Illinois public universities are in crisis. Colleges are slashing costs because the state’s budget stalemate has strangled cash flow to higher education. Some school officials fret that they’ll barely finish the academic year.
All of this should add urgency to an idea that we hope will percolate in Springfield: Streamline and consolidate the state’s university and community college system to increase efficiency and accountability. Right now, there are nine governing boards for 12 Illinois public colleges. That’s too many. Local control has meant expensive and redundant layers of administrative bureaucracies. Also less oversight to stop waste of school and taxpayer money on far-fetched, fiefdom-building projects.
Latest case in point: Chicago State University’s long-running effort to build a second campus, this one on Chicago’s West Side. Leaders of CSU, a South Side school, spent at least $370,000 in taxpayer money in an aggressive effort to open such a campus, according to an investigation by Tribune reporters Dawn Rhodes and Peter Matuszak. CSU officials conducted a pricey feasibility study, signed an agreement to buy property in the Homan Square area and selected an architect even after a 2014 school finance committee warned that that CSU "cannot afford a drain in the budget."
That plan has stalled because state funding dried up.
But why were CSU leaders spending money on expanding their mismanaged realm? Why weren’t they focused instead on why their enrollment has plummeted by half since 2010? Or why CSU’s six-year graduation rate is 11 — yes, 11 — percent?
Because no one stopped them, that’s why. No one in Springfield — no politicians, no state board of regents with rigorous control — held them accountable for their many years of failure. For the cronyism and corruption that thrived on campus. For that sharply declining enrollment, that abysmal graduation rate. Worst of all: No one in Springfield held them accountable for promising big yet delivering meager results for low-income students who depended on CSU to help them succeed.
Gov. Bruce Rauner has named several new CSU board members, including former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, to halt this textbook case of educational malpractice. All of this is part of a leadership shake-up to impose oversight and accountability on a university accustomed to neither.
But as we said atop this editorial:
A bigger issue confronts Illinois pols and taxpayers, students and families.
Right now, state government oversight is weak and there are few uniform standards to ensure that students gain the best education possible at a reasonable cost. Illinois needs to "create a governing structure more responsive to public needs," Joni Finney, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania, tells us. "That’s what the state doesn’t have right." Finney, who co-authored a 2011 study on the decline of Illinois higher education, says that the earlier "system of systems" was more coordinated and effective at oversight and divvying up funding. It also delivered superior results for students, the study concluded.
Illinois once had a more centralized system. But in 1995, the General Assembly dismantled what was known as the "system of systems" — four governing boards representing 12 universities — to allow more local control. But there’s little if any evidence that costs have been tamed or oversight improved. Witness CSU.
The 1995 change, according to the study, "exacerbated two problems that have driven Illinois’ recent decline in higher education performance: An inability to establish shared state goals and priorities for higher education. A failure to allocate resources strategically to meet state goals and priorities."
Translation: Nobody with a spine is demanding less redundancy in administrative layers or academic specialties among the schools. Nobody with a spine is asking if, given student demand, Illinois has too many universities. Nobody with a spine is warning that a school with pitiful results should be closed or swallowed by a stronger state university.
Perhaps Illinois higher ed reform should be modeled after the more streamlined university and community college systems in Wisconsin and New York. We know what would happen in either of those systems — each one a great source of statewide civic pride — if a public university had an 11 percent graduation rate: Angry legislators would blow the lid off their state capitol.
In Illinois, with its balkanized universities, a CSU could long avoid consequences. A more consolidated system of oversight here could hold university leaders accountable for financial and academic failure — and reward success in helping students learn and graduate.
Education funding in Illinois could be front and center in the current legislative session. Good. But don’t limit the reform debate to K-12, lawmakers.
Give serious thought to the educational improvements, the savings and the rigorous performance standards that robust and unified oversight could demand.
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