Posted on 03/06/2017 10:09:07 AM PST by MichCapCon
State funding for community colleges in Michigan has increased by over $112 million since Gov. Rick Snyder took office in 2011. Despite this fact, tuition has increased 19 percent and the number of students, as expressed on a full-time basis, is down 19 percent.
The state government has increased its appropriations for Michigan’s 28 community colleges by 39 percent during the governor’s tenure, starting at $284 million in fiscal year 2011-12 and going up to $396 million in 2016-17.
Mike Hansen, president of the Michigan Community College Association, attributed the increase to inflation.
“As the governor pointed out, inflation is up about 9.5 percent over that time. Sounds pretty good,” he said in an email.
Hansen pointed out that $80 million of the $112 million increase has gone to the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System.
“It is laundered through the [community college] budget, but unavailable to us,” he said. “It really never even hits our books, goes directly to MPSERS. That means our operating funding is up $32 million or about 11 percent over that time, so in real terms, up about a 1.5 percent over 5 years.”
The average price of a credit hour went up 19 percent, going from $85.91 in 2011-12 to $102.13 in 2015-16, the last year for which data is available. The College Board estimates Michigan’s in-district tuition and fees is approximately $3,700 in 2016-17, up 18 percent since five years ago.
“Remember that this was during a time when state appropriations were essentially flat in real terms,” Hansen said of tuition costs. “And to provide additional context, during this time, the state, employers, and the local communities were demanding more customized, specialized, advanced-level training in expensive-to-deliver areas.”
In 2011-12, the full-time equivalent of 164,828 students attended Michigan’s community colleges, a number which slumped to 133,895 in 2014-15, a 19 percent drop. (The enrollment number has not been updated since then.)
Hansen attributes this change to the cyclical nature of the economy. Enrollment goes up “when the unemployment rate rises, back down when the unemployment rate wanes. And much of this is out of our hands,” he said.
Richard Vedder, a professor emeritus of economics at Ohio University, said that it looks like the state money appropriated during the Snyder years is “wasted money.”
“Normally you invest more money in things that are highly successful and improving, not in things that are less successfully and declining,” he said. “Snyder seems to be doing the reverse. Why? For what purpose?”
“The fact that tuition and fees have also risen sharply during the same period suggests that the money is probably largely showing up in what economists call ‘economic rent,’’ Vedder said. He described the economic rent in community colleges as “extra payments beyond what are necessary – for employees and other members of the college community rather than for the students themselves.”
Vedder, who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, is a member of the Board of Scholars of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center, said of the statewide school pension system: “The state retirement system has been underfunded in 41 out of the past 42 years. It would be nice if community colleges got together to help prevent the system from being further underfunded.”
It's even reaching up to four-year colleges and universities. Would any sane person send their child to a campus that allows radicals to run amuck?
What I find staggeringly under-discussed is the lack of performance of college students.
As a part-time prof, I was amazed that consistently 1/4 of students simply did NOT do the work. They’d show up, nod attentively, take tests, participate in online discussions, ... and not hand in homework (critical for early programming courses). Near as I could tell, the bulk of my students were on some kind of grant/scholarship/welfare/whatever making it VERY easy to be there - but very painful after the fact if they did not do the work, which as noted a quarter of them simply didn’t. It wasn’t for any popularly-imputed want for help: save for a tiny number of truly incompetent students (if you don’t know basic algebra you’re not going to learn object-oriented programming in the allotted time), the resources available to every student were staggeringly extensive - right down to my clear & frequent admonition “if you have no idea what to do, submit a document stating ‘I don’t know what to do’ and I’ll walk you thru every step.” It was practically harder to _fail_ my class than to pass it, yet many did - I even gave Fs to three entire (albeit small) classes in a row, with the Dean’s blessing.
The only reason most kids graduated high school was it was illegal for them to drop out until so close to the end there was little point in doing so. Put kids in college for free, with no compulsion to actually produce (at least anything other than offspring), and you’ll have at least 25% of them merely showing up until professors like me steadfastly refuse to let them pass (you _cannot_ get thru Intro To C++ Part 2 until you have _passed_ Part 1, and should you waltz thru both like you did HS Social Studies, you’ll have not a clue come Gaming And Simulation Design). The high school had zero incentive to ensure the kids could do anything with their degree, only that each child sat in an appropriate class and regurgitated just enough to satisfy minimal requirements. Colleges, in contrast, actually need graduates who can show competency - a Programming graduate who can’t code “fizz buzz”, or a Medieval Gender Studies graduate who can’t write a publishable paper on “Frequency Of Transgender Encounters As Related To Castle Temperatures”, makes the _college_ look bad and lose funding.
Yet the Left continues to push for “free college”, insisting on throwing $X0,000 annually at anyone willing to show up - with no consideration of them actually _doing_ anything related to the purpose. And you can’t motivate such people with punitive consequences for lack of performance, because the whole point is that they have no resources to confiscate as punishment (on the theory that performance will assure income later). That leaves us with funding a slovenly lifestyle, filled with a cursory attendance to classes and the remaining hours each day engaging in creative studies of pharmaceuticals, copulation techniques, and tortuous interpretations of legalities ... oh, didn’t pass those three classes? well, better luck next year.
The thing I like about community colleges is that, because of all the adjunct professors, you are much more likely to get a professor with “real” world experience, than you are at an ivory tower university.
That being said, “something” is going on at OCC. The new administration has said that they have too many students and instituted changes aimed at reducing enrollment while at the same time, hiring more administration. When word got out that they were complaining that we have too many students, they changed their story to say they were trying to reduce the number of cancelled classes (because of fewer than 15 students.) Their solution was to eliminate classes. Cancel them before they even had a chance to not fill up. But these were classes which, historically, have always been full and had students on waiting lists.
Meanwhile, these were classes that feed other classes. So by eliminating them, they create a self-fulling prophecy low interest in other classes that these eliminated classes historically fed. Something is going on and it isn’t pretty.
For quite a few years, I did Math SAT Prep for a NE/NY regional company, a national, and self-designed courses. Students did incredibly well, much better than they did in the high school classroom environment. There were a few reasons. One was that the parents paid for these courses, so they expected their little darlings to succeed. Another was that the parents signed a clause that if the child misbehaved, he or she would be removed with no refund. Another was that in these courses (the ones that work), it's no-nonsense. The teacher has to be efficient and knowledgeable and able to ascertain how the class is responding to the material.
A community college or regular college class where you don't have a critical mass focused on learning? It doesn't work well.
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