With so much attention in North Carolina focused on public K-12 education (DPI) and the university (UNC) system, the state’s community colleges (NCCCS) tend to get lost in the shuffle.
NCCCS administrators probably wish Governor Bev Perdue had ignored them a little more last week, when she presented her 2011-13 budget proposal on February 17. She intends to reduce state appropriations to the community colleges by $85.8 million, or 4.9 percent (tuition increases will restore $39.7 million of this amount, however). The UNC system, which has traditionally received much higher levels of appropriations than NCCCS, was cut only slightly more, at 6 percent (including tuition increases), while the K-12 system escaped with a mere 3.9 percent.
Yet the governor’s proposal is merely the first step in a long process—one that may still offer a few surprises. It is now the legislators’ turn to take a stab at it—and they will almost assuredly be more aggressive than Perdue. It may be a good thing—for both the state and NCCCS—if they once again overlook the community colleges and spare them further reductions.
Certainly, every department in the state government must sacrifice to fill this year’s projected $2.4 billion budget hole, including NCCCS. And budget cuts are not necessarily all bad, since they force organizations to prune their least productive parts. Governor Perdue’s proposal contains some good ideas for reducing the community colleges’ budget without causing much pain (in fact, those ideas originated mainly with NCCCS).
They include saving $25 million by restructuring the formula for determining the number of faculty members needed at each school. In the past, teachers of all subjects were considered to require the same resources; the community colleges came up with a way to save money by dividing teachers into three tiers. This approach would allocate more resources to health care and technology, since classes in those subjects require the most intensive instruction, and give the least to less costly areas, such as the liberal arts.
Another idea is to offer retirement incentives to employees, which should save approximately $5.2 million next year.
Considerable savings can be achieved by replacing state appropriations with revenue from tuition. NCCCS tuition per credit hour is currently only $56.50, enabling a full-time student to attend for one full year for less than $2,000 (not counting fees and books). Perdue suggested a $5.50 increase per credit hour, which adds $25 million to the NCCCS coffers. System officials were hoping for as much as $10 per hour, however.
Now that it’s their turn to wield the fiscal scalpel, legislators should remember that the NCCCS is already much leaner than the other educational systems, and therefore should go easier on it. To illustrate the disparities, the community colleges only spent $5,498 in 2009-10 per full-time equivalent student vs. $8,663 for the DPI (2008-9) and $16,760 for the universities (2008-9).
Additionally, the UNC system strives to pay its professors at the 80th percentile nationally; this means that UNC schools, in order to attract top faculty, seek to pay salaries higher than at four out of five similar institutions. NCCCS is at the opposite end of the pay spectrum: it pays its teachers only 78 percent of the national average for community colleges, which places them at the 28th percentile.
At some UNC schools, professors are expected to teach only two classes per semester. Randolph County Community College, on the other hand, temporarily faced a loss of its accreditation—because some teachers were handling as many as eight classes per semester last year.
Yet, despite its paucity of resources, the NCCCS is supposed to bring its academic students—often with weak academic backgrounds—up to the same achievement level as university students by the end of their sophomore years, so that they can transfer into the university system and thrive academically.
And it does much more than that. Nearly half of its enrollment is in vocational programs rather than academics. It also attempts to correct the public school system’s failures by providing remediation to nearly half of its incoming students. It has recently accommodated a massive influx of new students—12.8 percent in one year alone—as the down economy sent many newly unemployed workers back to school to retool their skills.
This is not to say that the community college system is perfect. It has its share of wasteful policies, just like the other systems. And it has abysmal graduation rates: 20 percent of “first-time, full-time, credential-seeking students” complete their programs within a three-year period, according to Sherry O’Neill, the NCCCS director of internal communications.
Still, NCCCS president Scott Ralls said those statistics are misleading for a wide variety of reasons. For instance, the many remedial students have grim prospects for graduating. Of such students nationwide, only 17 percent complete a bachelor’s degree within eight years, according to 2004 Education Department data. He added that many academic students who attend community colleges for just one or two semesters before moving to a university are counted as non-graduates.
The community colleges are likely to be even more important to the state’s well-being in the future than they are today. The state is faced with a dilemma: It must drastically reduce higher education spending long-term, yet restricting access is regarded as politically undesirable. A viable solution is obvious: Many more public college students in North Carolina will have to start their college educations at the low-cost community colleges and transfer to the higher cost universities after two years.
There is already movement to accomplish this. Top administrators from both higher education systems have been working together to make the two systems mesh seamlessly for transfer students.
As a whole, the governor’s budget avoided many hard decisions. The legislature’s version is likely to include many more reductions than hers. For one thing, Perdue’s budget includes $826.6 million in revenue expected from continuing part of a temporary sales tax (¾ of a cent per dollar) due to run out this year. The newly elected Republican majorities in both houses campaigned on eliminating that tax, so they will have to find at least another $826.6 million in additional cuts to live up to their promise.
Let’s hope they pass the community colleges by. A strong community college system necessary to effect big long-term savings in the near future, and it’s only about 5 percent of the state budget; the really big savings—and big inefficiencies—are to be found elsewhere in the education system.