New Challenges: Demographic, Economic, Cultural, and Political
We face an unprecedented series of demographic, economic, cultural, political, and global challenges. It is important for us to understand how each of these affects our future as a University. These challenges also represent important opportunities for us, and require us to move beyond the status quo to create an even more focused and effective University. To accept the present is to fall behind in our increasingly competitive world and in the academic market in which we compete.
Reduced public financial support
One of our foremost challenges is financial. State funding for higher education in Minnesota has been declining relative to other states for nearly three decades. Minnesota has dropped from 6th among states in 1978 to 26th in 2004 in the percentage of state budget support for higher education, as measured by tax effort or state support per $1,000 of personal income.
This steady decline in the state’s rank, however, pales in comparison to the actual reduction in state funding for the 2004-2005 Biennium. State funding for higher education in Minnesota in FY 2004 was 10 percent less than in FY 2003; the situation was worse in only six other states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, West Virginia, South Carolina, and Colorado. The University’s annual appropriation was reduced by nearly $100 million, from $641 million at the beginning of FY 2003 to $547 million at the beginning of FY 2004, and then held relatively flat ($551 million) for FY 2005.
Unfortunately, most studies of higher education funding look only at state funds, even though about half of the states use local taxes to support community and technical colleges. When local taxes are included, Minnesota falls even farther below the national average in tax support per $1,000 of personal income. Sadly, the state ranks only 29th nationally.
Exacerbating these problems, federal deficits are unlikely to abate any time soon, and the implications for higher education – sponsored research and Pell Grant support for students, in particular – are profound.
Increased costs require growth in public research university funding. Yet competition with other state-funded entities – such as PK-12 education, health care, transportation, and corrections – will continue to increase. The competition for private gifts, particularly large, multi-million dollar gifts, will become increasingly keen. Notably, this occurs at a time when the resource gap between public and private higher education continues to widen and while competition among universities continues to escalate.
Education and the “Public Good”
These new financial constraints seem linked to an increasingly popular perspective that higher education is a private benefit that simply prepares students for careers and that should be paid for primarily by students and their parents. In the past, most Americans viewed higher education largely as a public good: colleges and universities provided an educated citizenry and workforce, offered a ladder to success for its graduates, produced future leaders for society, and benefited all of society through the generation of knowledge and scholarship. Public universities were democratizing institutions that allowed all prepared and motivated citizens, even those lacking financial resources, to develop fully their skills and thus to maximize their contributions to society. That historic “public good” perspective may be shifting in the wrong direction. At the same time, though, society continues to expect research universities to develop and deliver breakthrough solutions in medicine, public health, agriculture, transportation, engineering, and other fields, as well as to enrich the economic, cultural and artistic environment of their communities and provide access to quality educational opportunities.
In fact, higher education is both a private benefit – in that it gives advantage to the individual student – and, importantly, a public good. Moreover, the public good benefits of higher education extend beyond citizen participation and the social benefits of increased regional and national economic growth.4 Higher education as a public good has a long and distinguished cultural, social and legal basis. It is absolutely crucial that we not lose sight of the public good resulting from higher education. Even the United States Supreme Court recently reaffirmed higher education’s role in creating positive benefits for the whole of society, as well as for the specific individual receiving the education.5 We also should remain mindful that the significantly higher incomes of graduates – particularly from the University’s graduate and professional schools – support higher tax revenues for the state, representing a high direct return on investment for state support.
Our heterogeneous society
An important part of understanding our commitment to the public good from education is to recognize how demographic changes – some unique to our region – affect our future. Minnesota’s population, like the nation’s, is becoming more diverse and older, and the implications for higher education are immense. About one half of our current faculty are expected to retire within the next decade.
Demographic trends in Minnesota, in a number of ways, are different from the national picture in that the increase in diversity and the decrease in projected numbers of high school age students are very pronounced. There will be many more students of color – 30 percent of Minnesota’s high school graduates by 2018 are projected to be students of color, compared to 13 percent in 2004.6 We can expect to receive an increasing number of students of color for whom English is not their first language and who are “first-family” or “first-generation” students. There will be even more need for the University to focus on PK-12 educational preparation to ensure that those seeking admission to higher education institutions are well-prepared to accept the rigors of a research university education.
Minnesota’s traditional college-age population will begin to decline within the next five years.7 We can expect increasing numbers of older students with diverse professional and life experiences, goals, values, and expectations. More and more our focus will need to be on recruiting and retaining a broad range of students from across the nation and around the world.
New organizational structures and incentives
The organizational structures and incentives that accompanied the creation, growth, and development of land grant institutions across the nation are under challenge as never before. How and where faculty do their work; how and where students learn; the provision of facilities and the arrangement of space for teaching and research; the boundaries between traditional disciplines; the boundaries between the academy and the community; the impact of technology on how information and knowledge are organized, preserved, and disseminated; and how academic priorities are established and funded – all these structures and assumptions – largely created in the 19th and early 20th centuries – are being challenged by the needs and demands of 21st century society.
Nowhere are these challenges more evident than in how research is organized and funded. Federal and other sponsored research support is rapidly shifting to multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional grants and contracts. There is increasing pressure for universities to address society’s problems in ways that often require interdisciplinary and, sometimes, multi-institutional and international responses. In particular, the number of “Big Science” multi-investigator/multi-university/public-private consortia grants funded by government, industry, and foundations has been increasing over the past 10 years.
As President Bruininks has noted: “Today more than ever, pushing the boundaries of knowledge in one field often means crossing into other disciplines. And interdisciplinary work often has mutual reward; often the tools required to build new knowledge in one field require innovation in another. In chemical biology, for example, interdisciplinary work that creates new drugs and therapies for cancer patients is also accelerating the miniaturization of electrical circuits.”8 Such interdisciplinary work is especially important for our students – undergraduate, graduate, and professional – who can learn in new and dynamic ways.
Universities also are relying increasingly on enterprise-wide technology systems to accomplish process improvement and efficiency goals as well as teaching, learning, and public engagement goals. Open-source software development and multi-institution purchases also are increasingly important competitive elements. Complementary technology partnerships between institutions that leverage their unique strengths will continue to grow as financial constraints drive institutions to focus on core competencies.
Greater competition in recruiting and supporting faculty and students
The national and international competition for highly qualified faculty and talented undergraduate, graduate, and professional students is becoming even more intense. In addition to compensation, recruitment and retention of faculty centers on the perceived strength of the appointing department, state-of-the-art facilities and equipment, large start-up packages, and the quality and number of graduate students who will be a part of each faculty member’s individual research enterprise.
Amidst increased competition for talent and faltering state and federal funding, the cost of education to students continues to rise at several times the normal rate of inflation. The University has undertaken a number of initiatives, such as a major scholarship drive and internal reallocation of resources, in order to keep education affordable and accessible and to keep the University competitive as it recruits talented students from the state, the nation and the world.
Support of graduate and professional students is one of the most crucial – and most expensive – components of a research university. It is the pathway to discoveries that lead to intellectual property and benefits to society. Education and development that leads to a Ph.D. is often a joint effort between graduate students and a professor in designing and conducting experiments, analyzing data, and communicating the results at professional meetings, in scholarly publications, and to the public and private sectors.
Our global world
As important as technological developments have been to higher education the most profound long-term change may be that we are becoming a much more globally linked world. Higher education is no exception. China is making major advances in promoting and developing higher education in its country. India, England, Germany, Australia and many other countries are all involved in significant reforms to their higher education systems, including much more aggressive recruitment of international students and faculty.
Yet, recent changes in United States immigration practices have led to a significant decline in international student and scholar applications, a major source of graduate and professional students in American universities. As a result, American universities are facing increased competition from each other at the same time competition with institutions outside the United States to admit the best and brightest international students and scholars is increasing. If we neglect this trend, the quality of research and graduate education at the University will be at risk.
Research itself, along with being more multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional is becoming ever more international. Traditional national borders are increasingly permeable, with “[i]ssues from business to agriculture, from human rights to the relief of famine, call[ing] our imaginations to venture beyond narrow group loyalties . . . to consider the reality of distant lives.”9 The greatest research universities tackle these problems, frequently fueled with collaborations that transcend university boundaries and national borders. As a result, research universities are judged against world-class standards, comparing the quality of faculty, students and research against international peers.
At present, the University has 3,300 international students and 1,200 international scholars from 130 countries, but we recently have fallen out of the top 20 major research institutions in terms of the breadth of our international representation on campus. This is a trend we must reverse if we are to remain a major research and education institution on the world stage. As the Chancellor of the University of Illinois recently acknowledged, “our best public research universities are institutions of global stature that have long been enmeshed in far-flung international networks of individual and collective collaborations and exchanges of all kinds.”10
Faculty and students – graduates and undergraduates alike – increasingly will be expected to be attuned to international developments in their fields and, where appropriate, to have international experience, an international outlook, and an international impact. More than ever it will be important for students to have exposure to international cultures, international students, and experience in foreign countries. The University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents Policy on International Education “recognizes that a great university ideally builds and extends its service, its potential for research, its scholarly standing, and enhances its contribution to the education of students and citizens of the state by providing an international dimension in its educational programs. This is true in all fields of study: in the professions, the sciences, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences.”11
4 Darrell R. Lewis and James Hearn, “Overview of a Public Research University,” in The Public Research University: Serving the Public Good in New Times, ed. D. R. Lewis & J. Hearn (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003), p. 4.
5 Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).
6 The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates by State, Income, and Race/Ethnicity, 1988 to 2018 (December 2003), p. 117.
7 R. Thomas Gillaspy, Minnesota State Demographer, Presentation to the University of Minnesota Board of Regents, November 11, 2004.
8 Robert H. Bruininks, 2003 State of the University Address, October 2, 2003, available at http://www1.umn.edu/pres/02_speeches_031003.html.
9 Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 10.
10 Richard Herman, Building and Sustaining Excellence in the Public Research University: The American Model (March 24, 2004), available at http://www.oc.uiuc.edu/speechesnews/royalirishacademy3_04.html.
11 Policy available at http://www1.umn.edu/regents/policies/academic/InternationalEduc.pdf. |
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