Head of Nevada colleges calls for more money
Chancellor Jim Rogers, head of all Nevada colleges, hates seeing the numbers 49 and 50 next to Nevada in national higher education rankings.In his State of the System speech last week, Rogers said Nevada ranks 49th in population enrolled in college, the number of citizens with a degree and in the chance a high school freshman will eventually earn a bachelor’s degree. And it ranks last in the United States for the level of education among young workers.
“I am sickened with the constant barrage of statistics that say that Nevada is last and I intend to change them with your help,” he said in the speech Oct. 9. “We have a devastating train wreck in our future if we do not start to act now.”
He said in a recent New York Times article that graduation and retention rates are “awful” within the Nevada System of Higher Education – the six-year graduation rate is 43.8 percent – and told the newspaper “we do very little very well.”
He said there’s a solution: more money in the system. But there’s a problem – where will the money come from?
Rogers said more money would let NSHE lure better students with scholarships and buy better professors. The reaccredidation team praised the University of Nevada, Reno two weeks ago for high-quality faculty but Rogers said faculty can never be good enough.
“What you’ve done, you’ve provided scholarships and you’ve hustled the best students and you’ve hustled the best professors,” Rogers said.
To pay for a better university population, the chancellor suggested tuition increases, more state money and greater donations from the state’s private sector.
A committee of higher education officials and student representatives will meet this winter to decide if tuition hikes are a good idea, UNR President Milton Glick said.
Although Rogers said students should expect tuition hikes, Glick said nothing is for sure yet.
“I think that’s worth exploring,” Glick said. He gave no example of what a possible tuition increase could be.
Rogers said in an interview that most students can afford a tuition hike and the extra money could help with scholarships for those who can’t.
Stephen Porter, a 22-year-old history major with two years left until graduation, said he would pay between $5,000 and $10,000 more a year if it meant a more prestigious college and better professors.
“If there was a higher level of education here, then I wouldn’t have to worry about transferring schools for other graduate programs,” Porter said. “I just could move up.”
Rogers promised in his speech that Nevada’s tuition and fees would remain among the lowest in the nation but said students could expect to hear proposals that they would pay “considerably” more.
The average in-state tuition at UNR is $2,850 a year, according to the UNR Web site. The average four-year institution costs $5,491 a year, according to the American Council on Education.
But the availability of scholarships and loans must keep pace, he said. The UNR Foundation, which solicits donations and endowments from people and organizations, gave out about $2.5 million in scholarships last year. More came from system-wide and athletic endowments.
Suzanne Bach, scholarship coordinator for UNR, said most of their money comes from endowments. But many endowments are fairly new or aren’t very large, leaving UNR with many smaller scholarships, she said.
Enrollment also outpaced the endowments and left the scholarship office stretched thin, she said.
“It’s simple mathematics – as college costs have gone up and our scholarship amounts have stayed the same, it’s been harder and harder for us to cover the costs,” Bach said.
Sociology professor Markus Kemmelmeier said UNR’s inexpensive tuition, compared to other universities of similar size, gives students more of an incentive to drop out or leave the state.
“Basically, you can afford to be more fickle,” Kemmelmeier said. “However, if someone invested more money (with higher tuition), you’re less likely to walk away from that.”
He said UNR isn’t less demanding than other universities, but a combination of low-tuition costs system-wide and the state’s gaming industry, which offers high pay for low education, share some responsibility for UNR’s low graduation rate, which is about 50 percent.
“And that’s low because typically at other universities that we compare ourselves to are around 70 percent,” he said.
Rogers said on a whole, the private sector doesn’t help higher education with enough scholarships for students or money for the colleges.
“The donations from the private sector have been very inadequate and you can quote me on that,” Rogers said in an interview.
He said in the speech that all world-class colleges have been built with more than 75 percent of resources coming from the private sector. He said businesses benefit from a better-educated population – college graduates earn more money to spend and provide more technical skills.
The head of the UNR Foundation, John Carothers, said the foundation could do better outreach to business and community members. But higher education leaders need to know getting donations means waiting for donors to be ready, not the university.
“The chancellor has high academic aspirations and we think very highly of that and we hope we can keep up with his aspirations,” Carothers said.
As for getting more money from state lawmakers, UNR political science professor Eric Herzik said legislators probably wouldn’t give higher education a bigger budget in the 2009 legislative session as it competes with an under funded K-12 system.
“There is some evidence that not everybody is on board when saying education is K-16,” he said of state lawmakers.
Regent Ron Knecht, an economist by trade, said before asking for more money, NSHE should look at using the money it already gets more efficiently.
“Yeah, we can do a lot better with a whole lot of money,” he said. “But the more interesting challenge is doing better with the same amount of money or with a little bit more money.”
Knecht said students would be willing to pay more if they knew they were going to get their money’s worth.
He would support more money for the system with more performance oversight.
The majority of UNR’s money – 36.5 percent – this year came from the state. Student fees and tuition made up almost 15 percent and private donations are about 2.5 percent.
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