The 'performance' drug

Arkansas has been tinkering for a few years with a nationwide higher-education concept to send more money to colleges that retain and graduate more students and less money to those that retain and graduate fewer students.

It's counter-intuitive. The previously time-honored concepts of equity and need were to give colleges essentially equal amounts per enrollee and reserve any extra money for those that weren't getting the job done and presumably needed special help.

More than 30 states are now moving at varying speeds toward this new idea of "performance-based" rather than "enrollment-based" higher-education funding.

Since 2012, Arkansas has been increasing by 5 percent per year, up to a cap of 25 percent, the share of state dollars per institution that was based on a performance calculation.

But it's been a rather lame experience. Colleges were judged only against their previous years, not a prevailing standard, and those losing money could turn around and get that money back by filing an improvement plan.

What Gov. Asa Hutchinson wants--because Republicans love the idea of institutional competition for higher-education dollars by the same principle that has them embracing public school choice and charter schools--is to rewrite the entire higher-education formula mostly on a performance basis, and apply it to all four-year and two-year institutions in the state.

The state Higher Education Coordinating Council has approved the concept and a working group is set to approve the particulars Sept. 19. After that, the Higher Education Department will run some numbers to see which colleges celebrate and which howl, and how raucously and how desperately.

It is a complex matter. For example, I remarked to Maria Markham, the new director of the state Higher Education Department, that the thrust seemed certain to funnel more cash to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, with its emphasis on more elite students, and take money from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, which largely serves an educationally and economically disadvantaged student population.

Actually, not so, she said. For one thing, she said, there are "metrics" in the new formula other than the rates of retention, progression and graduation.

UAPB, for example, will get extra weighting for serving a disadvantaged, largely African American student body. Other schools, primarily community colleges in De Queen and Rogers, will get extra weighting for serving a disadvantaged, largely Hispanic population.

And all schools, Markham said, will get extra weighting for nontraditional students ages 24 to 53, since one objective is to get the state's vast college-dropout population back to college. The UA-Fayetteville campus is a decidedly traditional school covered up in youngsters 18 to 22. That means it will not get nearly the percentage increase other institutions will get for disadvantaged or nontraditional students.

But then Fayetteville ought to rack up in the weighting for student advancement in science, engineering, technology and math.

Markham mentioned that the department had run some preliminary numbers based on the "metrics" that have been plugged unofficially into the not-yet-finalized new formula proposal. And that intrigued me, of course. I wanted to know: Who is taking a big hit? How much?

She wasn't saying yet, of course. Political trouble shouldn't be invited prematurely.

Anyway, she said, all current numbers are based on 2015 budget levels. The new formula proposes to go into effect in 2018, and to be based subsequently on budget levels in effect in 2018. That will give losers nearly two years to see what's wrong and fix it.

Beyond that, Markham said, the formula likely will provide that no one loses more than 2 percent the first year, and no more than some graduated percentage for the few years after that.

Will there be institutions that will need that 2 percent first-year reduction floor in order to avoid much more precipitous reductions?

Well, yes, Markham said. But the idea, she hastened to add, is not to punish anyone. It's to encourage performance by rewarding it.

In that regard, she mentioned that higher-education institutions likely would ask state legislators next year for a small increment of something they haven't had for years, meaning a "modest increase" in overall state funding.

They will feel justified in doing so, she said, on account of their willingness to live by this new performance model.

So this amounts to a most interesting issue, both as policy and politics. It is troubling in a way, but encouraging in another.

Through it all, I must remind that the final say-so on the amounts of money individual colleges and universities get--one not likely to change--has much to do with which colleges have the most influential legislative allies sitting in on the closed-door writing of the Revenue Stabilization Act to allocate budgets among priorities of spending.

I'm not advised of any plan to change that process.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 08/28/2016

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