Beebe set to tie college results to state funds
Posted on Saturday, May 12, 2007
FAYETTEVILLE — Gov. Mike Beebe put the state’s higher-education community on notice Friday that he wants to revamp the way colleges and universities are funded, rewarding the ones that retain more students and raise their graduate rates.
“I’m going to make some higher-education folks mad before this thing’s over,” Beebe said in a speech in Fayetteville, turning his gaze toward University of Arkansas Chancellor John White. “John, you just might as well get ready for it.”
A similar attempt failed to gain support in the recent legislative session — even with Beebe’s endorsement — after college and university presidents testified that the state’s relatively new funding method shouldn’t be thrown out yet.
On Friday, officials from some of the state’s largest institutions, including the UA, said they were receptive to the idea.
“We recognize that the formula needs to do something other than count people, which is what it does now,” Arkansas State University System President Les Wyatt said in an interview. “That’s probably led to competition among the institutions to recruit students, where our real competition ought to be trying to graduate them.”
At a meeting of the Political Animals Club of Northwest Arkansas, Beebe didn’t offer any clues as to how a new funding distribution should work, nor whether a small or large part of the higher-education budget should be linked to performance.
He told about 200 people that the state’s economic prosperity is tied to college graduation.
“Higher education is the engine that will drive the kind of economic activity that makes a difference between high-income jobs, good jobs and ordinary jobs,” he said.
He said the state does a pretty good job of sending kids to college, but “we’re at the bottom of the heap in graduating rates. We’re not retaining those children.”
According to the 2000 U. S. Census, Arkansas ranks 49 th in the nation in the percentage of adults 25 or older who have bachelor’s or higher degrees — with about 16. 7 percent, or 464, 118, degree recipients. Only West Virginia fared worse, with 14. 3 percent of its 25-and-older population holding baccalaureate degrees.
Graduation rates have risen in the past decade in Arkansas, but they still lag behind national averages.
Statewide, 77. 3 percent of first-time, full-time freshmen enrolled in the state’s 11 public universities in 2000 returned for their sophomore year. Only 46. 3 percent of those 10, 480 students went on to earn degrees by 2006, according to a recent report to the Arkansas Higher Education Coordinating Board.
Nationally, the six-year graduation rate is 56 percent.
Beebe pointed out in his speech that higher-education funding grew by 10 percent in the budget he proposed and the Legislature passed.
He said colleges and universities needed and deserved that extra money.
“But the accountability has to be there,” he said.
State funding for colleges and universities is set to go from $ 644 million in 2007 to $ 709 million in 2008. That would increase to $ 738 million in 2009.
More accountability is what state Sen. Dave Bisbee, R-Rogers, had in mind when he introduced Senate Bill 842 in the recent session. The bill would have deleted the current funding formula, which is just 2 years old and was the result of years of negotiation.
Arkansas college and university officials have been happy with that formula, which doles out state funds generally on the basis of the courses the institutions offer and whether the institutions conduct research. They get more money, for example, for teaching a masters-level engineering class than freshman English.
Bisbee’s bill wouldn’t have replaced that formula but would have required a new funding formula to be used in the next regular legislative session, in 2009. The new formula would have to take into account increases in graduation and retention rates as well as the percentage of courses students complete, and other factors.
Bisbee was in the audience during Beebe’s speech Friday.
“I was tickled to death that he raised the issue,” Bisbee said, “particularly in a college town.”
Beebe reassured the crowd that he wasn’t picking on White when he said he was gearing up to make university officials mad.
“It really doesn’t bother John. It was his idea,” the governor said.
Asked afterward if White and other university officials are onboard with his plan, Beebe said, “Well, they will be.”
White left shortly after the governor’s speech, but Richard Hudson, UA’s vice chancellor for government and community relations, said the school already has put a lot of energy and effort into improving accountability.
“We’ll probably be a beneficiary of any move in that direction,” Hudson said. UA has the state’s highest graduation rates.
He said the key will be finding consensus in the higher-education community.
“If you impose a plan that half oppose, then you’ve splintered the group and probably nothing will happen,” Hudson said.
Bisbee said he’s been frustrated over the years by just that.
“Everybody at budget hearings is all over higher ed, but just as you’ve got to do something, their chancellor calls and they just roll over. Their courage melts away,” he said of legislative colleagues.
Barbara Anderson, executive vice president of the University of Central Arkansas, wasn’t at Friday’s speech but said in an interview later that UCA will be onboard, as well.
Anderson remembers the last time Arkansas tried to incorporate performance-based measures into higher-education funding. She helped write the formula, which she said became a political nightmare, when she worked for the Department of Higher Education.
The difference now is there’s a lot better tracking of information to use in such a formula.
“I think we can go forward. I think the department is ready to do that,” she said.
Anderson spoke against SB 842 when it came up for debate in the Senate Education Committee in March. The bill never made it out of committee.
University officials are more amenable to Beebe’s plan because it’s better to study the issue without deleting the current system, Anderson said Friday.
Wyatt said ASU didn’t take a position on the recent legislation but backed a bill by Sen. Paul Bookout, D-Jonesboro, that asked for a subcommittee to review the funding distribution between now and the 2009 legislative session.
Beebe said after his speech that education is the key to luring employers to Arkansas.
“I can’t say it enough. Quality work force, educated work force is a prerequisite to the kinds of jobs we want,” Beebe said.
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