ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9609040041
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Geoff Seamans
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS ASSOCIATE EDITOR
MY DESK is a magnet for stuff like "For Every Dollar ... the economic impact of public universities," recently published by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. True confession: I didn't attack the publication with the same relish - OK, make that coleslaw - that I might dig into, say, a platter of barbecue, North Carolina-style.
But I eventually got around to it. And when I did, I knew it wasn't barbecue, because I was struck less by what it contained than by what it didn't.
The document is a sort of report of reports, briefly summarizing a wide variety - in scope, sophistication, intended audience - of economic-impact studies put out by individual institutions.
So wide a variety, in fact, that my first conclusion (and, I gather, a conclusion of the association) was that somebody needs to come up with consistent yardsticks for measuring economic impact.
A second conclusion from flipping through "For Every Dollar": Higher education does well at stating the obvious - that big universities are big operations with big payrolls.
Consequently, they often are the lifeblood of local economies, and important components of regional economies.
According to a Virginia Tech study, for example, the Tech community - the university itself plus faculty, staff, students and visitors - each year spends about $425 million on goods and services in the New River and Roanoke valleys. About 30 percent of all employment in Montgomery County is the direct or indirect result of Tech's presence.
The repor, summarizes studies mainly at land-grant institutions like Tech that belong to the association. But other big public universities, like the one up in Charlottesville, no doubt would show similar economic-impact profiles. The impact of smaller universities, like Radford, is comparably less, of course, but still in the millions.
Higher education also seems reasonably effective at making the point that tax-dollar investment in colleges and universities can be used to leverage money from the pockets of private donors, and research grants from corporate and governmental sources.
A 1990 study, "For Every Dollar" notes, reported that Tech received $26.7 million in private giving, and that figure is dwarfed by fund raising since. Indeed, virtually every public university in the country now fishes for nonpublic dollars with an intensity once thought reserved for higher education's private sector.
Now all this is fine, and occasionally useful, information. It makes the point that a university can benefit mightily the economy of a local, circumscribed area. You can look at the size of the Tech payroll, for example, and get a pretty good idea that Blacksburg would be in the toilet if Tech were merged with UVa and moved to Charlottesville.
Trouble No. 1 is, you already knew that.
Trouble No. 2 is, much the same point could be made about prisons, or race tracks, or gambling casinos, or virtually any other facility that pulls more dollars into the community than are spent by that community's residents on the same activity elsewhere.
The task that higher education is performing less well is showing its value beyond just the net dollars pulled into communities where higher-education facilities happen to be located - that is, the economic impact deriving the nature of the higher-education business, and not simply its size.
"[L]ives ennobled by the arts, improvements to society made by people using what they've learned, current applications of a research breakthrough made ten years ago," says the introduction to "For Every Dollar," are examples of higher-education benefits "hard to measure in dollars and cents."
Maybe so. But it's a job that ought to be undertaken, if higher education is to make itself understood to the public and to the folks who decide what universities' appropriations are going to be.
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