Board Presentation 18 July 1997

President Aschkenasy, Members of the Board, Chancellor Cox

We want to thank the board for the efforts put into this legislative session to get OSSHE a budget that turns us around from the free fall of the last 6 years. We particularly appreciated your goal of raising faculty salaries toward the mean of salaries in the U.S. by the end of the next three biennia.

It is regrettable that this portion of the budget has been allowed to continue to fall behind that of other institutions around the country. Academe's annual report shows that the cpi has been up 3.3%, faculty salaries generally up 3% while we have the prospect of only 2% per year in Oregon. This figure will put us even lower in the lowest fifth where we now stand according to Academe.

A couple days ago, the chimney sweep swept our chimneys. He is a talkative sort who collects and provides information on any topic you can imagine. He was curious about my earnings as a professor and, when told, noted that he has typically earned $80,000 a year at his trade since he was 17, $20,000 more than I do after 35 years at mine. $20,000. might be worth a little grime.

I was among the educators that met with Governor Kitzhaber on his Education Stakeholders. As you are all aware, he asked that we all work together for a seamless education system in Oregon with a budget that funded all levels adequately. As I participated in this legislative session, it became obvious that higher education's clout and visibility lag considerably behind K-12 and the final legislative action on budgets drove that home. Once K-12 funding was settled, any serious consideration of our add-back requests fell by the wayside in the rush to adjournment. The IFS will look at what we did and ask ourselves if we can be more effective next time as faculty.

As you consider the shape of higher education in Oregon for the next 5 years, here are some points faculty find conflict with reaching our goals. First, with such great reliance on tuition dollars we must retain as many students as possible to make ends meet. However, the very productivity we seek produces large classes that are less satisfactory learning experences for most students, leading them to seek smaller classes elsewhere. Big classes are, in their minds, equated with low quality education. Technology will allow us to have a single instructor feed information to even more students but will it provide a substitute for the one-to-one interactions that students find so attractive and valuable?
Second, a three part conundrum. As we are under greater scrutiny than ever before, more reviews, reports and studies are made. At the same time, cuts in support staff put an ever greater burden of paper work on the faculty themselves. The combination leads to less time to spend with students and for preparing the quality courses that students, industry and the board's plans require. Does it really pay to have faculty salaries going for this kind of work at the expence of education? Is there a way to streamline the support process without diverting faculty energies from education (note: I include research as part of education)?
This third point is less for faculty than for the system. How can we say we are promoting access to higher education when we are forced to have high tuition? One source notes the average debt per student after four years is $15,000. That may seem surmountable but once those whose parents support them are removed, the individual debt rises strikingly. It is not uncommon to find students with debts rising to $40,000 or more as they seek a professional degree. Our socio-political system has been effective as most people have had access to adequate levels of education. An adequate level used to be high school but with the technical civilization we live in now we either open higher education to all qualified applicants regardless of their financial standing or we endanger the free flow of talent into our economic system and enlarge the dissatisfied have-not segment of our society. As it is today, 21% of Oregon's high school graduates move out of state for higher education compared with 9% in California Are we stuck with the user fee mentality or are there ways to sell the state and nation the benefits of affordable higher education?

None of these are easy questions with clear solutions. If the present structure of higher education has too many of these contradictions, it may well be, as Chancellor Cox suggests, be due for a transforming event, pulling us out of the path we have travelled recently.