State Colleges Cut Staff, Programs as Budgets Slashed

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:32:00 GMT

Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University who seven years ago promised to make ASU “The New American University” and to grow the school’s enrollment to 100,000 students by 2020, could see his plans go unfulfilled because of state budget cuts, reports The New York Times (“State Colleges Also Face Cuts in Ambitions,” March 17, 2009).

Since last June, ASU has lost $88 million in state funding, which amounts to 18 percent of the university’s base budget.

“The New American University has died; welcome to the Neutered American University,” the Arizona school’s student newspaper editorialized last month after ASU announced it would be eliminating more than 500 jobs, closing 48 programs and requiring remaining employees to take 10 to 15 days of unpaid leave this spring.

While ASU students said they believe school president Michael Crow is doing his best to protect them from further funding cuts, they also said the state’s budget cuts will negatively affect the quality of their education.

ASU Not Alone, Colleges Struggling Nationwide

Public colleges across the country are experiencing layoffs, salary freezes, and even enrollment reductions as they grapple with shrinking state funding in the current recession.

The University of Florida recently eliminated 430 faculty and staff positions, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, recently laid off around 100 employees, and the University of Vermont has eliminated 16 positions, left 22 faculty positions vacant, and frozen the salaries of certain staff, The New York Times reports.

And California’s higher education system, which serves 3.3 million students — nearly 20 percent of college student nationwide — is among the nation’s college systems hardest hit by this recession. Both the University of California system and the California State University system have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding and have been forced to shrink their enrollment numbers.

“What’s happening, everywhere, is what’s happening to Michael Crow,” said Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability, an organization that studies college spending. “The trend line is states disinvesting in higher education.”

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Higher Education Act Likely to Hold Colleges More Accountable for their Spending

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:53:00 GMT

Once Congress negotiates the latest reauthorization terms of the Higher Education Act, colleges will likely be required to report to the federal government on at least 300 new topics including tuition increases, transfer-of-credit policies, and file sharing, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Colleges Must Prepare for New Wave of Federal Oversight, Speaker Warns,” May 26, 2008).

The changes to the act mean colleges will have to steel themselves for a new era of intensive federal oversight, said Judith Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

Eaton made her remarks during an address in May at the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research, a 4,200 member organization of institutional research professionals — the people who will most likely compile and report colleges’ data to Washington.

While she expressed regret that the act’s new requirements for colleges and universities would transform the traditional relationships among schools, accreditors, and federal regulators, Eaton said she understood the public’s anxieties about college spending and affordability that have given rise to the new federal role.

“We ought to be accountable when we’re spending a hundred billion dollars or so in federal money,” she said. “We do have obligations here.”

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Student Loan Blog : college spending

State Colleges Cut Staff, Programs as Budgets Slashed

Higher Education Act Likely to Hold Colleges More Accountable for their Spending