This week, I would like to begin by suggesting where future
blog posts should take us. After reflecting
on this question, I concluded that a blog on the future of higher education should
go where a majority of America’s college students will be going to get their higher
education in the future.
It has been reported that some 75% of the college students in America today get their higher education in what has historically been called “public” higher education. That is the higher education sector where, primarily for reasons of lower cost, a majority of college students have been getting their higher education in the past, and that is where they can be expected to get their higher education in the future.
Here is a breakdown of the 2013 enrollment figures¹ from the National Center for Education Statistics:
Public 2-year institutions - 7.5 million
Private 2-year institutions - 0.5 million
Public 4-year institutions - 8.2 million
Private 4-year institutions - 5.6 million
Total - 21.8 million
In Pennsylvania, “public” higher education includes not just the public community colleges and the 14 PASSHE “state-owned” universities; it also includes four “state-related” universities—Penn State, Pitt, Temple and Lincoln—which are essentially “quasi-private” institutions that have agreed to help the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania achieve its educational goals, in exchange for some State appropriation.
It is well documented both in Pennsylvania and across America that what was historically known as “public” higher education has been rapidly transformed, over the last three decades, into something quite different but which, nevertheless quite confusingly, continues to be called by its former name.
The word public in the term “public higher education” made sense back when the institutions described by that term were still “highly-subsidized” by the State. In fact that’s what made them public—the fact that public, i.e., taxpayer funds, were used to subsidize the education that was offered to and received by the students who attended those institutions. Behind the entire idea of “public” universities was the idea that educating a State’s students was a public good that deserved to be funded with public dollars.
But in recent decades, as public funding has plummeted both in real terms and as a percent of total expenditures, the private dollars paid by students, parents and alumni donors have grown to replace the State dollars that are longer available. Nationally, almost half (47%) of the cost of “public” higher education is paid from the private checkbooks of students and parents. In Pennsylvania, it is now 75%!
Because I believe that if you don’t call something what it really is, you will almost certainly fail to do about it what needs to be done, I gave thought to what the proper name should be for “public” higher education in those increasingly common cases where the State is providing a minority (less than 50%) share of the annual funding. But as important as funding share is, it is only one of two critical factors. The second critical factor is “governance share,” defined as the percent share of the governance seats controlled by the different financial stakeholders. These definitions lead to three different labels for describing the three different types of higher education that actually exist in America today:
· Public Higher Education: State Funding Share > 50%; State Governance Share > 50%
·
State Related Higher Education: State Funding Share < 50%; State
Governance Share < 50%
·
Government Higher Education:
State Funding Share < 50%; State
Governance Share > 50%¹ http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372.
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