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Last updated: Wednesday, May 9, 10:51 a.m.
News

Trustees mull tying campus funding to performance

By Chris Chase
Posted on Feb. 02, 2012, at 12:39 a.m.

The University of Maine System board of trustees has decided to search for consulting services to pursue a performance-based funding model for the University of Maine System.

The move, determined at the trustees’ Jan. 23 meeting, is still in the conceptual stages. It aims to link funding to the performance of either academic departments or individual campuses systemwide.

For instance, instead of basing funding on the needs of individual departments and campuses, based on their size and scope, a performance-based funding model would link certain funding criteria to graduation and retention rates throughout the system.

Applications for the consultant position are not due until late February, and the review process won’t start until the end of the month. Currently, university officials have only ideas of what a future performance-based budget could look like.

“We’re in the process of putting out a request for qualifications for performance-based budgets,” said Peggy Markson, spokeswoman for the University of Maine System.

The selected consulting service will have until June 29 to make any reports, and the system will make its decisions after reviewing those reports.

“It’s way too early to figure out what it’s going to be,” said Michelle Hood, chair of the board of trustees. “We’re thinking about having individual campuses methodize around their strategic goals.”

Naomi Jacobs, chair of the University of Maine’s Department of English, sees problems with trying to form a performance-based funding model targeting individual departments.

“If the definition emphasizes external research dollars and research publications, the arts and humanities at UMaine will be at a disadvantage on both counts,” she said. “We certainly have many active scholars and artists but there are many fewer grant opportunities in the arts and humanities than in the [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] disciplines.

“The grants that are available to us are much smaller, and our faculty tend to have appointments and job descriptions that emphasize teaching,” she added. “On the other hand, the arts and humanities generate a lot of tuition dollars because of our heavier teaching loads and our role in general education. In that regard, we out-perform most of the STEM disciplines.”

With multiple levels of possible criteria and the huge array of classes offered at UMaine, any funding model that is separated by various departments quickly becomes complicated.

However, if the funding model holds to statistics such as graduation rates, complications still arise.

“I’d be surprised to see a model based purely on graduation rates,” Jacobs said. “I don’t think we would do anything very different in our classes on the basis of such a model. A fair number of our majors don’t declare until they are juniors, shifting from another major, or adding a second major, and this sometimes delays their graduation.”

Performance-based budgeting is a rising trend at state institutions across the country. Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma and other states have either proposed or followed similar funding plans, according to the Midwestern Higher Education Compact.

Each school receives state funding based upon a number of criteria, such as graduation rates and student retention, which could be used in rethinking funding in the University of Maine System.

Regardless of the method for changing the budget, the board of trustees and faculty agree that something needs to change on a system and campus level.

“I do not think our current model of funding is sustainable,” Jacobs said. “The allocation of budget cuts to the colleges, whose budgets consist almost entirely of faculty lines, means that faculty who retire or leave for another position are not being replaced.”

The poor economy and lower availability of state funds, added to the freeze in tuition rates, will make for tough decisions ahead.

“We want to evaluate what our options are. We want to provide the best funding model possible,” Hood said. “We don’t really know what that will be at this point. It’s too soon to tell.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2012, 12:39 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.

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  • MECommenter

    So, according to English Professor Jacobs, keep everything the way it is.  Sheesh.  Who’s the reactionary now?

  • none

    Leadership crisis?

    No problem.

    Hire a consultant.

  • Amy Fried

    Faculty have no control over admissions decisions and don’t organize or run programs for students most likely to experience academic problems. As professionals, they give grades based on students’ output — writing, lab reports, exams. Quality departments do not practice grade inflation. Faculty also have no control over financial aid.

    For departments to then be responsible for graduation rates — which is greatly affected by finances and academic status — is inappropriate.

  • King Tut Jr.

    Howard Segal, Prof. of History

    Whatever comes down from the Board of Trustees to the seven campuses has already been tried–successfully or not–elsewhere in America. For better or for worse, we follow other states re higher education. The problems arise when supposedly scientific models are embraced without sufficient grasp of grass-roots realities, as Profs. Jacobs and Fried make clear. Those who impose these models are so removed from the daily realities of campus and academic life that, as has happened countless times since the System was created several decades ago, expectations are often not met. One might ask why those who impose consultants on the System’s ordinary employees aren’t themselves held to some kind of performance review. But that never happens. I would guess that the taxpayers of Maine have paid at least ten million dollars in consultants’ fees over the past two decades alone. Could those precious dollars have instead been spent, at least in part, on replacing some faculty?

  • Suzanne_moulton

    How about UMS “consulting” some of the experts they have in their employ to get answers instead of going outside to pay thousands of scarce dollars to someone with absolutely no conception of our state, our students, our needs, our strengths. Is the fact that UMS chooses to hire “outside consultants” at every bend indicative of their faith in the people they have hired to educate here?

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_H42QFRNGIVG36JTIS536PFBLS4 Brian

    That’s a great idea… we continue to lower the bar in our public schools to get ALL of the kids through so why not do it in Colleges and Universities.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_TWPACSVHFZJV5BWDLOSTKDNKFQ John Perry

    “Ordinary employees”, my, my. Do you walk on water sir? 

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_TWPACSVHFZJV5BWDLOSTKDNKFQ John Perry

    When I went to nursing school, (another life-time ago) the person responsible for “graduation rates” was the student. At one point in my freshman year after a particular difficult exam, 25% of the class was flunking out. There wasn’t any grade inflation and the bell curve of grades looked like a bell. If by chance you were in the 25% of the above class, you were told to hit the books and that the teachers were availabe for consultation.   These may be old concepts but they worked.   Today, extra credit points can be gained by bringing in a pan of brownies or cookies the last day of classes. What exactly are the people of Maine paying for in this system? 

  • Anonymous

    Great, bringing the mentality of No Child Left Behind to the college level. Performance base funding has worked so well for public school.

  • Anonymous

    Aren’t you pre-judging the process? Why wouldn’t a consultant worth his/her salt agree with you and recommend appropriate faculty input?
    It would seem that one reason universities, let alone university systems tend to be so difficult to manage is that so many of the players involved prefer to view their world through a monoscope.

  • Anonymous

    Accountability in education?  The Leftists profs will come up with many fictious reasons why accountability and anything performance based is impossible.

  • Anonymous

    You parsed that wrong. Read it again.

  • Kathleen March

    The comment about extra credits is unnecessary.  I have never heard of anybody bringing in brownies or cookies the last day as an assignment.  I have, on the other hand, had students ask if they can do extra credit work.  My answer is always: Do the work on the syllabus.  Read the  syllabus.  

    As for performance-based funding, how can one possibly compare that in different fields?  The requirements are so varied.  And bell curves are not used in every class.  People who do not know what goes on in a classroom, and in specific classrooms, cannot know know whether the courses are taught well or the material learned by students.  Performance in a language, art, music, theater, etc, is not to be compared to that in nursing, engineering, accounting.