Ask the president of any state-funded college or university in the region if they are adequately funded to meet growing demand and, as the Business Journal found out, the answer is a unanimous and resounding “No.”
While state funding for the California State University (CSU) and community college systems has nearly returned to pre-recession levels, their needs have surpassed those of that time period. As higher education becomes more of a necessity to enter the workforce, these institutions are searching for ways to adapt and meet their communities’ needs in spite of waning state funding.
“The demand is probably at the highest it’s been in quite some time, and the economic challenges are probably among the most difficult in a long time,” Willie Hagan, president of CSU Dominguez Hills told the Business Journal. “It’s a tough proposition.”
Eloy Ortiz Oakley, superintendent-president of Long Beach City College (LBCC), agreed. “The needs are definitely outpacing the availability of state resources, and, given that the state has all sorts of competing needs, it’s difficult to see how the public will continue to be able to fund our colleges and universities at the same levels they once were,” he said.
The ratio of those who apply to California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) versus how many the university is able to admit due to funding constraints depicts a sobering example of this dynamic. The university received more than 90,000 applications for the coming school year, but is only able to accommodate about 37,500 students total, which is the current level of enrollment based on per-student funding from the state.
Jane Close Conoley, president of California State University, Long Beach, said the university recently had to turn away more than 27,000 applicants, who actually met the university’s entry requirements, due to funding constraints. (Photograph by the Business Journal’s Larry Duncan)
Many who were turned away didn’t deserve to be, as CSULB President Jane Close Conoley pointed out. “My admissions [department] told me that we sent letters about two weeks ago to 27,500 applicants who actually met our requirements, but there was no room for them,” she said. “I look at it like, these students did what we asked them to do, and now we don’t have seats for them.”
The increasing demand for college degrees and credentials has nothing to do with the size of the population – according to Oakley, populations and enrollment throughout the state’s K-12 systems are decreasing. Instead, the cause is a shift in what employers consider the standard requirements to enter the workforce.
“The needs are in some ways greater now because the economy has changed dramatically since 2008,” Oakley said. “The workforce has changed dramatically, and the need for more individuals with a college credential has increased.” He added that he expects to see more and more adults already in the workforce seeking to attain some level of higher education.
Conoley shared his perspective. “It used to be you had to have a high school diploma. Now, more and more, it’s becoming a college diploma,” she said.
Per-student funding must also be increased to better accommodate the needs of students who are admitted, according to Oakley. “Per-student funding continues to be less than $6,000 per full-time student [at Long Beach City College]. We still feel that is too low,” he said. “It doesn’t provide enough support to help students, such as the ones we educate here in Long Beach who have a number of different challenges, including coming from low income backgrounds.”
Another major need of public higher education institutions is to hire more full-time faculty – a point Hagan, Conoley and Oakley all touched upon. “Dominguez Hills does not have the number of full-time, tenure-track faculty we feel are necessary to execute the things we need to do,” Hagan said.
While CSULB is currently hiring about 76 new full-time faculty members and hired nearly as many last year, Conoley said the university still has more part-time instructors than she is comfortable with. “Where we are really struggling is hiring enough tenure-track faculty to meet the increased number of students,” she said.
Upgrading school infrastructure for seismic safety and to accommodate growth and new technology is another unfunded need for public higher education institutions. “The biggest one that hangs over my head and I worry about a lot is the infrastructure,” Conoley said. “You know, we have buildings that are 50 years old and have seismic problems.”
CSU Dominguez Hills has similar needs. “We need additional dollars to renovate our facilities and to equip the laboratories to take advantage of technology, not only to educate but also to make us more efficient in terms of reducing our costs,” Hagan said.
In addition to increasing per-student funding, Oakley counted upgrading LBCC’s infrastructure as a top need for the college. Investing in energy-efficient equipment and building upgrades could ultimately help the college save money and use those funds for other needs, he noted.
Rather than sitting back in the hopes that the State of California will increase funding, these higher education leaders are searching for other sources of funds, and are striving to increase internal efficiencies to reduce costs. As Hagan put it: “We know we can’t count on the state to be the only way that we obtain resources to achieve our goals.”
Partnering with industry is at the top of the list of funding pursuits. “We’re looking at partnerships with business and industry,” Conoley said. “I am always on the lookout for those kinds of partnerships. For example, we just introduced a program in engineering about construction in coastal waters, and we have a strong partnership with the Port of Long Beach for that,” she said. CSULB’s engineering department works closely with Boeing to meet its aerospace workforce needs, and the nursing program is heavily supported by local hospitals, she added.
CSUDH is focused on developing similar partnerships in the private sector. “If there is a demand for more students to be trained in the area of global logistics because that’s a growing industry, then it might be that we need to sit down with the logistics businesses in this area and talk about what we can provide to help meet their workforce needs,” he said. The business partners would in turn provide resources to strengthen the program, he explained.
Public higher education institutions are also increasingly looking at alternative revenue streams as potential ways to bolster their budgets. Conoley, for example, has reached out to Amazon to see if the internet giant would consider placing one of its shipment lockers on campus, where people can pick up their orders in a secure locker instead of having their packages delivered to a porch. Amazon would pay to use campus space. “It would be good for their business and it gives us a revenue stream that we haven’t had before,” she said.
“Here at Dominguez Hills, we also want to leverage our land,” Hagan said. “We have needs for faculty and staff housing. It may be possible to build housing that will not only provide for the needs of our workforce but also would generate revenue that we could then plow back in to our programs.”
While private universities are known for their fundraising programs, public institutions haven’t invested quite as much in these efforts, according to Conoley. Last year, CSULB changed that, launching its first massive fundraising campaign. “Our goal was $225 million, and we raised $238 million,” Conoley said. “About half of that is going for scholarships, and the other half for research programs or other kinds of programs across the university.”
Oakley said LBCC is working with its foundation to boost fundraising efforts. “We’re trying to expand our efforts at tapping into our alumni network, which is something new for community colleges,” he said.
Public colleges and universities are also examining ways to boost internal efficiency and to restructure programs to save money both for themselves and for their students.
All segments of the public school system – grades k-12, community colleges, the CSU and the University of California – must work more closely together to improve student transitions between these institutions, Oakley said. Doing so would “make much more efficient use of students’ time at every level and at every institution,” and would save both the institutions and students money, he explained.
“We’re not effective if we’re not working with the groups that feed us students, and we’re not effective if we’re not working with the groups that receive our students,” Hagan said.
In an effort to be more efficient, some public higher education institutions are working together. “In the CSU for example, the greater L.A. colleges formed what’s called ‘The CSU 5.’ We partner on various large scale grants,” Hagan noted.
Leveraging technology may also prove effective in reducing costs and assisting students. Providing online resources, from coursework to open source textbooks, cuts down on cost, Oakley pointed out.
Technology should also be used to provide better analysis of student needs, he added. “If you think about banks or Amazon and the way they’ve reached us through technology [in] that they can predict our needs or behaviors, we can use the same kind of technology to help our students be more successful and leverage the great talent of our counselors and advisors so that we don’t have to invest precious resources only on personnel,” he said.
To keep costs down, CSULB is likely to offer more hybrid courses, in which, for example, a class would meet once a week in a classroom and the second session of the week would be held online, Conoley said. This reduces the need for classroom space, freeing it up for additional classes without having to build more facilities, she explained.
“My admissions [department] told me that we sent letters about two weeks ago to 27,500 applicants who actually met our requirements, but there was no room for them. I look at it like, these students did what we asked them to do, and now we don’t have seats for them.” — Jane Close Conoley, President California State University, Long Beach (Photograph by the Business Journal’s Larry Duncan)
CSULB is also developing programs to help students get through the university faster and at lower cost, such as by offering a year-round program. The difficulty there is that a large number of CSULB students attend on Pell Grants, which cannot be applied to summer courses. “If we can convince congress to do summer Pell Grants, that would make all the difference in the world for us,” she said.
Conoley is also planning on creating customized programs for students who are close to graduating but are having difficulty doing so due to lack of funds or personal reasons.
As Conoley put it, “There’s no magic wand” to solve public higher education’s dilemma of low funding versus demand and community need. “It’s a dangerous time for public higher education,” she said. Some economists predict there may be no public funding available for higher education by 2060, she noted.
“We have to do a better job certainly in L.A. County, the central valley and in many parts of the state to improve education attainment; otherwise, we are going to have two very distinct California’s,” Oakley said. “One that is very high wealth but with a relative few members of the state, versus the other California, which is struggling,” he explained. “And I think that’s dangerous to the future of California. So we really need to figure out how we’re going to solve this dilemma sooner rather than later.”