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Doing more with less
State colleges and universities are faced with real fiscal challenges and they are worried about the bottom line. That's the focus of a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education profiling Southern Illinois University and the efforts of its president Glenn Poshard to fish for dollars at the State Capitol. The state of Illinois has failed to pay SIU $135 million in promised appropriations over the last year, and tuition & fees for the university's mostly working-class students are now more than $10,000 a year.
To his credit Poshard is reluctant to hike SIU's tuition rate to even higher levels, even as he is in favor of raising state taxes to help ease the financial situation. But Illinois is facing a $13 billion budget deficit, the state registered the fourth largest net loss of residents last year nationwide, and the unemployment rate is more than 11 percent. In other words, even if raising taxes were more politically popular, there is little reason to think that doing so will actually close the budget gap.
In the face of these fiscal challenges, it's not surprising that higher ed leaders like Poshard are going to the Legislature. But isn't that part of the problem? Rather than demanding more, Poshard and the SIU Board of Trustees would be better off first actively evaluating how to use the resources they do have more effectively.
ACTA's recent report card on public higher education in Illinois found that students can currently graduate from SIU without exposure to key areas like literature, language history and economics that they will need after graduation; less than a quarter of incoming full-time freshmen graduate within four years. When students are not guaranteed a well-rounded education and many don't even graduate in four years, does it make sense to ask for more dollars?
Rather than spending time at the State Capitol, SIU and other similarly-situated universities around the country need first to tackle the issues of cost and quality. Unless they do so, their pleas for protection in the midst of budget cuts will fall on deaf ears.
Posted by Anne D. Neal on April 09, 2010 at April 9, 2010 10:44 AM
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