UDC requests $4 million to lay off employees (Big professor & staff payoffs)

The University of the District of Columbia is asking the city for $4 million as it prepares to lay off dozens of professors and staffers whose union protections entitle them to big payouts, school officials told The Washington Examiner.

But Mayor Vincent Gray isn't immediately ponying up, saying he has issues with the university's "right-sizing plan" and wants UDC to put more effort into its request for more city funds.

"We've got to see a lot more than what we've seen," Gray said. "We've gotten a two-page letter from them."

The District's only public university released a plan in October to cut seven departments, cancel two dozen majors, and lay off 25 faculty members and staffers, on top of 30 positions already cut. The university's finances came under scrutiny from the D.C. Council earlier this year as UDC's Community College made a bid for independence only to discover that it couldn't get accredited when its host university's finances were so unstable -- its reserves were nearly depleted. UDC spends $35,152 per full-time student, 66 percent more than institutions of a similar size. Through the plan, UDC would bring costs down to $28,527 per student.

But school officials explained that much of the "bloat" was caused by an accumulation of faculty over the years and that it would be expensive to eliminate these positions because of a strong union presence...

DC has the same tendency as most school systems to keep buildings open regardless of population shifts and neighborhood declines. Closing schools is always difficult. This was true in my small, southern Indiana hometown, which had three elementary schools, one of which should have been closed years earlier, and it's true in spades here. But there is an added factor in DC: over 40% of the total public school enrollment is now in charter schools. A lot of the traditional, non-charter schools are desperately empty.

I looked briefly for a complete breakdon of DC's k-12 enrollment by traditional public, public charter, private/parochial, and home schools. Couldn't find it. Perhaps someone more familiar with the databases can help. But I think what it would show is that DC is a lot further along in educational reform than a lot of people realize. If all you look at is DCPS stats, the picture is pretty bad (although even among the traditional public schools, a few are turning the corner). But DCPS, with a couple of (hopefully growing) exceptions, are the left-behinds. That's sad, but a reality. Once again, vouchers could transform the syatem pretty quickly. Give the left-behinds some real choices, and let people vote with their feet.

Never heard of it? I can fix that. This will be long, but there's a purpose.

UDC could and should be a perfectly serviceable junior college, and that is probably its future. The current school was formed by a series of mergers that over time amalgamated the District of Columbia Teachers College with Federal City College and the Washington Technical Institute. This was an experiment that has not worked and that needs to be unravelled

DC Teachers College had honorable 19th century roots in two earlier girls schools (white/black, DC being a southern town at the time) that were classic old-time teachers colleges with no pretensions of grandeur. Tbe other two were 1960's creations; Federal City College was supposed to become a liberal arts "state university" and the Washington Technical Institute was meant as a junior college. The idea was that DC, with aspirations to statehood, should have the full spectrum of "state" institutions of higher learning.

This was always as farcical as the notion of DC statehood itself and has always been recognized as such by the sober remnant here in town. But DC politics at the time was dominated by empire builders with delusions of grandeur and Great Society enablers on Capitol Hill. So a perfectly serviceable teachers school and a perfectly serviceable junior college were crammed together with a doomed-to-fail experiment in building a serious municipal liberal arts university in a city of 600,000. Once launched, D.C.'s very own "state" university aped its role models across the country: it bloated. This is not unique to UDC; we just have less of a tax base to support it, and there is no residual core of academic excellence at UDC to maintain the pretence that the institution is still credible.

As it stands today, UDC does a reasonably solid job of technical credentialling at a junior college level, and I have the impression that it is a hit with many of our immigrant communities, most of whom I very much respect, btw. DC is an immigrant magnet, and moving our Indian and Vietnamese and Ethiopian, etc. newcomers up the ladder is a worthy purpose. But DC is just flat-out too small to even pretend to support a quality liberal arts university, especially since we have the University of Maryland and George Mason within the metro area. (Not to mention Georgetown, Catholic, George Washington, or AU; the issue here is access to public education.)

This is overlong, but it is useful background to an important point. DC now has arguably the best college situation in the country for high school graduates. The Congress in 1999 finally gave up, more or less officially, on turning UDC into a full-service, high quality public university. Most of the country, however, takes access to such an institution for granted, with the flagship state university setting the standard and second and third tier public universities rounding out the picture.

To provide public university access to DC high school graduates, Congress authorized a grant program of up to $10,000/year towards the tuition of any accredited public college or university across the country (as well as private non-profit schools in the metro area). This is a voucher program on steriods; imagine taking the taxpayer subsidy your young-un is getting at State U. and applying it anywhere in the country. This is a model to be emulated, as long as the dollar amount of the voucher is competitive with national norms.

Before you grumble that this is an unfair subvention for a favored constituency, consider that this approach is vastly cheaper than trying to create a high quality public liberal arts college in DC. The real solution to the DC statehood issue is retrocession to Maryland, which would give DC high school grads access to the Maryland system. But it is important to the health of Our Nation's Capitol (as a real city, where real people actually try to raise families) that DC high school grads have access somewhere/somehow to quality public (aka affordable) public universities. This is a great way to do it. We now have a national voucher for undergraduate college eduction ... while the DC pols who take great pride in this situation still oppose vouchering k-12, but that's a story for a different day.

Sorry for the length, but a national voucher model is worth commenting on. And UDC should be more than the butt of jokes; it just needs to slough off yet another grandiose Great Society mistake and get back to doing what its predecessor institutions used to do, and very competently.

Agreed. Delusions of grandeur and bureaucratic empire building aside, the wrinkle in DC was that, prior to the current tuition assistance arrangement, there was no academically respectable in-state public university option for DC high school grads. Through the 60’s and 70’s, DC suffered from middle class flight for all the same reasons as did other cities. The ‘68 riots were a major push. In addition to crime, taxes, and Marion Barry, the collapse of the k-12 public school system drove out most young families when the kids came along. When the kids grew up, the hardy souls who had stayed and paid the private school tax were then consigned either to private universities or out-of-state tuition — absurd when Maryland/College Park and George Mason are both fine, close-in DC suburban campuses. Just one more nail in the coffin of a declining city with a disappearing middle class; DC kept the wealthy, for whom hefty tuitions were not a concern, and the poor, who had no escape. I can understand the desire to have an affordable public university option. The current arrangement is a much better way to do it.

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