Lansing State Journal, August 8, 2010, Sunday

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Lansing State Journal (Michigan)

August 8, 2010, Sunday

MSU spends more in nonacademic areas as state aid drops

BYLINE: By, Matthew Miller

BODY:
With state support shrinking, an increasing share of Michigan State University's budget is coming from student tuition and fees.

At the same time, the share of the budget MSU spends on instruction has declined.

MSU's general fund grew by more than 75 percent between 1998 and 2008. The amount spent on instruction grew by just 64 percent. The amount spent on student services rose 35 percent.
At the same time, spending on administration increased by 106 percent, while operations and maintenance of the university's physical plant rose 95 percent. And as tuition doubled, the amount of its own money MSU spends on scholarships has nearly tripled.

MSU is not an exception. According a recent report by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability, colleges and universities across the country are spending more of their money in nonaca-demic areas.

MSU officials say it's a case of shifting necessities brought about by declines in state support for higher education. Some faculty and students worry it's more a matter of shifting priorities.
Kim Wilcox, the university's chief academic officer, said the change in how MSU spends its money "is a story of the state walking away from its responsibilities, plain and simple."

In 1998, state appropriations made up just over half of the university's general fund. A decade later, it was 30 per-cent.

Student tuition and fees filled in much of the gap, increasing by 109 percent over the 10 years.
To keep the university accessible, MSU needed to invest more money in scholarships, Wilcox said. Because the state is no longer paying for the university to build new buildings or maintain the ones it has, MSU has had to pay out of its own pocket.

Rather than hoping state appropriations will bounce back, MSU's leaders have decided they need to "diversify our revenue streams," Wilcox said.

"That means we have to invest in places that are going to be useful to us in the long term," he said, such as fundraising and programs to help MSU win research grants and contracts.
That is, in areas that aren't directly related to educating most of the university's 47,000 students.

Classroom changes

But some faculty and students worry about what they see as a diminishing commitment to quality education.

"In the recent budget cuts, there are many classes that have gone from having graders to just being computer-graded classes," said Phylis Floyd, a professor in the Department of Art and Art History. She is also vice president of the MSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, but emphasized she was speaking only for herself.

"This is at Michigan State University," Floyd said. "That's outrageous."

She was referring, in part, to cuts made just in the past year, after MSU proposed shutting down two departments and more than two dozen degree programs and asked colleges to pare back their operating budgets.

Those cuts can be felt in the classroom.

"There are places where, in the past, we might have taught a course with 75 students and then, once a week, small groups of 25 would meet with a teaching assistant for a discussion section, and those are being done away with," said Stephen Arch, the chairman of MSU's English department. "We can't afford to add the teaching assistant to that assignment."

To keep grading loads manageable "we have tried to change our understanding that every single class has to be a writing class and instead recognize that a major in English will take 10 or 12 classes total, some of which will be more writing-intensive than others," he said.
Arch believes there is something to be gained from that sort of rethinking but said "it's not what we chose. We recognize that it's an economic necessity."

It's not what Sam Inglot would choose, either. The sophomore journalism student said he has been disappointed by large classes where electronic clickers are used to gather student feedback and teaching assistants are few.

"I would like my degree to have some weight and some value to it," he said. "Not just, 'Look at me, I filled out the bubble sheet and got more right than everybody else.' "
Big Ten comparisons

MSU's spending on instruction is comparable to that of similar schools.
In 2008, the most recent year for which federally reported data was available, MSU ranked fourth among the public universities in the Big Ten for both percentage of its budget spent on instruction and the amount it spends per student.

And though executives, administrators and managers were the fastest-growing pool of employees from 2003 to 2008 - growing by 28 percent, while the number of faculty increased by 13 percent and the number of clerical and maintenance workers fell - MSU still spent a smaller portion of its budget on administration than most of its peers, ranking seventh among the Big Ten public universities and eighth for the amount it spends per student.
Student services, a category that includes counseling, performing arts, admissions and financial aid administration among other things, is a different story.

In 2008, MSU spent a smaller percentage of its money on student services than any other Big Ten school. Only Purdue University spent less per student.

Kyle Dysarz, a 2010 MSU graduate who chaired the University Committee on Student Affairs last year, called that "alarming."

"Student services is extremely important to complement what we do academically," he said.
"The students that need to use the counseling center, they actually need that center to even survive their four years here."

Support services key

Research bears him out. While student services are sometimes viewed by critics as frills, student service expenditures have an impact on students' academic success, said Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.

That is particularly true for those students who are the first in their families to go to college or who come from poor backgrounds.

"These students will tend to need more support services than will the high-income kids coming from highly educated families," Ehrenberg said.

Wilcox said he stands by MSU's results - the increasing graduation rates, the improving academic profile of its stu-dents, the falling student-teacher ratio, grant funding that's approaching $500 million annually.

Had MSU not invested in fundraising and research operations, "we'd have fewer resources total," Wilcox said.

"We'd have fewer students supported. We'd have fewer students employed. We'd probably have a different profile of students enrolled," he said.

"It seems to me growing the instructional fund from $300 (million) to $500 million is at least a statement that we think instruction is important."

Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project, which recently published the report on college spending, said spending on administration is "a necessary price of business and certainly not something that we mean to be all that pejorative about."

But if there is a link between that spending and students' academic success ... "Nobody has ever found any evidence for it," Wellman said.

As state government support dwindles and the financial burden on students grows, "it's important to ask tough questions about where the money is going and about necessity," she said, "so that we don't just automatically shift costs onto students."

Big Ten ranking

MSU's rank in spending compared with public universities in the Big Ten: 4th
share of budget spent on instruction and instructional spending per student
7th share of budget spent on administration 8th administrative spending per student
10th percent of budget spent on student services 9th student services spending per student
4th percent of budget spent on research 7th research spending per student
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, IPEDS data center

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