Panel snubs overhaul of university funding
BYLINE: BY LAURA KELLAMS ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
The Senate Education Committee rebuffed an attempt Thursday to overhaul the way Arkansas funds higher education, heeding warnings from university officials who said the state's relatively new method shouldn't be thrown out yet.
Sen. Dave Bisbee, R-Rogers, wants the Legislature to fund colleges and universities based on "outcomes" the state strives to improve, such as studentgraduation rates.
His Senate Bill 842 would have gotten rid of the highereducation funding formula adopted in 2005, which Bisbee himself sponsored, and called for the creation of a new method that would reward institutions for improvements in certain categories.
Gov. Mike Beebe endorsed Bisbee's bill, but representatives of the state's higher education community came out against it. Committee members generally agreed with Bisbee that Arkansas needs to do something different if it's going to rise above its 49th-in-the-nation ranking of adults with bachelor's degrees. But Bisbee didn't get the five votes required to move his bill to the Senate.
"The Legislature doesn't have the courage to do it, and that's why we've never done it," Bisbee said after the meeting.
After the meeting, opponents of the bill said they think some form of what Bisbee's looking for will be devised over the next couple of years, just not as drastic as SB842 proposed.
Sen. Gilbert Baker, R-Conway, said he thinks the Legislature will vote for changes in 2007 that would take graduation rates and student retention into account. But he said the bill included troublesome aspects, such as paying schools for students completing courses - possibly rewarding them when students get F's rather than dropping a class. Bisbee told the committee that the kinks could have been worked out over the next two years.
"The devil is in the detail, and the detail is not in this bill," he said. "There's been a lot of work over the last five years or six years, and we don't want to destroy all that work ... I'm not attempting to wipe any of that out. This is not an attempt to punish anybody." He said he envisions that the current formula could be the base of a new one that takes into account incentives for productivity.
But Barbara Anderson, executive vice president at University of Central Arkansas, said something similar failed a decade ago. She said she used to work for the Department of Higher Education and nearly got fired trying to work out a formula that took into account 16 measures of performance.
Former Gov. Jim Guy Tucker wanted money disbursed based on outcomes and not student enrollment, she said.
The Legislature adopted a new formula with a small amount of incentive funding in 1995, but it was impossible to come up with measures that didn't shortchange schools based on their particular missions, she said.
Only 2.5 percent of total state funding was disbursed that way, but it caused a huge rift, she said.
"Someone always felt like that they were being misjudged, inequitably funded, and it became very, very contentious. It became very, very political, and then it went away," she said.
The Legislature got rid of it in 1997.
She said the current needsbased formula took years to devise and needs to be fully funded to meet the outcomes that the Legislature wants.
It 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 said he gets "flustrated" - a pronunciation that committee members joked should go in the Bisbee vocabulary manual - that Arkansas' rankings in college graduates and per-capita income aren't going up.Committee Chairman Jim Argue, D-Little Rock, said he shares Bisbee's frustration after 16 years in the Legislature.
"This isn't a new problem... We haven't been very aggressive about finding a fix to that. We've been pretty satisfied in just perpetuating the status quo," he said.
B. Alan Sugg, president of the University of Arkansas System, told committee members that there have been improvements over the past decade.
From 1995 to 2005, college enrollment grew by 45 percent statewide, and the percentage of high school graduates going to college rose 15 percentage points to the national average.
He said the number of bachelor's degrees earned each year increased 24 percent over that decade, from 7,131 in 1995 to 8,843 in 2005.
He said he's proud of that, but he said one factor in the low percentage of college graduates in the state is that they may be leaving the state for better jobs.
Bisbee said the state's population grew during that period.
He said experts at the National Conference of State Legislatures told him that Arkansas is unique in the nation in having higher-than-average highschool-graduation numbers, high college-start rates and very low college-graduation rates.
"We've got to start somewhere. I guess my question to you is, are you asking us to be satisfied with the status quo?" he asked Sugg.
"No, no, no. I'm not," Sugg said.
"Are you opposed to us getting started?" Bisbee said.
Sugg said he's not, but the problem with the bill is that the current formula is deleted before a new one replaces it.
"It works well," he said.
After the meeting, Sugg said everyone seems to have the same goal of increasing graduation rates and retention.
"I think as we develop the formula for the next session, it will develop all of these goals," he said. "There can be some incentive built into the formula." Bisbee insisted that he's not "mad at higher ed" and that he thinks the state's colleges and universities are doing a good job.
"The fault lies with the Legislature. We've never told higher ed what we want," he said.
This article was published 03/16/2007