Higher-education funding won’t ever be the top budget priority for state legislators - or even second or third, Arkansas Department of Higher Education Director Shane Broadway told faculty members Wednesday at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
After kindergarten-through-12th-grade education, Medicaid and prisons, “we usually fall fourth,” Broadway said. “And, depending upon what the General Assembly and governor decide to do in regards to tax relief, sometimes we become fifth.”
Broadway told about 40 attendees to speak up to elected officials about university needs.
“We’ve got to have bigger pools of people talking about the importance of higher education,” Broadway said.
He said $150 million in tax cuts will kick in next year in July, with legislators also wrapped up in how to handle a shortfall in funding for public-school teacher insurance that Broadway called “a $70 million issue.”
Broadway presented a slide showing enrollment growth for 15 states participating in the Southern Regional Education Board. Arkansas ranked second in percentage growth in enrollment from 2001-11 with 46 percent, just behind Texas.
However, state general revenue funding per full-time student has dipped below what it was in 1999, Broadway said.
“Since 2003-2004, the vast majority of new general revenue dollars going to education have had to go to K-12,” Broadway said, citing the landmark Lake View School District lawsuit that resulted in requirements for more equitable funding for kindergarten through 12th grade across the state.
He called it “a challenge” to recruit and retain faculty members without increases in per-student support, acknowledging that as a former state legislator he was “just as much a part of the problem.”
Among states in the Southern Regional Educational Board, “we’re last in faculty salaries, and we’re also last in administrator salaries,” Broadway said.
Broadway also spoke about efforts to improve student outcomes, such as what’s known as the Career and College Coaches Program offering counselors to students to discuss possible paths after high school.
“There are a lot of things we have to do to reinforce the importance of education,” Broadway said.
He said his office has fielded hundreds of inquiries from online programs seeking to operate in the state. So long as they have certain educational accreditation, “we don’t really have a lot of choice but to accept them,” he said.
Students also “are looking more and more for online opportunities,” Broadway said.
He also talked about measuring outcomes once students are enrolled in college, describing how some measures don’t adequately take into account students who transfer to different schools.
“It’s important for policymakers to look at the whole picture, to understand these students are going to move around,” Broadway said.
Responding to a faculty member’s remark about the unique role of UA-Fayetteville, Broadway said he never senses that members of the state Legislature don’t understand the university’s importance to the state.
“The challenge, in a term-limited environment, is they’re looking for results now,” Broadway said, adding that as a young legislator he didn’t always understand “the importance and value of making investments in research.”
Asked about universities duplicating one another’s programs, Broadway said the state Higher Education Coordinating Board operates with an understanding that it doesn’t have the legal authority to block academic programs, though they are reviewed.
But the “purse strings” of the General Assembly can come into play, Broadway said, with recent discussions focused on concerns about duplication of “various technical programs” in different parts of the state.
In response to a question about the eVersity online-only university initiative from the University of Arkansas System, Broadway said “there hasn’t been a lot of discussion among legislators yet.” He said a presentation will be given to the higher-education board next week about eVersity.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 04/17/2014