Another thoughtful piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education, forwarded to me by a Sierra College faculty member, about the dramatic changes in higher education that are being brought about by the forces of “fiscal gravity” per se.
The financial meltdown that has caused seismic upheavals in many other corners of the economy hasn’t changed much about how colleges operate.
College leaders may be thinking about new strategies for doing more with less, and a few are actually putting those new approaches into practice. But as the country passes the first year of a supposed New Normal, few signs of revolutionary change are apparent.
The absence of radical change is probably a measure of the resiliency of the higher-education sector, the cushion provided by federal stimulus funds, and the political difficulty of instituting swift changes at such complex and decentralized organizations.
“It’s tough to be out there by yourself,” notes Suzanne Walsh, senior program director at the Lumina Foundation for Education, which has been using its grants to encourage experiments on ways to educate students at lower cost.
It may also be a sign that the full effect of the economic fallout has yet to hit home on many campuses, a perception reflected in numerous interviews with anxious higher-education leaders and in the sobering findings of a new Chronicle survey. In the survey sent to chief finance officers at four-year colleges in September, 62 percent of the respondents said they did not think the worst of the financial pressures on their institutions had passed. Nearly two-thirds of them worry that 2010, 2011, or 2012 or later, will be even tougher.
“In some respects, people are doing what they should be doing in an economic downturn,” says Paul E. Lingenfelter, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers organization. They are aiming cuts at “soft spots” and protecting core academic programs and student aid. But as Mr. Lingenfelter and countless other observers of the sector note, even when the economy rebounds, the pressures on colleges will be greater and all the usual sources of support—states, donors, and students and their families—are likely to be less able to provide resources.
The challenge, says Mr. Lingenfelter, is for higher education’s leadership to recognize that aiming to get back to pre-crash levels of financing or educational effectiveness is not enough. “We come across to the public as totally insatiable and resistant to change,” he says. “We’ve got to improve productivity.”
At Sierra College, we’re very fortunate to have visionary and forward-thinking leadership. The college governance systems are pretty well consumed right now with stabilizing our budget situation, but we’ve already had this issue arise at the board and executive team levels, and I think we will need to soon start talking about how to foster this type of discussion among our faculty and staff.
Innovating the model of educational delivery — whether you’re talking a greater use of technology or just creating efficiencies in how we serve students — is something that this force of “fiscal gravity” will do to us, whether we like it or not.
Do you think revolutionary change is inevitable in education, or will the status quo win out? Use the comments below…I’m curious what you think!
