Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 28, 1993 TAG: 9310280339
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LARRY HINCKER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Lost in the news series on higher education carried by the Roanoke Times & World-News and three other Virginia papers (Sept. 12-16, "A college education at what cost?") was clarity and discussion of the fundamental problems.
Consider a basic cause for pain - tuition. The cost of higher education has not been rising. Factoring in inflation, university instructional budgets are essentially flat, but state support has dropped by $413 million over the past two years. Tuitions rose to fill the gap (but only partially). It's that simple.
Not so simple is the reason for the increase. State revenues, while rising, are not going up fast enough to keep pace with the voracious appetite of other programs such as Medicaid, public schools and prisons. To pay for those increases, the state has elected to scale back support for colleges.
Virginia has one of the most highly respected systems of colleges and universities in the nation. Students from around the world beat a path to learn on our campuses. We must be doing something right.
We must admit, though, that this system will not survive as we know it with continued battering at the budget table. The state must soon come to grips with several key public-policy questions:
What is the right level of support for students? Do we want to be 43rd in the nation in terms of per-student appropriations? Do we want to be in the top 10 for average tuition? Obviously, those two statistics are more than related; one is directly dependent on the other.
Put another way, do we want to appropriate less than 10 percent of the state budget to higher education, while North Carolina appropriates 18 percent? Will we continue to watch new job opportunities crop up south of the border while we eviscerate our universities - the engines of information-age jobs?
And how about the hatchet job done on professors in the series? The treatment of Virginia Tech's Dr. Neal Castagnoli is but one example of the shallow, anecdotal reporting. The portrayal was inaccurate and totally misrepresented the truth.
Castagnoli was hired on a research contract, not instruction, and half of that is paid with private endowment funds for the purpose of research on brain- disorder diseases. Yet, because he feels so strongly about teaching, he has taught a sophomore course in organic chemistry, with about 200 students, every year except the semester referenced in the reporter's story.
In this case, the university is essentially getting his teaching for free! Yet somehow, the reporter twisted the truth, making it look as if this professor is dipping into the public trough.
Furthermore, and contrary to the story, Castagnoli did teach several classes as a guest lecturer during the semester. He also was responsible for three dissertations of graduate students and had four independent-study undergraduates under this tutelage.
This latter point demonstrates the difficulty of simplistically portraying a faculty member's teaching load by number of courses taught. Indeed, weighted student credit hours or student or faculty contact hours are better indices of total workload and are the criteria research universities use to examine faculty loads.
Depending on the formula assumptions used to estimate faculty contact hours with students (the considerations for thesis supervision, graduate instruction, laboratories, etc.), the class-equivalent load of Virginia Tech professors is 2.4 to 3 classes per semester. Of course, they are expected to do research and public service in addition to that.
It is deceptive and disingenuous to imply that all colleges must have equal teaching loads. Why have a Penn State if it mirrors Slippery Rock College? Different institutions have different missions. The research and doctoral universities, by their nature, have responsibilities in addition to undergraduate instruction. The real question here is how many universities with a multipurpose mission can Virginia support?
Although there were no facts to support it in the story about university budgets, the reader is left feeling that somehow universities are surfeited with bloated administrations. Fact: Virginia's colleges and universities are educating more students today with less funds (in adjusted dollars) than in 1988.
At Tech, only 33 percent of the instructional-division budget is for administrative operations - less than any other doctoral university in Virginia. Even after factoring in tuition increases, Virginia Tech's budget is $26 million less than in 1989, and is operating with 252 fewer positions. Virginia Tech's purchasing power is 10 percent less now than four years ago, but enrollment is up by 1,300 students. That's productivity.
I am not sure what to think about the story on fund-raising. Should colleges feel guilty for filling in where the state left off? For looking for that added margin of excellence? Private funds are dominantly used for supporting professorships and scholarships. More importantly, it is usually private money (not state) generating more private money. The best-run charities in the country would like to have a cost structure like Virginia Tech's. For every dollar spent, we raise an additional $10. Only the Salvation Army claims such efficiency.
It is unfortunate the newspaper series on higher education could not have been more objective. College costs are probably the consumer issue of the '90s. And for good reason. Never before has college been in such demand and never before has its product - the ability to cope in a knowledge-based economy - been more necessary.
The 300,000 students currently enrolled in Virginia colleges, their parents and the thousands of students to follow deserve a more reasoned discourse on the problems facing our state and how we fund our institutions
\ Larry Hincker is director of university relations at Virginia Tech.
by CNB