Cal States ponder a leaner future
Lauren Mendoza | 12-17-2009 | Comments |
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The California State University system is busting at the seams as budget cuts force the 23 campuses across the state to sacrifice not only curriculum and staff, but the number of students it serves. For some experts, the light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t offer much hope: Some campuses expect a range of services will never be restored.
The post-recession impact is a hidden worry at Cal State campuses, now facing the immediate problem of finding space for students. Facing $584 million in budget cuts for the 2009-2010 academic year, thousands of instructors have been laid off, classes have been eliminated and students are simply being turned away.
“The tools and options that we have are not good, but they’re the only ones we have,” said CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed in a recent video post on the CSU website. "I’ve never seen a massive reduction come so fast in the 40 years that I've been doing this business. It’s nothing short of a mega melt down financially."
Managing the sprawling Cal State system in the best of times is like piloting a ship through the ocean. “It doesn’t turn on a dime,” said Erik Fallis, spokesman for the CSU chancellor’s office in Long Beach. In the worst of times, the task is more difficult.
“When we make these large decisions that we’ve had to make because of the unprecedented drop in state support, it does have a long-term impact on our mission overall,” said Fallis. “Everything depends on how quickly California begins to renew its support for public higher education.”
But the million-dollar question for the CSU system is how much more is this budget crisis going to cost to restore lost services? How long will the ripple effect of this recession be felt on campuses?
Individuals in the thick of the budget crisis all have their opinions of what should be done to return what was taken from their campuses and students. Restoring programs and services eliminated by budget will cost the state roughly $1 billion to restore, almost twice the size of the budget cuts, because of inflation, even at modest rates, said David Dowell, Vice Provost of Cal State-Long Beach.
In the meantime, all campuses can do is to continue adjusting for the losses they've already incurred and continue brainstorming for, what they consider, is a future no better than the present.
“Holding students hostage”
For many universities, such as the California State University at Northridge, they’ve had to compensate for the budget cuts by cutting student enrollment.
“We’ve lowered enrollment by 6 percent this year, and then we’ll have to drop another 10 percent next year,” said Harold Hellenbrand, CSUN provost. “We also cut the summer session in half. So we did a lot of things to limit the enrollment.”
Cuts were the result of a series of bad decisions, possibly made from good intensions, but ultimately made without thinking the consequences through, Hellenbrand said.
“It’s difficult because the decision to drop enrollment is a completely political decision to force the legislature to provide the system with more money,” he said. “So essentially we’re holding students hostage."
Hellenbrand explained the ripple effects of the budget cuts, first on students and then services and personnel: “When you have fewer students, somebody forgot to calculate that you get fewer fees; when you get fewer fees, you hire fewer people to teach…and you being to spin down a drain.”
Hellenbrand also said he the current recession is shutting students out and putting up more barriers for some to attend college.
“What we’re doing now is shutting people out to try and get more money from the state,” he said. “Or we can try and get more students in and raise fees. I prefer to do the latter because relying on the state to meet the financial needs is proving to be a bad idea.”
The answer to restoring resources that were lost is funding outside the state, Hellenbrand said.
“If we continue to rely on the state, it will take a long time to restore services,” he said. “There is planning going on for the future, but it will go nowhere if we don’t find funding outside of the state. It just
depends on how stubborn we are.”
This outside funding can be fund-raising, grant-getting or even charging for clinical services the university provides to the public, Hellenbrand said in his 2008 essay: Reflections In A Bloodshot Eye: Budget, CSU, CSUN.
“We need to think outside the box of state subsidy,” Hellenbrand said in his essay. “We in CSUN and the CSU can control our destiny by controlling our funding.”
Retracting campus resources
California State University at Los Angeles decided to counter the sour economy with cuts in its staff and class offerings.
“The division of academic affairs’ budget, which deals with scheduling of course for students, was cut and that resulted in significant reductions in the number of sections we’re allowed to offer this year,” said Kevin Baaske, past chair of the California State University of Los Angeles academic senate. “[This budget] also pays for faculty salaries and pays to hire lecturer to teach classes so we can offer more classes.”
As a result, Baaske said students are not only struggling to find a spot in the university but even a seat in classes.
“Students have encountered a lot of closed classes and struggled to find an appropriate course load in the classes they needed to make a timely process to graduation,” he said. “When you have such significant cuts to your operating budget you have to reduce the number of offerings you can make because there is simply no money and that is very disappointing.”
And next year is only going to get worse, Baaske explained.
“We expect there will be additional budget cuts, maybe even additional budget cuts this winter,” he said.
However, even as Cal State-LA struggles to make adjustments, Baaske said the university was still able to serves as many students as possible. But how long can universities continue to effectively function on just enough?
“We have accommodated more students than the state has given us money to teach and I don’t think it has damaged the education students are getting. But it threatens to damage the education students are getting,” he said. “The state simply needs to decide what kind of education its citizens should get.”
Since 2001, Baaske claims, all together, nearly $1 billion worth of cuts have been imposed on the CSU system, and although some of that has been made up with student fee increases, there is much more funding that needs to be restored.
“I believe the state of California needs to restore nearly $1 billion to higher education in the CSU,” he said. “And that sounds like a hell of a lot of money, and it is, but when you’re talking about a $200 billion budget it’s not a lot.”
Baaske fears if something is not done to restore these lost services, not only will the California State University system suffer, but inevitably so will the California economy.
“It’s a downhill spiral,” he said. “Cuts now, weaken the economy later, which means there will have to be additional cuts in the future, which will weaken the economy in the future and it just continues to spiral down.”
But a major problem, in Baaske’s opinion, is that it’s difficult to move from different funding models, such as outside funding from the state. So as of now, the only option is to construct a model that relies heavily on student fees.
“It’s a revenue stream that the CSU has gone to,” he said. “But we need to recognize that it’s a change in the commitment and promise that California made to its citizens [of affordable higher education]. Then it becomes a question of access to the institution as well as support for the institution.”
Short-term solutions
Some schools, like California State University at Long Beach, were able to manage the damage a little better than others. “We had a reasonably normal fall opening unlike some of our sister campuses who had massive class cancellations in the week before classes,” said Vice Provost David Dowell.
Long Beach was also able to dodge cuts to their faculty by implementing furloughs, which according to Dowell are worth about $20 million this year.
“All faculty, staff and administrators are on 10 percent furlough so they’ll be taking days off during the year without pay, so essentially it’s a 10 percent pay cut,” he said. “But furloughs are temporary, so we have a problem next year.”
But like all the other California State Universities, the $49 million budget cut to each individual campuses was a huge blow to their basic functioning.
“That’s 25 percent of our budget,” Dowell said. “And [without that funding] it’s just not possible to serve the same number of students.”
Short-term solutions at Cal State-Long Beach steadied the campus this academic year, but next year is expected to be more challenging. “For next year we’re looking at what we think is a worse situation,” Dowell said. “A lot of what we did to hold the university together this year was based on temporary solutions like the furloughs. “So with those temporary solutions expiring next year will be more challenging.”
Recession’s long-term impact
“[Education] has been the engine of the California economy for decades,” said Dowell. “To me that makes a lot of sense that higher education is an investment in the state’s interest [seeing as how] education returns $4 to 5 dollars to the economy for every $1 you invest in it.”
However, unlike Northridge who believes that outside funding will be the answer to the million-dollar question, Long Beach officials are hopeful that the state will pull through.
“We’re not quick to turn our backs and just say ‘to heck with the state.’ I really think historically the state of California has been very supportive of higher education,” Dowell said. “The traditional CSU mission of providing access to quality education at an afford price is a very important mission to the state and we’re hoping to hang on to that, but we just have to see how it plays out.”
And when the recession does start to turn around, Dowell said Long Beach will be ready to proceed with future plans.
“As we respond to the crisis that we’re in right now, we are very mindful of the fact that we will be recovering eventually and we will be wanting to move on,” he said.
Cynical critics
But experts at CSUN, Cal State LA and Cal State Long Beach are all skeptical of the Cal State system’s recovery in the near future. "It'll probably take two to three years for an economic recovery to really translate back into [universities]," said Dowell.
"I'm very concerned and pessimistic about this year and the coming year," said Baaske of Cal State-LA.
"[Our] political decisions have failed that last two years and will probably fail next year," said CSUN’s Hellenbrand.
Ultimately, Dowell said, the real story is the students that are being affected by the economy and its impact on the California State University system. “[It’s] about the 2,000 students who don’t get to go to college because we didn’t let them in, because they didn’t have any other choices or because the other CSUs and UCs were doing the same thing.”
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