Faculty Coalition at Work in Sacramento

As the budget battle grinds on in the state capital, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) has been advocating on behalf of system faculty. In February, CUCFA weighed in on a proposal to alter UC governance. In a letter to legislators from Joe Kiskis (UC Davis), CUCFA noted

While some actions of the Regents and the UC administration generate criticism with which we concur, we do not believe that the UC governance structure itself is fundamentally flawed. The University’s long term goals of access, affordability, and excellence are well served by an independent, diverse Board of Regents that can represent the perspectives of the citizens of California, promote the beneficial, enduring values of the creation and dissemination of knowledge, and moderate the interaction of a public university with the political process.

The letter advocated a more open process for choosing Regents, the letter noted that a university under legislative control would be overly subject to short-term political pressures that would undermine the university’s mission.

On March 5th, about 150 faculty, staff, and students from across the system participated in a Reclaim California’s Higher Education lobby day at the capital. They visited more than 40 legislators and staff and held a rally outside the capital building.

A calendar of upcoming actions, meetings, and events is available on the Keep California’ Promise website.

Jerry Brown Suggests Master Plan is Dated

Our previous post covered the Jan. 22 meeting of the Regents’ Committee on Educational Policy. As noted, there was discussion of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, considered a major accomplishment of Brown’s father when he was governor.

Below is a link to Brown’s comments in which he suggested the Plan was now dated.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RmjI4gVync?feature=player_detailpage]

Listen to Part of the Regents Afternoon Session of 1-22-2014

As we have noted in numerous prior posts, the Regents refuse to archive their meetings beyond one year. So we dutifully record the sessions in real time. Below is a link to part of the afternoon session of Jan. 22. This segment is mainly the Committee on Educational Policy. Gov. Brown was in attendance. We will separately (later) provide links just to certain Brown segments. But for now, we provide a continuous recording.

There was discussion of designating certain areas of UC-Merced as nature reserves, followed by discussion of a new telescope. The discussion then turned to online ed and the governor seemed to push for courses that involved no human interaction so that there could be unlimited enrollment. At a later point, Chancellor Block made a comment about the virtue of “residential” education which seemed aimed at the governor’s online push. He talked about a digital divide in which better off students would have traditional in-person classes and poor students would have mainly online offerings. There was discussion of the old Master Plan. Heads of the three segments in the Plan – UC, CSU, and the community colleges – were part of the discussion. Brown indicated that the Master Plan was a political compromise of an earlier era and that it needed to be questioned as to today’s needs.

The president of the UC Students Assn. spoke in support of a larger state budget allocation than the governor was proposing, an oil tax to fund education, divestment from fossil fuels, and other items.

You can hear this portion of the afternoon session at the link below:

The Resurrection?

[More in our Regents coverage. See earlier posts.] The Regents spent some time on the old Master Plan for Higher Ed. There was discussion, according to news reports, among representatives of UC, CSU, and the community colleges on better coordination.

…“This report shines an important light on the need to have a central body whose sole focus is guiding the Legislature, governor and our three higher education segments as we plan and build for the future,” (Assembly speaker John Pérez) said.

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-college-reports-20140123,0,5215408.story

Um, does no one remember CPEC, which still exists in ghostly form as a website (see screenshot above), after the legislature cut its budget to zero? It was supposed to be the coordinator. So will it be revived?

It’s really not so hard to recall such things!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2iIUcUL71s?feature=player_detailpage]

Four!

In contrast to the silence the greeted the Little Hoover report on higher ed (see the previous post on this blog), a possible effort pushing for California community colleges to become four-year institutions got some attention.

From the LA Times:

California’s community college system is considering a controversial effort to offer four-year degrees, a move designed to boost the number of students who graduate and are more prepared for the workforce. The change would require legislation authorizing junior colleges to grant baccalaureate degrees. Colleges would also need to seek additional accreditation as baccalaureate-granting institutions. Supporters argue that it would help to address shortages in workforce training and benefit students in rural areas without access to a four-year university. But critics, including some community college faculty and officials from four-year universities, counter that it would represent a dramatic shift from the traditional mission of the two-year system. They point to the state’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which designated community colleges as open-for-all campuses for career and transfer students. The four-year universities were to focus on research and higher degrees…

Cal State and UC officials said maintaining their respective roles is the best way to serve students…

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/le-me-college-degrees-20131015,0,3511251.story

Four is an enticing number:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwklMgTGfYM?feature=player_detailpage]

Little Hoover’s Report

Little (Herbert) Hoover

The state’s Little Hoover Commission issued a report yesterday on public higher ed in California. Although the Sacramento Bee mentioned on Monday that such a report would come out on Tuesday, I could find no reference to it in today’s Bee. I looked on the LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle websites. (In all three, after seeing no articles, I searched their websites using such terms as “Little Hoover” without finding anything.) It’s a philosophical question whether a tree falling in a forest makes a noise if no one hears it. It’s less philosophical in this case. Maybe, just maybe, no one was impressed.

The report has the now-standard online course fixation. So no surprises there. The idea that California needs a new Master Plan is not a shocker either.

From a UC perspective, if you look at the press release from the Commission or its recommendations, there is one word that gets little attention: “research.” Did the Commission not know that only one out of ten dollars in the UC budget, primarily for core teaching, comes from the state? Did it not wonder what the other nine dollars were for? The main interest in research in the report is that it could create revenue for UC through patent royalties. Did theCommission really consider whether any of its recommendations might have repercussions on the research function? Or on hospitals run by UC?

Here is the press release from the Commission. Below that are the Commission’s ten recommendations. And below that is a link to the report.

========

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 14, 2013

For Additional Information Contact:

Stuart Drown

Executive Director

(916) 445-2125

Commission Calls for New Master Plan

In a study released today, “A New Plan for a New Economy: Reimagining Higher Education,” the Little Hoover Commission calls for a new master plan for higher education that addresses both the state’s need to substantially increase the number of graduates and the reality that state resources are limited.

Though the state was well – served by the 1960 Master Plan, substantial changes in California, together with new opportunities , warrant a rethinking of the state’s strategy for higher education, one that looks at what best serves students and the state as a whole. “

The Master Plan is dead and probably has been for a long time. California’s future depends on a new, transformative Master Plan that will be smart enough to take us through the next 50 years,” Commission Chair Jonathan Shapiro said. The Great Recession forced state government to slash spending for public higher education and for public colleges and universities to turn away California students. California is recovering, but it must change its model for higher education if it hopes to meet the needs of a growing population and provide workers with the skills to compete in the world of the 21^st century.

The Commission found that that the state lacks a strategy for achieving statewide goals for higher education. It urges California’s leaders to start the public discussion about how to change the state’s higher education system to meet the state’s current and future civic and workforce needs with the finite financial resources it has. The Commission found that online education has enormous potential to expand the reach of public higher education, if used in a manner that benefits students.

California’s colleges and universities already are using online courses, though they have yet to aggressively engage online education in ways that could help more students complete their programs on time and transfer course credits between systems. This is an area in which California higher education institutions, so long recognized as national leaders, should be setting the standard.

The Commission encourages the Legislature to provide incentives for developing online courses, particularly for high-demand and bottleneck courses, that would be awarded credit system – wide and, ideally, across all three segments.

The Little Hoover Commission is a bipartisan and independent state agency charged with recommending ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of state programs. The Commission’s recommendations are submitted to the Governor and the Legislature for their consideration and action.

========

Recommendations from report:

Recommendation 1: The Governor and the Legislature should direct the development of a New Master Plan for California Higher Education. The New Master Plan should lay out goals and a public agenda for higher education aimed at the needs of students and the needs of the state as a whole to increase the number of Californians with higher education.
Recommendation 2: The Governor and the Legislature, in drafting the New Master Plan, should draw from students, alumni, civic organizations, local governments and business and economic development groups, as well as from the higher education institutions themselves.
Recommendation 3: The Governor and Legislature should encourage the drafters to think responsibly about how higher education is structured, and through the New Master Plan process, re-examine the rationale for how the three-tier system is currently organized and to explore greater campus-level specialization in all segments.
Recommendation 4: To encourage enrollment in higher education, improve higher education completion and reduce costs of remedial courses, the Legislature should provide incentives for districts and colleges to collaborate and expand counseling and outreach to middle schools and high schools in areas that have both state college campuses and community college districts.
Recommendation 5: Link a portion of funding to progress in achieving targeted goals.
Recommendation 6: The Governor and the Legislature should create an oversight body with the authority, or give the Department of Finance the authority, to obtain financial, workload and outcomes data from all institutions of California public higher education and require coordination among segments on data collection and transfer policies.
Recommendation 7: To improve transparency and public understanding of how its resources are used, the University of California should standardize its budgeting systems across campuses as well as standardize its measures for faculty workload and educational outcomes and post this data in a form that can be assessed and analyzed by the public.
Recommendation 8: The Legislature should provide incentives for developing high-demand introductory courses and bottleneck courses, such as prerequisite courses, that can be transferred for both content and unit credit to all campuses at all three segments of California’s public higher education system.
Recommendation 9: The Legislature should provide incentives for developing online courses for high-demand introductory courses, bottleneck prerequisite courses and remedial courses that demonstrate effective learning. To qualify, the course must be able to be awarded course and unit credit, at a minimum, at all California community colleges, or all California state universities, or all campuses of the University of California. Better yet would be courses that would be awarded credit at any campuses of all three segments. Courses could be designed by private or nonprofit entities according to college and university criteria.
Recommendation 10: The Legislature should develop incentives for the creation of a student-focused Internet portal that aggregates individual student records into master transcripts of classes they have taken at different institutions. The Legislature should require that sufficient privacy measures be incorporated into the portal and that California’s higher education institutions cooperate in the release of individual student data.

The full report is at http://www.lhc.ca.gov/studies/218/Report%20218.pdf.

Just Four Years? How about Eight?

Everyone wants more years!

From Inside Higher Ed today comes this story about changing the Master Plan:

Community colleges in a growing number of states are offering bachelor’s degrees. Now California and its huge two-year system may join that group. A committee created by Brice Harris, the system’s chancellor, quietly began meeting last month to mull whether the state’s 112 community colleges should be granted the authority to offer four-year degrees…

Full story at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/27/two-year-colleges-california-mull-bachelors-degrees

Four? Eight? Just more:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RosYCAUN2TA?feature=player_detailpage]

Boulware at the Regents?

Lemuel Ricketts Boulware

Today is May Day – often viewed as a labor holiday. That happenstance brings to mind the role the governor has been playing as an ex officio regent.

Governor Brown likes to show his scope of knowledge through quotations, Latin phrases, and historical references. Earlier this year, when asked about his collective bargaining policy with state unions, he referred to “Boulwarism” as something that he wouldn’t want to do.

So what is Boulwarism? Lemuel Ricketts Boulware was General Electric’s chief bargainer with its unions in the 1950s and early 1960s. He developed a take-it-or-leave-it style of negotiating, basically putting forward the firm’s position, indicating that the position was based on what the firm had determined was correct, and not moving.

Governor Brown has yet to eschew Boulwarism, however, when it comes to higher ed and more specifically the UC budget. His January budget, for example, proposed $10 million earmarked for online education. Although the May revise has yet to appear, the usual leaking process indicates that it will have various targets on which funds will be contingent.

The problem with this approach is that – even apart from the merits of the particular targets – it is piecemeal. As we have pointed out frequently on this blog, in recent years, roughly one out of ten dollars in the UC budget comes from the state. That tenth is more or less matched by tuition. So eight of ten dollars represents activities other than core teaching and degree production. All of that “other” activity is left out of the equation even though it is linked in complicated ways to the core.

As we have pointed out, the old Master Plan of 1960, ultimately proctored into law by the governor’s dad, provides a better model for developing state higher ed policy and, more particularly, the fiscal relationship between the state and UC. Both the governor and the legislature see only a small piece of the larger world of higher ed, especially at UC where so much activity is not state-funded. A process such as that which produced the Master Plan is what is needed now. If the governor follows his current practice, he is likely to attend the Regents meeting in mid-May. Will any Regents point out the need for a larger and systematic review? Or will we continue to focus on the fad of the moment at budget time?

Here is the governor on Boulwarism:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOZ28d-z7Hw?feature=player_detailpage]

NASBO

Are you against efficiency? Of course not! Do you think goals should be achieved? Of course you do! Do you think higher ed could be improved if it became more efficient and achieved its goals? So far, you totally agree.

The National Assn. of State Budget Officers (NASBO) has issued a report on public higher ed, a system which nationally, as well as in California, is under budgetary strain. I don’t know for sure how much circulation the report got pre-publication. I suspect, however, it reflects the general scuttlebutt among budgetary types that evolved in the aftermath of the Great Recession. You see similar ideas coming from the Legislative Analyst here in California, for example.

But there is a problem with the report once you get beyond the motherhood-and-apple-pie stuff. There is lots of Good Government lingo – performance metrics, etc. But when you take all of higher ed together – from community colleges to research universities everywhere in the U.S. – the one common element is that all institutions have students who (hopefully) get degrees. So the metrics end up focusing on dollars/student, degree completion rates, etc.

For high-quality research universities, however, more goes on than degree production. At UC, roughly one dollar out of ten in the budget is coming from the state. That dollar is roughly matched by tuition (some of which is paid by out-of-state students). So what happens to the activities that are reflected in the other eight dollars if you focus only on the state dollars/degree type “metric”? At UCLA, we could run the place as Cal State Westwood or Westwood Community College and undoubtedly improve the dollars/student metric. Is that what the state wants? Does the state know what it wants?

The report also tends to have a silo approach, isolating “cost drivers” without looking at interrelationships. That tendency is notable when it comes to compensation. Benefits are rising in cost relative to cash pay, the report notes. So cut benefits! But wait. If you cut benefits wouldn’t you have to raise other pay? Or can you just cut total compensation (cash pay + benefits) without any consequences?

Similarly, the report suggests that undergrads’ tuition cross-subsidizes grad students. Let’s assume that is true. If you cut undergrad tuition to marginal cost, what happens to grad student education? Can you have a research university without subsidized grad students? That is the kind of question the silo approach can’t address.

As this blog has noted many times, there are indeed issues about cost and efficiency at UC. We have pointed out the problem with the limited ability of the regents to review and evaluate capital projects. There are really big bucks involved there, but not the dollars that get directly into dollars/student metrics.

What needs to happen is not magical thinking about “delivery systems” (a.k.a. online higher ed) and metrics but for something like the old 1960 Master Plan review. At that time, UC president Clark Kerr directed that review and presented the Plan to the then-governor, Jerry Brown’s dad. We are about to bring in a new UC president. Whoever is ultimately selected should be someone capable of doing what Kerr did including persuading the governor that a new Master Plan is what is needed. That’s the metric the regents in making the selection should be using.

The NASBO report is at http://www.nasbo.org/sites/default/files/pdf/Improving%20Postsecondary%20Education%20Through%20the%20Budget%20Process-Challenges%20and%20Opportunities.pdf

Grading the LAO Report on Higher Ed

We summarized the Legislative Analyst’s report on higher ed funding in a post yesterday and provided a link to the document. One thing that faculty do is evaluate and give grades. In this case, the grade for the report would have to be an “incomplete.”

Pensions: The LAO continues its assertion that the state has no legal liability for the UC pension. It wants the legislature to say so. The legislature can say the Moon is made of green cheese if it wants. But the Moon will be what it is. The question of state liability is a legal matter and no legal analysis is provided. It is a legal matter that extends beyond the state into the federal constitution. If the LAO wants to be serious about this issue, it could start with the history of the UC pension written by the UCLA Faculty Association’s Executive Director, Susan Gallick, and then get some outside legal advice from constitutional experts. As the governor and the legislature continue to discover about the state prisons, it is the courts that ultimately decide issues of constitutionality, regardless of state pronouncements.

What is odd is that after its assertion of no liability, the LAO goes on to say that someone is going to have to fund the pension and says the legislature should do so. It suggests that the UC pension should be compared to the recent state pension enactment for other public pensions and then the legislature should pay in some sense what the others get. UC’s pension was omitted from the pension bill because the legislature and governor were persuaded that the pension changes enacted by the Regents in 2010 approximated what was later proposed for other public pensions. What the cost implications are will vary from plan to plan, even with the same provisions.

Costs. In loose terms, UC and CSU get comparable amounts from the state. But UC has fewer students so the dollars/student ratio is going to be higher – which is what you expect in a research university. There is little analysis in the report of what California gains by having a research university. There is no analysis of what other states such as Michigan and Virginia have done once they concluded that they couldn’t afford, or didn’t want to afford, a research university.

Pay for Performance. As personnel directors can tell you, this is a slogan – maybe even a concept – but specifics are needed as to how you do it. Is this year’s budget going to be based on a formula? Transfers – dropouts + course loads + completion in Y years = X? What? Personnel directors can also tell you that you can get perverse results. Quantity over quality is a prime example, but only one.

Capital Costs. There is concern in the report about the handling of capital costs but the concern seems to be confined to state-paid capital costs. At UC, as we have noted repeatedly on this blog, the Regents – members of a part-time unpaid board – are routinely asked to approve large and expensive capital projects which are said to be paid for from future revenues. But the Regents have no independent capability to review such projects or to follow up on whether the promised revenues actually materialized. If the revenues prove inadequate, like the pension, somehow the deficiency will be paid; the campuses don’t default. The issue of Regental oversight and governance needed to be discussed regarding all capital projects, not just state-paid.

==
The rule at UCLA is that if you get an incomplete, you have one quarter to finish the work or the grade goes from incomplete to F. There is an out from that rule in this case, however. LAO can join us in what we have recommended in prior posts. It is clear that we have arrived at a point in California where a new Master Plan needs to be developed to deal with the issues above and others. To get there, we need to set up a review of the three segments – a process in other words rather than off-the-cuff “solutions” from the governor, the LAO, or anyone else. The annual budget cycle doesn’t work when a fundamental review is needed. It was done before under Pat Brown and it can be done again.
==
Of course, we’ll have to wait. A process takes awhile to complete. But in the meantime, we have just the selection to go with an incomplete report:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ySpn8E-dAE?feature=player_detailpage]