MSU President, Randy Dunn

Greetings for this week.

It’s my plan to use the next couple of columns to set the stage for some discussions we’ll eventually be convening across the campus—which will last over the course of a year or so—about the new business/financial model we’ll need to determine in advance of the 2013-14 academic term to deal with the loss of $3.2 million in general state support for MSU which conventional wisdom says won’t be coming back…probably not ever.

As I stated in this space last week, I believe we are in pretty good stead—with a combination of operating reserves, a tuition increase that can still remain in the single digits , and some limited cost-savings—to weather this proposed 6.4% reduction in appropriations from the Commonwealth for the upcoming fiscal year, FY13. And I indeed believe we can weather 2012-13 without taking drastic or knee-jerk actions that would immediately jeopardize academic programs, student services, or involve the firing or furloughing of faculty and staff.

But—having stated that—it is critical that we utilize this next “cushion year” to jointly determine a set of recommended actions to deal with this impending cut that we can take to our Board of Regents a little over a year from now—as part of the FY14 University Budget plan. Toward that end, in last week’s Roundabout, I mentioned the idea of looking at some work groups or planning teams with broad campus representation to collaboratively develop these recommendations. Certainly, I could see teams that at a minimum would consider such areas as limiting or reducing programs and services…determining sources of alternative revenue…identifying organizational or structural changes to operations that would provide cost savings…and there could be others.

As I continue to think about our overall approach and sketch out some concrete ideas to get this review and planning process underway—likely sometime later yet this semester—I welcome your emails, calls, and notes for suggestions and guidance. Too, I’m also always willing to make myself available to various campus constituency groups to share my thinking on all this, tapping your collective insight on how we can best proceed with this task over the course of the next 12-15 months. I’ll be outlining the general approach on all this in more detail with the MSU Board of Regents Finance Committee when it next meets on March 1-2—it will be critical to have a Board consensus as to how we will deal with this financial challenge over the next year as well.

Again, as I said last week, there will be much more to come here and elsewhere on this topic.

As mentioned earlier, though, I want to take the remainder of this column, and most of next week’s, to do some ruminating on larger trends, issues, and practices that create an environmental context for some of the tough decisions we’re going to have to make at MSU over the course of the coming year.

This past Tuesday night, in his State of the Union Address, President Obama highlighted the need to reduce the cost of college to assure that Americans will still have access to the higher education opportunities necessary to succeed and contribute to the strengthening of our nation. The President characterized postsecondary education as an economic imperative—and this is a line that many of us here in the Commonwealth have frequently employed to advance the role of the public universities in moving Kentucky forward. Economic development—and all of the social and quality-of-life improvements that derive from that—requires a skill set and knowledge base which often can only be obtained through some type of higher education.

As I write this column (on Thursday), staff from the statewide Council on Postsecondary Education are giving testimony to the Kentucky House Appropriations and Revenue Budget Review Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education (yes, that’s a mouthful) citing research from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University that asserts “[b]y 2018, 54% of all jobs in Kentucky—over 1 million jobs—will require some level of postsecondary education.” If you look at the website for the Center, you’ll note that they say as many as 60% of jobs nationally will require some higher education in that same timeframe: http://cew.georgetown.edu

However, the current economic climate has made the growing cost of a university education a barrier for many Kentuckians and others within the larger catchment region of MSU. So the pressure is not going to abate one iota for Murray State—nor any other institution—to ensure that we remain both accessible and affordable.

What this all means, of course, is that we’re going to be expected to keep our tuition and fee pricing reduced while increasing the number of students who come to us…and then make certain they succeed in getting a degree over four years’ time. The only way to pull this off when state support is getting cut is through a rethinking and redesign of components in the HIED system to heighten efficiency and productivity. President Obama suggested in his SOTU speech that much can be done to lower costs while maintaining quality standards—something that’s important for us to balance at MSU. But just to get the attention of those of us laboring in the Academy, the President even proposed shifting some federal aid away from institutions that don’t keep net tuition down and provide good value.

We’re in a decent position to deal with this at Murray State, though. As I’ve stated many times in conjunction with the 12 11X12 enrollment initiative, we have capacity to absorb increasing enrollment without a concomitant and exponential increase in costs to the University. The revenue overage from our added students will help us meet the President’s goals. However, there is no doubt that as we look over the course of the next year at how to respond to a multi-million dollar loss in our state appropriations, we also have to be willing to start confronting some core assumptions on how we structure, fund, and deliver an outstanding MSU education.

We don’t yet know how all this will be operationalized on the Murray State campuses…but we can be pretty sure that change to our current model is going to happen in some form or fashion. American Higher Education has been on the cusp of this fundamental change and restructuring for some time now—and we’re going to start experiencing it here, in far west Kentucky, while doing our best to ensure the adjustments we make emerge from a rational, thoughtful, and methodical process.

Next week—in the second of this little series—I’ll pontificate some on the paradox we are living with now in traditional HIED: that of having to look and act more like a “business,” while those for-profit “businesses” calling themselves institutions of higher learning are selling unknowing students a bill of goods.

OK…all that being said…have a great week!

Randy Dunn

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