The Education Funding Crisis
Familiar refrain: Students working more to pay tuition
Alpena Community College’s Matt
Dunckel, president of the Michigan
Association of Higher Education, is hearing
the same excuse from students who
are absent from class these days:
“I missed class because I have to work more hours to pay for my tuition.”
That refrain no doubt is ringing through the halls of academia louder than ever with tuition costs rising at an annual rate of 4-plus percent in community colleges.
Another factor that worries Dunckel goes to the heart and purpose of receiving a college education.
“More and more it seems students are engaged in academic studies as a way to earn a living rather than learning to live,” he said. “The most important contribution higher education has to offer is a critical analysis of the way we create culture. Too great an attention paid to money as master removes this critical perspective.”
Key to learning? ‘Stronger investment in human resources’
No one argues that choices must be
made when education funding diminishes.
What is open for discussion and debate,
however, are a school district’s or higher
education institution’s spending decisions
in times of financial crisis.
Cindy Storie, president of the Lansing Community College Faculty Association, questions the recent construction of a new administration building.
“On the surface, LCC claims to be cutting administrative costs, but the college spends millions of dollars on capital outlay to construct a new administrative building,” Storie said.
The building comes at the expense of what’s good for students.
“It opened last year,” she said, “and there’s no instructional space in the entire building. Was this the best use of the dollars available? I don’t think it was, and how is that helping our students?”
What’s needed in higher education is a larger investment in adequate staffing.
“Human resources—our faculty members—should be viewed as the most important asset to student learning, not just a salary and benefits expense on a budget line,” Storie said. “Salary and benefits are the most critical cost of instruction and student learning. We need to increase our investment in these human resources.”
Storie expressed concern over the ability
of recruiting and retaining quality educators
without the stronger investment.
“Many faculty members I know are considering moving to other professions,” she said. “If we don’t make this a desirable profession with attractive salaries and benefits, how can we put the best educators in the classroom?”
Budget cuts put strain on MSU’s APA unit
The
stress and strain of substantial budget cuts weigh heavily on the 1,700 members
of the Michigan State University Administrative Professionals Association whose
work keeps the East Lansing campus functioning smoothly.
“We’re highly stressed and woefully understaffed,” said MEA Board member Leo Sell, president of the MSU APA.
The unit covers a wide range of jobs critical to quality learning at MSU, from counselors and engineers to data resource analysts and computer technicians.
“We’ve not had many layoffs, but when people leave, they’re not replaced, and our members are picking up the workload,” Sell said. “Our members receive some overtime, but we’re encouraged to do our jobs, including the additional work, within the normal work week.
“Management won’t set priorities of what needs to be completed first. Their philosophy is do it all, including the extra, and avoid overtime.”
Sell said the MSU APA would have an additional 200 members “if we had the funding we should have. If MSU is to maintain its mission of delivering quality and service to students, we need higher levels of funding.”
Mott employees do their part to lift cost burden from students
Employees of five unions at Mott Community College in Flint have a common goal during the education funding crisis.
“We’re all in this together trying to provide a quality education for students,” said Steve Robinson, president of the Mott CC faculty association.
Students are taking the brunt of shrinking state appropriations for higher education by paying rising tuition costs. Fewer dollars are available in state and federal grants to help students.
“Today’s college students often have to take out bank loans and have less time to study because they have to run off to work at a part-time job,” Robinson said.
Mott’s union employees don’t like seeing
the higher cost of attending college passed
along to students, Robinson said.
“Every union at the college (MEA represents
two—faculty and the professionaltechnical
ESP unit) has taken at least one
year without any kind of raise,” he said.
The faculty association also has accepted
increases in prescription co-pays and an
increase in deductibles for health care coverage.
“We went into this with our eyes wide open trying to save money for the college,” Robinson said. Mott also has reduced full-time employee positions across the board--administration, faculty and support staff, he said.
“We have fewer and fewer faculty members to do the academic work of the college,” Robinson said. “This definitely adds to the workload. We generate the curriculum and the materials for the course work. Instead of having just three committee assignments, now we may have seven or eight.”
Remove burden from students who ‘add wealth to community’
The
funding story at Grand Rapids Community College is playing out as it has in
other higher education institutions in Michigan.
“In the last five years, over $5 million was cut from the budget,” said MEA Board member Pam DeGryse, an ESP in the college’s Learning Academy for Faculty and Staff.
“Our college is growing, but we have the same number of staff, who must do more work” to serve a student population that now exceeds 15,000. “The make-up of our staff seems to be continually changing to make it leaner.”
DeGryse says students need relief from the rising cost of attending college.
“Community colleges are still the best buy in town—at Grand Rapids CC, we charge $73.50 a credit hour for resident students—but the at-risk students and single moms going here, the people who strengthen our community by furthering their education, need some financial relief,” she said.
“We need to fund community colleges at a higher level to lift the financial burden off these students so they can put extra time into their studies. These are the students who will add wealth to our community by getting a degree here or using it as a stepping stone to get a four-year degree. Then we would be successful.”
‘Debt for typical Ferris student tops $20,000’
Mike Ryan, president of the Ferris
Faculty Association, jokes when he
describes the drop of state funding for
higher education over the last 40 years.
“We’re all in the same boat in Michigan—we’ve gone from the state supplying 70 percent of our funds four decades ago to 30 percent today,” Ryan said.
“I like to say that Ferris State has gone from being state supported when we were receiving 70 percent of our funding from the state, to state assisted when funding dropped to 50 percent, to today where we’re just a dot on the map located in the state.”
Of course, Ryan recognizes that funding
is no laughing matter for Ferris faculty and
staff, students and their parents.
“Today, the burden of funding for universities has shifted to the student in theform of higher tuition costs—at Ferris, students pay $250 a credit hour,” Ryan said.
“Our typical Ferris student is over $20,000 in debt. In fact, I know of parents who are still paying off their student loans from when they were here, and now they’re helping pay the college costs of their sons and daughters attending Ferris.”
Like other universities, Ferris is hiring more part-time faculty instead of investing in full-time professors, Ryan, a micro-biology professor, noted. This can affect the quality of education students receive.
“Part-time faculty members can have excellent skill sets and credentials, but they don’t receive the same level of support from the university,” he said.
“They work out of cubicles and have
little privacy when they meet with students
outside the classroom. They don’t
have the same access to professional development
that full-time faculty members
have. They may teach only two days a
week, and they don’t have ready access
to full-time faculty members for dialogue—the give-and-take discussions
that help make us better teachers.”
Students must ‘work more
and more to afford college’
David Schneider, Michigan Association of Higher Education vice president representing four-year institutions, sees the state’s education funding problem every day on the faces of students at Saginaw Valley State University.
“To me the biggest impact is watching students carry a larger financial load,” said Schneider, a communications professor at Saginaw Valley. “They need to work more and more just to afford college.
“Over the years, state support for higher education has diminished, and we make up for it by charging the student more through higher tuition.”
‘We can’t keep pace with the growth’
Oakland University’s enrollment has
climbed to almost 18,000 students
this fall, but little else has grown to keep
pace with the needs of students, faculty
and staff.
“We’re still operating with the same numbers of staff and faculty and in the same space,” said MEA Board member Susan Russell, past president of the Oakland University Professional Support Association.
In fact, lack of space has become a major issue affecting students and staff.
“Classes are filled to over capacity,” Russell said. “Students want to learn, but they can’t get the classes they need when they need them. Sometimes we can only offer two or three sections of a class when we have demand for five more. There are not enough classrooms.”
During this growth spurt, the university has sacrificed teaching lab space and conference room space in order to accommodate increasing numbers of part-time faculty who must share space.
Oakland University hasn’t been able to keep pace with technology due to funding issues. “We have faculty using outdated computers,” Russell said. “We do have some new technology in classrooms, but it’s not always compatible with the older computers.”
This inability to keep pace with enrollment growth directly impacts students in other ways. “We’ve always been proud that we can offer students smaller class sizes and the opportunity to meet with their professors one on one,” she said.“Now, we have trouble meeting those quality standards.”
Still, faculty and staff continue to work as a team, “even though we seem to be working on top of each other,” to provide the best possible service to students, Russell said.