education, between 2002 and 2007, the Louisiana State University System increased its instructional expenditures by 63 percent, but administrative spending went up over 87 percent. During that same period, instructional spending at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette went up 21 percent, while administrative spending increased by 41 percent. The rapidity with which administrative costs are increasing is a significant factor in spiraling college costs -- and to raise tuition without addressing it is little more than applying a flimsy band-aid to the wound.
Posted by Anne D. Neal on January 04, 2010 at 04:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
ACTA on holiday
Dear readers, please note that our offices will be closed until Monday, January 4th, and we will therefore not be posting any Must-Reads until then. We wish you all the best for this holiday season and for the coming year.
Posted by David Azerrad on December 23, 2009 at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Yearning to know that they don't know
First the good news: According to a new survey by the American Revolution Center, over 90 percent of Americans believe it is important both to know the history and principles of the American Founding, and to teach them to students. Even when the responses are broken down according to political affiliation, income, gender, level of education or geography, Americans of all backgrounds nearly unanimously recognize the importance of the Founding.
Unfortunately, these same people have a rather hazy idea of what these principles are and how this history unfolded. Eighty-three percent failed a 27 question multiple-choice exam on the Founding period. Only 65 percent placed the American Revolution in the correct century.
The poor results will not be surprising to those who follow ACTA's work. In an earlier survey of historical literacy, we had found that four out of five seniors from the top 55 colleges and universities across the country had failed an exam on general American history. And when we looked at which of the country's leading colleges and universities actually require American government or history on WhatWillTheyLearn.com, only 20 of the 137 institutions we surveyed got a check mark.
Looking at the exams in both these reports, one may be tempted to dismiss some of the questions as completely irrelevant to contemporary political life and informed citizenship. After all, couldn't one reasonably ask what difference it makes whether anyone knows who the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was? In and of itself, the answers to this question merely amount to random pieces of information, easily accessed through a simple Google search. A Trivial Pursuit champion could well memorize the names of all Chief Justices and not know the first thing about the Supreme Court.
What matters ultimately though is not the name John Jay, but an understanding of the federal judiciary power and his role in shaping it. Someone who has studied this important question and understands what Publius called "the least dangerous" branch of government, will have encountered the name John Jay along the way. As such, he will be able to easily answer this question because he possesses a deeper understanding of the governing institutions of his country.
There is also something to be said for simply knowing and recognizing the names of the great men and women who left their imprint on this country's history. America is such a vast country and its population so diverse that part of what unites its people is a shared history. Let us not therefore neglect the education that will permit the next generation to bind itself to what Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory."
Posted by David Azerrad on December 23, 2009 at 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tuition hike ABCs
One of the points ACTA emphasized in our recent testimony before the Louisiana Postsecondary Education Review Commission was that nationally, increased administrative spending seems to be one cause of skyrocketing college costs. Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research and the American Enterprise Institute expands on that point in a wonderful new paper entitled "Where Does All That Tuition Go?" While the whole thing is excellent, here is a particularly enjoyable excerpt:
[T]uition, fees, and overall student costs of attending college are increasing far faster than inflation and most people's salaries. In turn, students take out more loans, and many work long hours even while enrolled full time. Further, graduation rates at far too many institutions are mediocre at best, in part because colleges and universities are not engaging in the practices that keep students engaged and enrolled.[14] So who is benefiting from rising tuition?Let us look at an interesting pattern of growth in personnel over the last decade. Figure 1 shows that when it comes time to hire, colleges and universities are stocking up more on executives and administrators than on faculty.[15] This helps explain one of the key findings of the Delta Cost Project's recent report Trends in College Spending....Its recent report found that in recent years, the average college or university has increased its institutional support--which includes general administrative services, executive management, legal and fiscal operations, and public relations--faster than it has increased its instructional expenditures.[17]...
In short, students seem to be a lower priority than administrators when it comes to allocating revenues.[19] This is part of what Jane V. Wellman, director of the Delta Cost Project, calls "the higher education funding disconnect: spending more, getting less."[20]
Even more interesting is the pattern of increases in salaries documented in the Almanac of Higher Education, a compendium of trend data in higher education issued yearly by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Combining salary data from the most recent edition covering the 2008 academic year with earlier data from the 2004 academic year, as reported in the American Association of University Professors's faculty salary survey, we see the tyranny of the alphabet.[21]
Figure 3 shows that if your title leads with a c--as in "chief" of almost anything--you win, with average salary increases of close to 30 percent. For more detail, consider data recently reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education: presidents at research universities had a median income of $627,750, which was an increase of 15.5 percent over the year before.[22]
Not everyone can be a chief of something; some must settle for being a dean. And just as d follows c in the alphabet, if your title starts with a d--as in dean of arts and sciences or dean of education--you lag behind the c's. For the set of deans displayed in figure 3, salary increases were in the 18-25 percent range. And sure enough, if you are an f--as in faculty--you fall behind your more alphabetically privileged colleagues, with salary increases around 15 percent.[23] Moving to the end of the alphabet, if you are an s--as in student--well, you get to pay for these salary increases that exceed inflation. There is one notable exception: professors in two-year colleges found that their salary increases were lower than the growth in the CPI.
Read the whole thing. And if you are a trustee, don't just read: Take a close look at what your institution is spending on administration, and what your students are getting for that money.
Posted by Charles Mitchell on December 22, 2009 at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Higher ed straight talk
Straight talk on higher education is often hard to come by. ACTA tries to deliver. And so does our good friend Dr. Richard Vedder. In a recent post on the Center for College Affordability and Productivity's blog, Vedder looks at a new book by sociologist Jackson Toby and focuses, in his characteristically candid way, on some of its key findings. Most colleges today blame K-12 for their problems. But Vedder thinks that's not quite right: In fact, the problems are also due to the universities themselves. He quotes Toby: "Lax university standards have contributed to the dumbing down of our secondary education system."
Regrettably, this statement is all too true, and it seems particularly relevant in light of my recent trip to Louisiana to provide testimony to that state's Postsecondary Education Commission. Amidst major budget shortfalls, the Commission is trying to assess the state of higher ed in Louisiana in order to see if there are better ways of doing business. Believe me, there are. Fewer than 40 percent of the students who enroll in Louisiana's four-year colleges graduate in six years. That's one reason ACTA endorsed the proposal to raise admissions standards at the four-year colleges.
The proof will be in the pudding, and the Commission has not yet issued its final report. But it and the University of Louisiana Board of Supervisors have already commendably signed on to the proposition of raising standards. It's ACTA's hope that the Governor will get behind this commonsense proposition as well.
In too many cases, higher education is the problem, not the solution. Richard Vedder deserves much credit for shining a light on this truth. And Louisiana has a chance to do something about its own higher ed troubles and to show the rest of the country that it is possible to bring real reform to public universities.
Posted by Anne D. Neal on December 18, 2009 at 05:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)