EDITORIAL: Griffin panelists ignore inconvenient truths of higher education
"Besides funding, what is wrong with it?"
Lou Glazer, President of Michigan Future Inc. said this of the Michigan higher education system Monday.
In response, the other members of the Griffin Policy forum panel were silent.
Just one week prior, however, the two professors who received national attention for their book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” were at Central Michigan University with a very different message.
Their famous study followed 2,341 students over two years from 2005 to 2007 in 24 diverse four-year colleges.
The professors found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in learning during the first two years of college. The authors expressed serious doubts about higher education's ability to prepare students for the current job market.
Jason Bentley, director of First Year Experience, conducted a similar study last year focusing only on CMU, and found it was no exception. CMU fell short in academic self-efficacy, academic integration, advanced academic behavior and self assessments of various skills, where it scored below a 5.5 on a seven-point scale.
How could the panelists disregard these inconvenient truths?
At one point, Don Gilmer, past chairman of Michigan House Appropriation and Higher Education Appropriation committees, stated CMU has problems with independent control, or autonomy. However, he was overpowered by the three other voices, who pushed for more autonomy, instead of less.
If CMU feels it should be run as a business, then it should be able to react to changes in funding resulting from the economy it exists in much more quickly. The university has known about these state cuts for at least 10 years, why wasn't a plan developed then instead of continually blaming the state while raising tuition?
Obviously, the university would like to have more government funding, but it has done little to demonstrate that they would use such funds to improve the quality of current undergraduate students' education.
In the instance of a funding cut, the university, like any other business, is forced to either increase revenue or cut costs. Over the past ten years the university has both raised tuition and embarked on costly vanity projects.
When the university does decide to cut spending and adopt a party line of fiscal conservatism, why does it have to come out in the form of no pay increase for faculty and staff.
There is a myriad of problems facing higher education, and CMU in particular, today. Funding is one of them, but many more seem to stem from the apparently just-realized problem that Michigan is facing an economic crisis and has been for the better part of a decade.
