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Monday, November 15, 2010
Higher Ed Fixes Rely on Smarter Decisions
By David Dunaway And Les Field
UNM Professors
Your editorials make the important point that New Mexico's higher education dollars are spread way too thinly with seven four-year colleges and universities and 21 community colleges. For a population of 2 million, this is simply far too many campuses.
But any administrator or legislator looking to resolve this situation quickly by reducing the number of these institutions to concentrate our resources will not have an easy time of it.
Over the last quarter century, efforts to rationalize New Mexico's educational infrastructure have failed because local interests prevailed over state-wide planning. Arizona has far fewer colleges and universities than New Mexico, though its system educates four times as many students.
The University of New Mexico's peer schools have higher graduation rates, it's true. But according to the latest data, New Mexico's college students differ significantly from those at their peer institutions.
The semester at Virginia or Texas-Austin might begin with a well-prepared, enthusiastic freshman class, expecting to graduate in four years. But consider this: Nearly half of New Mexican college students take care of a dependent; half require remedial classes; most hold full-time jobs and thus finish studies at an older age.
Besides the challenging situation of our students, we have structural problems in allocating resources away from academics. Universities tend to have the same administrative structure whether they educate 27,000 students or a tenth of that, as in some of our campuses. At New Mexico's smaller universities there are departments of three or four people, bearing the administrative costs that go into running a department.
As most readers of this paper know, UNM's own administrative costs have skyrocketed.
Today the two new divisions added by the incoming President David Schmidly cost $8 million a year — almost as much as the cost of running the state's only law school! While promoting enrollment, equity and inclusion are great goals, we now have assistant and associate vice-presidents by the dozen. The president's office alone consumes $5 million annually.
This is not to make an ad hominem argument against UNM's president. As Max Weber and other social theorists have pointed out, institutions and their administration grow in a self-perpetuating fashion.
Teaching faculty are being asked to cut salaries by 3 percent or fire graduate students or staff. But considering that pay raises have already been suspended for two years; and that the attrition of faculty members ends up in the provost's office — rather than in the colleges and departments from which the faculty retired — all this suggests a UNM administration at least as interested in athletics as in academics.
UNM faculty have wondered aloud why current budget projections take more than $700,000 in instructional and general funds — the funds with which we teach our classes — to fund the Athletic Department. (That's more than twice as much as being spent on IT at UNM!)
If athletics departments and university foundations were self-supporting; if decisions about replacing retiring faculty were made at the departmental level, where the expertise is greatest; if the formula by which the state Legislature funds higher education were adjusted to prioritize research institutions — seed money that brings in funds external to New Mexico; and, the hardest, if we were to accept the fact that 10 percent of our colleges and universities would need to be phased out in favor of distance learning, classes held at local high schools and adult centers, etc., then New Mexico would really be getting smarter about higher education.
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