Volume 46 Number 2
Time to check the college budget
By Ron Norton Reel, Ph.D
CCA President
The California Community College faculty members are being asked to do more and more with less and less. Faculty are teaching larger classes, offering fewer classes, and not receiving additional compensation for taking on this added work. Most professors have not had a raise in over three years. At the same time, our students have fewer class choices, take longer to transfer and are not progressing through certificated programs as rapidly as before.
Administration complains at every level that if only they did not have to use 50 percent of their budget on faculty and teaching aides, they could do so much more for the college. How could this possibly be true? There is basically only one way our colleges earn their budget – by faculty. Faculty members teach students. The college is paid for the students who are being taught in the classrooms or online. It is time to reexamine the priorities of our colleges.
Public is shocked
It is time we check the college budget line item by item. We should examine how any money that is spent by the college relates back to the mission of teaching students. When I discuss this issue with members of the public, it seems that not only do they disagree with these administrative statements, they are shocked that so little is spent on faculty and students.
It is time we check the college budget line item by item. We should examine how any money that is spent by the college relates back to the mission of teaching students. When I discuss this issue with members of the public, it seems that not only do they disagree with these administrative statements, they are shocked that so little is spent on faculty and students.
How do administrators justify spending so little on students and faculty? The disconnection between the administration and the public is found in the approach administration has taken regarding how the college budget should be spent. More and more administrative leaders view the college as a business model. When one views education in this view, we move away from the core value of providing a balanced budget each year to the college. Until recent times, the college was not expected to make money. Instead, the mentality was to spend the budget in any given year to meet as many of the student needs as possible within the budget provided. The bottom line for current administrators is they believe a substantial reserve should be left over at the end of each year. They contend that a larger reserve demonstrates they have met the business concept of providing profit for the institution. For the very first time in the history of California Community Colleges, last year the collective 72 districts had over $1 billion in unrestricted reserves. When administrators are asked why they are cutting programs and have these unspeakable reserves the message has been crafted from their organizations that suggest “We need to save for a rainy day.”
It’s already raining
The question before us is, “What constitutes a rainy day?” Unfortunately, not many of the administrators realize the rain has been here for the past three years. Faculty and students have lost class sections, been asked to participate in furlough days, reduced their salaries, and have been asked to pay more and more of their medical benefits. Even in this climate, the districts have further increased reserves (now being called positive variance by districts) because they over-project expenses and under-predict revenues. This philosophy of constantly increasing higher reserves each year is counterproductive to the mission statement and goals of colleges to provide the best and most efficient education possible within the money provided by the legislature year by year.
For the past two years, the legislature has begun to advance a new economic theory of deferral allocations to the districts. This year, the intra-year deferrals are unchanged from last year’s $300 million. The inter-year deferrals increased from $703 million to $832 million. This amount is just less from what the districts have in their unrestricted reserves. Perhaps this new policy is a message to the districts to spend down their reserves annually and voluntarily before the legislature forces them to be taken away permanently.
Paradigm shift
In 1999 approximately 45 percent of the faculty teaching higher education in America was part-time. Today it is approaching 60 percent in many of our colleges. Did this just happen? No, it has been a slow and deliberate paradigm shift.
Administrators have sought at every level to provide part-time faculty short-term contracts (semester to semester only) and providing little due process rights.
There are recent studies that show students do better when taught by full-time faculty, because full-time faculty are on campus, they have office hours, and teaching is their full-time job. That makes sense. It’s not that part-time faculty aren’t good, but they don’t have the same resources. CCA and other organizations have been working for years to get more part-time faculty hired as full-time faculty because it’s better for student achievement.
Let’s make the students our priority. Districts should invest additional money into the colleges by providing parity pay and office hours to part-time faculty so our students don’t suffer because they are taking classes from the faculty member the district does not support in the same way as a full-time faculty member is supported.
If districts continue to spend less on our students by employing more and more part-time faculty, I suggest the students file a class action law suit against the districts for not providing the same level of education to all students.