The Illinois system of higher education is coordinated by IBHE
through processes that have evolved from the board's statutory
authority: to analyze needs and develop a master plan; to recommend
budgetary needs for operations and for capital improvements to
the Governor and General Assembly; to administer state and federal
grant programs; to approve new and review existing programs of
instruction, research or public service for the public sector
in relation to educational and economic justification; and to
approve or disapprove operating and degree-granting authority
for nonpublic colleges and universities. We describe the major
coordinating processes below from the perspectives of those within
the system.
IBHE next drafts a "shadow budget" as an indicator of what it
might recommend to the Governor. Copies of the shadow budget are
given to the presidents and to the Governor's Bureau of the Budget.
This design encourages presidents to buy into IBHE's requests
and concurrently seeks input from the bureau on what is possible.
Even before developing the shadow budget, IBHE tries to get a
sense from the Legislature and the Governor of the resources available
for higher education. The strategy used in the past several years
is to try to present a reasonable budget that has to be given
serious consideration in the Legislature and the Governor's office.
While this process of consultation was cynically described by
one president as "asking for what they know they can get," IBHE
staff believe they push the limit on what the state can provide.
During the most recent year, IBHE cut $90 million from the requests
of system boards while recommending a budget that was more than
$92 million higher than the previous year in general funds support.
The presidents comment on the shadow budget and there is additional
discussion. By January, discussions end; IBHE adopts a budget
and sends it to the Governor and the Legislature. Typically, the
Governor and majority and minority heads of each of the Illinois
houses meet to negotiate and decide on the final budget. For the
last two years, the Governor has agreed to the higher education
budget advanced by IBHE.
By this time, a budget bill has already been introduced in the
Legislature, and it is amended to conform to the recommendations
of the Governor's Bureau of the Budget. At budget hearings, testimony
on higher education is first taken from IBHE staff, then from
the system chancellors or presidents. Institutional chief executive
officers sit with system chancellors and presidents at the hearings.
IBHE conducts several analyses of cost data. Reported costs for
an institution are compared with projected costs if the institution
provided all instruction at the average state cost per student.
Institutions whose costs exceed the per student average by more
than five percent are encouraged to reduce costs. Those with reported
costs below the state average by more than five percent may be
encouraged to reduce enrollment. Cost studies allow IBHE to look
at the results of the PQP process in institutions that have cut
costs, cut programs, or are reallocating funds. The process for
university cost studies as well as the format tables and charts
have been in use for over 15 years so there is a considerable
degree of constancy, stability, and longevity in the financial
data.
The budget process does not always seem as rational and well-organized
to institutional participants as it does to IBHE staff members
who described it for us. The president of a comprehensive university
talked about the process as "bizarre." He said, "Institutions
are forced to begin planning now for what they will need in the
next fiscal year; they work through their own campuses and through
their governing boards and then give something to IBHE. At this
point, categories of incentive funding miraculously appear, but
institutions have not previously been told there is extra money
in the budget if they do an especially good job on x or y." The
president believes that if the process were used correctly it
might really drive the way an institution established and met
policy objectives.
This same president praised the board for providing PQP bonuses
in the budgets of those institutions that had, according to IBHE
representatives, effectively addressed this initiative. He said
this was a powerful way of making a statement about what was important
and should be taken seriously. A community college president was
not so sure that the PQP process furnished usable data about what
was happening on his campus.
A private sector representative suggested that the current cost
data collected by IBHE is "suspect." The methodology excludes
significant costs, he said, such as retirement, fringe benefits,
and capital costs. He thinks that the cost data for each institution
could be 50 percent higher than that reported. Another private
sector representative criticized the IBHE and legislative focus
as revenue-driven rather than expenditure-driven. From his perspective
as well as the perspectives of community college representatives,
the net effect of many board procedures favors four-year institutions
at the expense of community colleges, where funds may be in greater
need.
A representative of the Bureau of the Budget told us that enrollment
expectations or projections are not used at the state level. The
chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee said there does not
appear to be any formula or procedure for relating enrollment
to budgets, then added, "After the fact, IBHE looks at costs-per-student
and then tries to adjust requests." An IBHE staff member suggested
that while budgets in Illinois are not enrollment-driven, a sizable
jump in enrollment at an institution might be considered a justification
for an increase.
Chicago State University is a case in point. During the several
years prior to our visit, the institution increased its enrollment
by 68 percent while receiving only a 19 percent increase in funding.
In the fiscal year 1995 budget cycle, the institution requested
a 29 percent increase which was whittled down to an 11 percent
increase by the Board of Governors and finally to 4.5 percent
by IBHE. An IBHE staff member justified the small increase by
noting that Chicago State had taken a dive in enrollments in the
late 80s while their funding remained relatively stable. The validity
of this explanation notwithstanding, Chicago State was able to
obtain $1.7 million beyond the amount recommended by IBHE in one
of the few exceptions that occurred in that year's budget process.
We were told this happened because Democratic members of the Legislature
wanted to challenge the Governor's claim that he had "an education
budget." Through a series of compromises, each of the legislative
caucuses received funds they could provide to higher education.
The Senate minority leader, who is from Chicago, was instrumental
in arranging the additional funds for Chicago State.
In the final analysis, we were told that the entire system functions not because it's in the statutes, but because it's not. The board has no statutory right to mandate budgets. It can review them, but it does not have final authority over them. The system works because institutional representatives have thought that it is in their general interest to go along, to cooperate, to present a united front, and not to try to submit individual budgets to the Legislature. There have been times when individual institutions, usually the U of I, have threatened to submit their own budget because they were displeased by some of the decisions of IBHE, but in the end they have gone along.
We were told that the most important steps of the program-approval
process happen on campus. When an application is received by IBHE,
it is compared with criteria that have been developed for each
sector. The review process operates at both the formal level (through
advisory committees and other communications) and the informal
level (through constant consultation and collaboration). The process
moves very slowly, a source of comfort to people within and outside
IBHE. The process is more formal and better documented for private
than for public institutions. For community colleges, program
approval takes place primarily at ICCB, with review by IBHE mostly
a formality, unless the program is contested by another institution.
Program challenges most commonly involve duplication. Formal criteria
address this issue in public institutions (including community
colleges), but duplication is not a criterion for the approval
of programs for private institutions. The statute authorizing
board authority for the private sector was essentially a consumer
protection bill, as evidenced by its title in the 1960s as the
"diploma mill bill." On the issue of whether IBHE should approve
private sector programs that reduce the productivity of public
institutions, an IBHE member suggested the board could not stop
private institutions from spending their money. The differences
in IBHE statutory authority for public and private institutions
probably accounts for some of the opinions among individuals we
interviewed that privates are favored in IBHE processes.
Chicago State administrators, who believe the institution would
benefit substantially by having a master's degree in social work
and an MBA program, were critical of the IBHE process for approving
new programs. In the judgment of a senior administrator, this
is because "The process does not allow for the needs of a particular
area such as Chicago." To serve the needs of the population in
a segregated city, the administrator continued, "We need to have
such programs even if they already exist elsewhere."
At the October 1992 board meeting, IBHE staff recommended the
elimination, consolidation, or reduction of 190 programs at public
universities, including seven percent of all undergraduate programs.
In addition to reductions in instructional programs, staff recommendations
called for phasing out state support for intercollegiate athletics,
redirecting six to nine percent of the expenditures for research
and public service to undergraduate education, and paying particular
attention to faculty workload assignments for undergraduate education.
In 1993, the initial 190 programs were increased by another 33
identified by IBHE staff as economically and educationally unjustified.
Out of this total of more than 220 programs, a staff member told
us that about half were either eliminated or reconstituted in
a more cost-efficient format. There are different estimates of
the savings produced by the process. One IBHE staff member estimated
cost savings for the two-year period from 1991 to 1993 at around
$90 million, although he conceded this was a difficult number
to calculate because of the flexibility campuses have in moving
funds around once they receive them from the state. A former staff
member suggested that even if all of the programs on the so-called
hit list in the first and second years had been eliminated, the
savings still would have been "nickel and dime stuff." Supporting
this latter perspective were the comments of a faculty union representative
who told us that most of the faculty in the 125 programs actually
eliminated were absorbed into new programs or moved to other existing
programs. He called the savings "fictitious," arguing that they
came as the result of attrition of faculty members and either
not replacing full-time faculty at all, or replacing full-time
faculty with non-tenured faculty. He also said that some of the
resources freed were used to increase faculty salaries.
A university president told us the common view that institutions
have been able to keep all of the funds saved through PQP is not
quite correct. The PQP process was preceded by a state rescission
that took from institutions one-fourth to one-half of the funds
they were likely to be able to free. Nonetheless, the president
said that the results have been positive and that the real reinvestment
would provide for a stronger system in the future. Even the former
board staff member who described the savings as "nickel and dime
stuff" said that about half of the effort has involved real reform-so
that programs now make more sense than they did before.
In fiscal year 1995, IBHE gave bonuses ranging from $200,000 to
$500,000 to 7 of the 12 public universities they judged particularly
meritorious in implementing the PQP process. The five institutions
that did not get bonuses complained to their local legislators
and the heat grew sufficiently intense that IBHE staff plan to
drop this approach. For fiscal year 1996 they will try to reward
institutions doing the best job by giving them a larger share
of the new program money in the hope that this approach will not
stir up so much trouble in the Legislature. Also to dispel concerns
raised by the 1995 approach, additional money will be provided
to all institutions under a new "undergraduate education" bonus
category.
Board caution is probably justified. At one of the early budget
hearings for the current fiscal year, a legislative representative
for IBHE was asked by the chair of the House Appropriations Committee,
"Are there any blatant things in this budget like the PQP bonuses?"
IBHE is moving toward indicators for academic productivity as
the next stage of PQP. In a public meeting, the chair described
his "ten percent rule." No matter what an institution does, at
least ten percent of the programs they have at any given time
are probably of low quality and in need of review. PQP should
be seen as a continuous quality-improvement initiative. According
to this perspective, the easy program decisions were made in the
first stage and now institutions face the more difficult decisions.
"We are not about saving dollars," he said. "We are trying to
use dollars to transform what we do. In the next phase PQP must
consider the role of the faculty and how they spend their time."
The early stages of the PQP process received high praise from
virtually every political leader we contacted, with the exception
of some Democratic legislators. We were told by an assistant to
the Lieutenant Governor that the process took an onerous burden
off legislators in determining which programs ought to be closed
so that resources in the current environment of constraints could
extend as far as possible. A budget office representative said
PQP has given the impression of accountability and that it has
helped keep budgetary requests within the five percent range that
more or less is reasonable in state budgeting. We were also told
that PQP is appreciated by the Legislature because it departs
somewhat from the consensual processes the board had followed
in the past.
A senior senator described PQP as the first step toward accountability
for IBHE. At the same time, he criticized the board for the timing
of their 1992 report, noting that it was released after the board
had asked universities to evaluate their programs but before universities
had provided the results of this evaluation. The senator added,
"The universities were livid at this action of the board." Democratic
legislators were also critical. A senator who is particularly
concerned about problems at Illinois State University and believes
that the PQP process contributed to them, said the process was
not communicated well and the overall goals were not clear. A
Democratic House staff member, while acknowledging the IBHE attempt
to set priorities, told us that during the worst budget years,
"PQP raised howls from the campuses and from legislators because
IBHE had recommended cuts to some of the sacred cows like the
Northern Illinois Law School and the Illinois State Agricultural
Program." He continued, "These programs were not eliminated because
the IBHE does not have the power to do so." At the time of our
visit, however, the Legislature was no longer Democratic and was
much more supportive of PQP than its predecessors.
Institutional representatives, while generally positive about
the impact of PQP on efficiency, were more qualified in their
praise than political leaders. Some suggested that the impact
of the initiative varied widely by institutional type. A senior
administrator for the U of I said that other institutions had
"stone-walled the IBHE." A faculty union representative argued
that the U of I probably did not pay any attention to it. We were
also told that the Board of Governors praised it publicly but
probably did not do much about it and that the Board of Regents
(particularly Illinois State) defied IBHE. One respondent suggested
that many program reductions involved little more than getting
rid of "catalogue clutter, stuff that's been around for a long
time and people knew shouldn't be offered but was still there
for one reason or another." A prominent example given was an inactive
Ph.D. program in mining at the University of Illinois Urbana campus
that was ultimately abandoned after an unsuccessful effort to
keep it in the catalog.
A faculty member suggested that the IBHE executive director and
chair were in fact "scapegoats to take the heat off institutional
leaders who did not want to confront their faculty." Supporting
this perception were the comments of a senior U of I administrator
who suggested that PQP provided his campus administration with
the camouflage they needed to do the things that needed being
done anyway. He added, "The administration almost leapt for joy
at the board's PQP initiative." A faculty labor representative
described the focus of the board on academic programs as "mistaken,"
arguing that the board should have focused its efforts on administrative
expenses and costs. An official of one of the discontinued system
boards said that building political support has been an important
outcome of the PQP exercise.
Finally, the process clearly worked better in some areas than
in others. Intercollegiate athletics did not go through the same
type of discussion that characterized the other programs identified
by IBHE. Ultimately, IBHE abandoned its effort to redirect state-appropriated
funds from intercollegiate athletics to academic programs.
Whatever the magnitude of savings, it seems clear that IBHE has improved its reputation for effectiveness. A K-12 representative described the PQP process as the closest thing to reform in higher education he has seen, adding, "PQP has given IBHE more muscle and made them more vigorous in their view of the state-level leadership they might provide." A member of IBHE said, "Board reputation has been enhanced because the board has been able to reallocate funds to institutions from the PQP process." A reporter told us PQP had a positive effect on institutions.
We were told by a senior IBHE administrator that articulation
and transfer between two- and four-year institutions has been
on the agenda for almost 100 years because Joliet was founded
in 1910 and current initiatives will be fully implemented in 2010.
From his perspective, IBHE and ICCB made the decision that transfer
and articulation would be addressed cooperatively as a statewide
initiative to develop a systematic process for improvement. As
with other items on the consensus agenda, IBHE started with system
academic officers and involved faculty in leadership positions
on the campuses. To date the initiative has produced a new general
education core acceptable at all public institutions and ten area
panels that jointly encompass 75 percent of the students who transfer.
Panels include high school faculty members as well as faculty
representing universities and colleges. Plans are to have a fully
articulated program in nursing by fall 1996. An IBHE staff member
told us that Illinois has made more progress in articulation and
transfer than most other states.
In contrast, an ICCB member told us that IBHE has studied articulation
for 26 years. When the topic once again came before IBHE recently,
staff suggested that it should be studied some more. The ICCB
member who sits on IBHE rejected the recommendation and used information
about the 3,000 annual reverse transfers to show a senior U of
I administrator what would happen if community colleges decided
to reject their credits. A comprehensive university president
described the new general education core as, "a way of backing
the U of I into a corner so they can be less snooty about taking
general education courses from transfer students." The same president
described the board's approach as "non-substantive but tactically
effective." ICCB staff used the information system to show that
in the final analysis very few students transfer to the U of I.
A staff member from ICCB was even more blunt in his assessment
of IBHE leadership. While acknowledging the transfer and articulation
effort as "useful," he said it was about four or five years behind
most progressive states. He added, "The place where articulation
is worse is with the U of I and that is where IBHE should have
and could have done the most, but hasn't. IBHE has stepped in
and grabbed the agenda and taken credit for progress that has
essentially been accomplished through individual community colleges
and the ICCB." Characterizing IBHE transfer and articulation efforts
as "not cutting-edge," he said that there is "a lot more rhetoric
than actual change."
The reality of Illinois articulation probably lies somewhere between
these contrasting viewpoints-as suggested by the closing comments
of an IBHE staff member. He told us, "Articulation . . . must
constantly be on the agenda. Once you have a general education
core, institutions change their approach to general education,
so the process must constantly be attended." His description of
enforcement procedures for the transfer initiatives and core curriculum
reflected the weak statutory authority of IBHE as well as its
consensus mode of operation. Colleges will submit their requirements
to IBHE and the outcome will be an Internet list maintained by
an office not yet identified.
The IBHE role with respect to relationships between the private
and public sectors seems much more straightforward. A university
president said IBHE's role is to "compromise the public institutions
so they would not trample on the privates." He sees this as a
great source of strength for IBHE in the political context of
Illinois. From a different perspective, the chair of IBHE told
us that the board has a role in preserving good relationships
between the public and private sector. He continued, "Every once
in a while a head of steam builds up to take money away from the
private sector because public higher education has so many problems."
As a chair, he tried "to nip such efforts in the bud."
The "not-so-veiled resentment" that characterized the reactions
of many community college representatives to IBHE was mirrored
in the comments we heard from K-12 respondents. For instance,
we were told that IBHE ignored the K-12 board in its discussion
of admission requirements during the 1980s, despite the fact that
K-12 was involved concurrently in looking at outcomes. We were
also told, "There needs to be some way of linking higher education
and basic education efforts. With respect to minority student
achievement, higher education takes the moral high ground, but
efforts at the institutional level in absence of pressures from
the state have been pretty meaningless. Nothing much happens."
IBHE's efforts to assess affordability were described as another
"strain on the conversation" because the board never considers
the impact on elementary and secondary school costs. Rather, it
sends a message to K-12 education, "If you would do a better job
of preparing students, our costs would go down." One respondent
concluded, "No matter what happens, seems like the ball rolls
downhill."
Concurrently, we were told by IBHE representatives that the relationship between higher education and K-12 was becoming more important. The arrival of a new superintendent and the activities of a joint Board of Education and IBHE Education Committee were identified as "promising developments." From our K-12 respondent's perspective, however, the Education Committee is "a wonderful idea without authority, a very ineffective group" where meetings exemplify the gulf: "They sit on one side, we sit on the other." Most of the effective cooperation between schools and universities, we were told, has occurred at the local level.
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