Tuesday’s story on the anticipated budget shortfall for Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences for the next budget year is unsettling if not completely surprising.
The loss could total between $4 million and $8 million for the academic year, Arts and Sciences Dean Larry Singell told reporter Michael Reschke. The entire budget is about $393 million, he said.
Short term, the revenue decline could mean a cap on faculty pay raises and a hiring freeze. Longer term, there might be reductions in faculty numbers through attrition, loss of lecturers whose work would be taken over by tenure track professors and possible elimination of some programs within the College.
The College’s income depends on the number of credit hours for which students sign up, and as Singell pointed out, they are signing up for fewer Arts and Science classes as the higher education landscape changes. The trend is national, with students and the parents who support them looking for areas of study that lead more directly to that first job than in the past.
Professional schools such as the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, the Kelley School and the School of Informatics and Computing offer what many see as a more clear career pathway. Junior college for the first two years of a degree, which can save families significant expense, is a start that translates into a significant loss in credit hours for the College. Many junior college students who might once have filled seats in IU classes are now in Ivy Tech’s lecture halls.
For some time now, IU has operated under a “responsibility centered” budget process, with funding for each academic unit based on the credit hours it “sells” to students. This model makes sense, right? You work, you get paid for it. You do less work, you don’t get paid as much. That’s the American way.
In many ways, it makes perfect sense in the academic as well as the working world. If business school enrollment is burgeoning, for example, the business school will require more faculty, more support. If the English department is losing enrollment to foundation courses at the junior college level or even to business writing classes at the business school, it ultimately will need fewer resources to serve a smaller student population.
The problem comes, as pointed out by both Singell and distinguished biology professor Jeffrey Palmer in the article, in that such a model does not account for widely varying production costs of particular areas of study — a biology teaching lab costs a lot of money, for instance, while a SPEA lecture on health economics might require seats in a lecture hall.
Even more important, though, is the mission of a university to pose questions and explore for answers, to examine the state of our world and ask why.
It remains critically important to find and keep the means of support for those intellectual enterprises that may not sell real well to undergrads — or to their parents who worry the kid will be moving into the basement after college instead of finding a job somewhere else.
Yes, the job is very important. But it can’t be all that a university is about.
Research undertaken today by a theoretical physicist in an obscure area of interest with no conceivable application, for example, may decades from now open secrets of nature that change the direction of the world.
That and work like it in almost any field must continue and be allowed to thrive.
Responsibility centered budgeting must accommodate such work, where payback may not be realized in any of our lifetimes, but which could be immense.
The trick will be finding a way to do that while also meeting the reasonable demand of the marketplace for the resources to meet the needs of the paying customer — the student whose choices fill the lecture halls.