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Vision and Courage in Minnesota
When ACTA issued its Minnesota State Report Card, At a Crossroads, it praised the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System (MNScU) for the fiscal responsibility it demonstrated in closing 345 programs while adding 191 in 2007 and 2008. Now MNScU's Bemidji State University and Northwest Technical College (BSU-NTC) has announced a "recalibration" that includes further, significant reductions of administrative staff, athletic programs, and academic programs, an overall 10% budgetary reduction. Closing academic programs, which are the heart of a university, is never easy, but it is the duty of administrators to make these painful decisions, especially in hard economic times. As former the president of the University of Northern Colorado, Robert Dickeson, argues in Academic Program Prioritization, failure to make choices between programs means that that every program--and the institution as a whole--will suffer. Or, yet worse, as ACTA has consistently emphasized, colleges will pay for their runaway costs on the backs of their students with unconscionable increases in tuition and mandatory fees. BSU-NTC firmly rejected the timorous expedient of "across the board cuts." Bemidji's leadership has been transparent about the economic exigencies and included the entire campus in the development of their recalibration plan. Notably, the BSU-NTC “recalibration” is not just a series of cuts, but it is a strategic vision in which the university will enhance programs that are part of its distinctive mission. Their plan targets increasing enrollment of first-generation and low-income students and American Indian students from the White Earth, Red Lake and Leech Lake bands. While cutting its budget, BSU-NTC has plans to raise the student graduation rates by 20 percent and create three-year baccalaureate programs. It will hold tuition increases to 4% over the next two years. ACTA has urged trustees to consider a variety of measures to cut costs. This Minnesota university has assuredly modeled for other institutions a variety of best practices in these difficult times.
Posted by Michael Poliakoff on January 25, 2011 at January 25, 2011 11:32 AM
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