Higher ed's PR problem

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Some of our favorite people are college presidents. They're smart, personable (they've got to be good at selling their institutions, after all) and full of impressive stories of how their professors, in teaching or research, make the world a better place.

We've seen a lot of college presidents in recent years - especially after revenues slumped early this decade and higher education became the first and fattest target for cuts from lawmakers with a mandate to balance the state budget. We not only commiserated with these presidents' plight, we supported Referendum C two years ago in part because it was clear that higher ed would be steadily defunded if something wasn't done to stop the hemorrhaging.

For that matter, we remain sympathetic to finding more money for higher education. We endorsed a legislative move this spring to shore up funding for the University of Colorado medical center. And as recently as last week, we suggested earmarking a slice of the state's ballooning severance taxes for a higher ed capital construction fund.

If you want great scientists, musicians, economists and poets to settle in Colorado, why not use great facilities as the bait?

Yet as we look back at our various meetings with university officials, we can't help but notice how their reactions to budgetary woes differ from what we're familiar with in most other fields. To wit: There has been little (and usually no) talk of restructuring, of ramping up productivity, of eliminating marginal or duplicative enterprises or programs. There is little talk of doing things differently.

In an era of transforming change in many private industries and even such huge sectors as health care - an era when such normally risk-resistant public entities as urban school districts are actually restructuring themselves - higher education seems a universe apart. And not only in Colorado. Across the nation, despite costs that most years have escalated faster than inflation, higher ed's message remains mostly a one-word mantra: more.

Apparently the present model by which universities organize themselves and deliver services is optimal. Among this nation's major institutions, they alone have seemingly found the sweet spot from which they must never budge. Or at least that is the impression they often give to outsiders. State higher ed officials were on hand again Friday to relate their budgetary concerns to the Colorado Commission on Higher Education; those concerns are real, we repeat, and the needs by and large are legitimate. But if higher-ed leaders despair - as several have confided they do - at putting a measure on the ballot asking the public to ante up more taxes to buttress university spending they might consider the possibility that the public is not convinced that they're getting full value from their present investment.