Funding Tied to Performance May 28, 2009
Posted by tobykeeping in Challenges, Information sharing, Successes.trackback
In my last post, I asked about ways higher education could perhaps become more efficient and effective as the economic challenges mount. USA Today just published a story that a number of states are now considering linking funding to the performance of the school.
Many states have proposed different funding formulas and as Julie Bell of the National Conference of State Legislatures expresses in the article, “We as legislatures have been giving higher education a pass on accountability. With tuition going up … there’s a whole new thinking about productivity.”
Some proposals include;
- Ohio and Indiana are targeting degrees in science, technology, engineering and math.
- Missouri’s department of higher education has proposed a plan to finance schools based on how students in allied health and other fields fare on state licensing exams.
- Washington state’s board of community and technical colleges plans to reward schools when students cross certain hurdles, such as completing 15 credits and passing math, along the way toward earning a credential.
Of course, few things guarantee success. Florida apparently used a system like this for 10 years and community college completion rates went up by 43%, and enrollments 18%. However, of 26 states that had performance funding since 1979, nearly half abandoned it.
“Accountability”, “performance”, and “data driven results” are phrases that I hear almost daily from executives at higher education institutions. As the shift to view students as ‘customers’ continues, has the culture in higher ed shifted to the point where a philosophical change, such as performance-based funding, could now be suitable?
Please share your thoughts!
Good post, Toby. The problem with performance based funding is how to assess it. Students are not all equal. So, if the assessment of performance is internal, it has to be based on how much learning has been accomplished rather than some externally agreed upon standard, such as graduation or retention rate. For example, the graduation rate at a prestigious New England liberal arts college should be higher than that of a public institution. External licensing exams are a good way to assess professional preparation, but higher education is so much more than that.
Rick Hardy makes a good point about the trickiness of linking assessment and funding. But to your original question, “ways higher education could perhaps become more efficient and effective as the economic challenges mount,” one way of becoming more efficient is incorporating social media in all aspects of the institution – from the classroom to internal and external communications. At University of Richmond, we launched our new Web site yesterday, http://www.richmond.edu. The new site incorporates social media, customization, storytelling and much more. We are new to the social media realm, but we’re finding that it is a low-budget extension of existing marketing and public relations strategy. For step-by-step overview with screen shots, visit: http://www.richmond.edu/web-intro.html.