Now that the semester's started, I've been a lot less active here than I was over the winter break. That's partly because I needed to be most active here in the weeks and days
before Governor Hochul's
State of the State Address and release of the
State Fiscal Year 2025 Executive Budget. But it's mostly because I've been doing the work that comes with the first two weeks of classes:
- keeping up with the reading load that I've assigned in my Fantasy Fiction and Critical Reading classes;
- getting to know my new students and adjusting my teaching plans accordingly;
- holding a minimum of ten office hours per week (to be available to the nearly 60 students in my classes, about a dozen advisees, and colleagues I represent and work most closely with as chair of the Fredonia University Senate, immediate past chair of the English Department, member of the United University Professions Chapter Executive Board, and English Committee member who's part of a team currently shepherding a revision to the English B.A. through the SUNY approval process);
- supporting the planning of campus events, including Fredonia's Writers @ Work, which is fast approaching the hosting of its 50th alumni writer-in-residence (from multiple majors and on many career paths);
- attending campus events (including a powerful call to action from Dr. Shaun Nelms as part of Fredonia's Martin Luther King, Jr., celebration and a moving memorial to Dr. Shannon Jonas, the only poet in the Fredonia English department, who died far too young, suddenly and unexpectedly, just before Christmas, but who lives on in his family, friends, and students);
- speaking at the campus kickoff event (which was delayed by more than a week due to the mid-January double blizzard);
- contributing to the UFS Executive Committee's work as its Immediate Past Vice President/Secretary (which includes planning the Public Good U conference this November, and more I touch on below);
- leading the SUNY University Faculty Senate Governance Committee (we're putting the finishing touches on a toolkit on campus free speech that builds on UFS resolution 196-01-1 [Ensuring Non-Discrimination, Enhancing Campus Inclusivity, and Supporting All SUNY Students, Faculty, and Staff], which began as a suggestion and draft from us, among many projects this academic year);
- leading the Fredonia Senate (our first meeting of the spring semester is this coming Monday), Senate Executive Committee (on which more below), and informal Senate leadership team (which includes everyone with an expectation of confidentiality [Executive Committee members and co-chairs of the Planning and Budget Committee]).
So all in all it's actually been a pretty normal start to a spring semester—especially now that everything except the largest snow piles is melted and there's nothing but pretty decent weather for this time of year on the horizon. Sure, given my course releases from being English Department chair from 2015-2021 academic years and Senate chair during the 2022-2024 academic years, my service load may be a little heavier than most, but if you check in on any faculty member at Fredonia this weekend, you'd find a similar overall level of activity and accomplishment. We all know that spring semesters are always busy, always intense, always starting at full speed and accelerating from there.
Most of all, spring is when the budget season and the recruitment season kick into high gear. And because of that, I'm taking a little pause from some of my additional confidential work (fulfilling the charge at this stage of Fredonia's Program Deactivation Review Process [
PDRP]; researching and writing for the UFS team that's crafting a statement in response to Governor Hochul's Executive Budget; learning more about a regional advocacy team that's being assembled; supporting campus governance leaders at campuses in similar situations as Fredonia's) to respond to a January 27th op-ed in the Dunkirk
Observer from a former member of the Fredonia College Council and adjunct lecturer in Sociology, JoAnn Niebel, and a January 31st interview on the
Capitol Press Room with SUNY Chancellor John B. King, Jr.
As much as I appreciate, like, and respect both of them, I also disagree with them on some pretty important matters. By putting them in dialogue on enrollment and state support, financial distress and financial responsibility, and college affordability and state financial aid in what follows, I'll set up my own ideas for solutions and make clear when, where, how, and why I agree, and disagree, with them.
Enrollment and State Support
JN: RECRUITMENT ENROLLMENT RETENTION — this should be the major effort by this administration, Campus wide and community driven.... I truly respected President Dennis Hefner and the impact he made. I was always encouraged because at every meeting he emphasized the importance of Recruitment, Enrollment and Retention! He was enthusiastic and driven and as an economist very aware of the financial impact of tuition dollars. He was always true BLUE and he directed a period of tremendous growth at Fredonia. There is no reason this cannot be repeated.
JK: The good news is enrollment going up is good for the financial picture of the SUNY system as a whole. I'd say alongside enrollment is the question of state support.... We are clear that over time we are going to need significant state investment to keep up with growing expenses.... Certainly, we negotiated a really strong contract with UUP—well-deserved raises for faculty. That's going to cost us about 86 million dollars this year. We'd love help covering those costs....
According to the SUNY
Report on Long-Term Enrollment and Financial Sustainability, Fredonia had the second-largest one-year drop in undergraduate enrollment (-10.6%) among SUNY's comprehensive colleges and universities and third-largest in the entire system, as well as the second-largest one-year drop in total headcount (-7.8%) in the system; over a ten-year period, Fredonia was also next-to-last, with a 40.3% decline in total headcount (25, 27, 29). Nobody disputes that everyone at Fredonia needs to pull together to figure out what in all our past and recent efforts has been working and what new approaches need to be developed to arrest and start reversing these trends. Like Professor Niebel, I am encouraged that our new Vice President of Enrollment Management and Services Kathryn Kendall is a Fredonia alum and has already hit the ground running in her first week on the job. I look forward to speaking with her at Monday's Senate meeting.
And yet, enrollment is only part of the story across SUNY and at Fredonia. As I've been repeating until I'm blue in the face, and as Chancellor King himself emphasizes in his interview with David Lombardo, state investments matter. And cuts to Fredonia's direct state aid preceded and remain deeper than Fredonia's enrollment declines; in fact, the deepest cuts came while our enrollments were rising.
This is why a commitment by New York State to funding the contractual increases it's negotiated with its statewide unions across SUNY and CUNY—which the
Fredonia University Senate and the
SUNY UFS have been calling for, for years—would be such a game-changer for places like Fredonia that have become so tuition dependent as a result of long-term state disinvestment in core operating support. Finally refusing to pass along the cost of contractual increases to the campuses would go a long way toward "putting an end to the era of annual real-dollar operating budget cuts" to SUNY and CUNY that both governance bodies have been calling for, as well.
It's clearly going to take a concerted political effort to get NYS's political system and leaders to prioritize making our state
the national leader in college affordability and in sustainably and equitably supporting and advancing the mission of public higher education—
the national leader in funding and pricing SUNY and CUNY like the public goods they are.
Financial Distress and Financial Responsibility
JN: After being on the College Council for 26 years I have never been more concerned about the future of the campus than at this time.
JK [addressing the question of directing "targeted" or "bridge" funding to distressed campuses in next year's Enacted Budget]: Well, look, alongside investment has to come responsible fiscal stewardship. We can't have faculty teaching to empty classrooms. And so every campus, whatever their financial picture, should be looking at their programs and asking, "is this a program where there's real student demand and real community need?" And when you have a major, for example, that has two students in it, that's not something that can be supported long-term. And so you've either gotta find a way to increase student interest or demand, or you've gotta look at that program and say, "is this really something we should continue doing." ....We are not going to be a place where every conceivable major is offered on every campus, but, as a system, we can offer literally anything that a student is interested in studying, and on every campus, students are going to get a rich liberal arts education that's going to involve study in a range of fields. [On campuses where enrollment stabilization rather than increase is the goal and where "adjustments in staffing, programs, and infrastructure to match being a much much smaller campus" are needed so they can be "long-term, sustainable,"] they do have to make some financial choices that are difficult but important to make them sustainable.
JN: [T]he truth is no money is attached to a “major” and no money is saved by eliminating them. The savings would only come from eliminating budgeting to that program — faculty, support staff, technical support, etc. But not one word has been said about those efforts — for example, will there be layoffs? ...Time wasted on efforts that will bring little to no measurable improvement should become secondary. SUNY Fredonia means so much to the campus community and impacts the surrounding communities in multiple ways! We are definitely on the precipice—we cannot fall into the abyss!
Chancellor King has made it crystal clear that he needs to see significant efforts from financially distressed campuses to climb out of the budgetary holes they are in as a result of the combination of decreases in direct state aid and in enrollment that I discussed in the last section. Given multiple opportunities in his latest interview, he refused to endorse calls from campus governance bodies or unions or legislative leaders for ladders of dedicated new state funding to be extended into those budget holes, or even any climbing ropes than enrollment-directed ones. And he's remained steadfast in his position that every SUNY campus has needs, challenges, and opportunities, so every campus needs funding increases, and it would neither be fair nor strategic to focus limited investments only on the most struggling campuses. But where does this leave Fredonia and others like us?
I understand that as the leader of an entire system, Chancellor King needs to balance the needs of every part of that system. And I'm glad he quickly backpedalled from that "empty classrooms" quip. First off, not all teaching occurs in a classroom. There can be all kinds of good reasons for an institution to invest in high-quality, high-engagement, very small classes such as internships, undergraduate research opportunities (labs, theses, assistantships, etc.), music lessons, independent studies, and so on. And even if a major is very small, faculty teach all kinds of courses, not just upper-level courses that can be taken only by majors (of which there are fewer than you might expect). Moreover, Fredonia has been focusing on curricular efficiency for over a decade, which means that any section with fewer than 12 students requires a special justification from the chair and dean to continue running. After working with the Delaware Cost Study, Ad Astra, and EAB over the years, Fredonia puts together one of the most efficient class schedules in the nation, every single semester. Furthermore, every new faculty line in the last decade has had to be fought for and justified in the face of incredibly strict scrutiny, while retirements and other kinds of attrition in many academic areas have led to incredible shrinking faculties in many departments.
So I question Chancellor King's implication that campuses in financial distress have brought their problems on themselves over the last decade through inaction or other failures of fiscal responsibility, when in fact we've saved over $20M at Fredonia over that time period through a combination of strategies, including curricular efficiency and curricular transformation, but also, unfortunately, radically reducing staffing in non-instructional areas where workers are part of CSEA, as well. It's precisely because we've become so good at controlling non-personnel costs and directing significant resources toward instructional costs that we face the current dilemma: how to advance curricular transformation and innovation in smart, strategic ways that will lead to enrollment stabilization and growth, minimizing harm to student retention, success, recruitment, and actual faculty whose teaching conditions, after all, are student learning conditions?
If Chancellor King will not rethink how SUNY allocates the state operating funds it receives for next year's budget, how will Fredonia keep from falling from the "precipice" into the "abyss" Professor Niebel warns about? Her language here reminds me of my
October 2023 message:
Why is it that everyone involved in designing and running the marathon of the last two decades—from New York State Governors and legislative leaders to SUNY Chancellors and SUNY Fredonia Presidents—has been complicit in kicking the financial sustainability and stewardship can down the road? That longstanding efforts by United University Professions and the SUNY University Faculty Senate, among many others, to point to the unsustainability and inequities of New York State’s funding model for SUNY—and to offer alternatives and solutions—repeatedly get dismissed, delayed, deferred?
What seems to be happening across New York State is a realization that this situation is untenable, that kicking the can down the road is becoming an ever-riskier option as the marathon’s course rises and narrows—and as that cliff on the other side of those increasingly rusty guardrails with the concerning number of rusted-out sections becomes deeper, steeper, and more jagged with every kick.
What remains to be seen is what follows from this realization.
I would submit today that New York State's elected and appointed leaders are no closer to taking responsibility for their own financial decision-making regarding public higher education than they were when I wrote this nearly four months ago.
This ties to the reason I gave SUNY's Report on Long-Term Enrollment and Financial Sustainability only a B+ just over a month ago, despite writing that "it may well be the best piece of research, analysis, and writing to come out of SUNY System Administration in my 25-year-plus career at Fredonia." To be frank, it's A-level work all the way up until the Financial Sustainability section, where it barely rises to a C and may actually be incomplete. After nearly two years to put together this report, where is the analysis of costs of instruction and total non-instructional costs—including breakdowns such as costs of academic support, other student services, Management/Confidential administrators, UUP professionals, and CSEA workers—on every campus, over time? Where is the response to the SUNY UFS's April 2022 Costs of Administration Study resolution 191-02-1? Where is even the acknowledgment of receipt of the Fredonia University Senate's October 2023 Public Good Index resolution? Where is the system-wide data on section sizes, faculty FTE/student credit hour ratios, costs and revenues per credit hour, student progress toward degree, and other measures that would help chairs and deans build efficient schedules, identify obstacles and chokepoints on the path toward graduation, and response to Sandy Baum's and Michael McPherson's call to examine "spending patterns, attempting to analyze which programs [instructional and non-instructional] are particularly important for student success" (Campus Economics [2023], 102). There is so much data that SUNY System Administration should be collecting, using to create dashboards, and providing to campuses to help them make the difficult financial decisions that Chancellor King is calling for.
I've been looking at budget books and listening to campus Presidents and Chief Financial Officers for a very long time. And I can think of fewer than five years out of my 25+ at Fredonia that we weren't facing some kind of deficit, including many years when our enrollments were much higher than they are now. So if Chancellor King is committed to the long-term sustainability of campuses like Fredonia's, at some point he's going to have to make it clear what balance of public and private revenues he expects us to arrive at. Which means making it clear what SUNY System is willing to invest in recurring direct state operating aid to Fredonia to get us to that equilibrium. At some point this year, he's going to have to put his cards on the table.
College Affordability and State Financial Aid
JK: SUNY's tuition is extraordinarily affordable, just over seven thousand dollars. It's more affordable than many of our neighboring state peers. So that commitment to affordability has to be matched by a commitment to continued investment in the SUNY system, if we're going to be financially sustainable.
JN: The annual tuition at Fredonia is $23,960.
There are several different ways of understanding college affordability. This exchange between Chancellor King and Professor Niebel illuminates the difference between tuition on its own (~$7K) and the total price of attendance (~$24K). We know that over half of SUNY's students attend tuition-free and almost half of SUNY's students graduate debt-free, thanks to federal, state, university, and private sources of financial aid. But what about the other half? And what about the students who choose more affordable options?
As the father of a 20-year-old college sophomore and a 17-year-old high school senior, one of the biggest things that matters to me is the net price of attendance for a year of college for my daughters. My older daughter is attending a small liberal arts college for about $7K less per year than the nearest competitors (which included other small liberal arts colleges such as my own alma mater Hamilton College—and UB). I've argued repeatedly here and elsewhere that SUNY needs to get serious in the net price wars, the inevitable tuition and other discounting that higher education institutions of all types and sizes can't help but avoid in the decade-plus of the "demographic cliff" that's New York will go over in 2025.
This is why I'm so excited that so many players are lining up—from campus and system governance bodies to higher education unions, from SUNY to
CICU, from Senator Stavisky to Assemblymember Fahy to NYPIRG—to pressure the federal government to increase the value of the Pell scholarship, the state government to
#TurnOnTheTAP, and both to rethink long-standing income thresholds and other barriers to eligibility. Yes, it's no substitute for further increases to direct state aid for public higher ed, and should not be pitted against those increases. But when 91% of Fredonia's Class of 2019 took on some debt, you know there's an affordability crisis for those who would benefit the most from a Fredonia education.
I would include among that population a fairly strong proportion of the students graduating this year in the top 10% of their high schools. Given disparities in local property tax bases and historic patterns of state underfunding of public schools in lower-income zip codes, many students across the state will not be as well-prepared to excel as their better-funded peers on SUNY's most selective campuses—which turn out to be its largest campuses, by and large, which turn out to be its research institutions, which turn out to not have invested in faculty teaching as much as at places like Fredonia. Geneseo doesn't have the capacity or the program mix to meet all their needs. For most of my career, Fredonia was a selective institution; it's only in recent years that we started accepting more than 50% of our applicants. Thus, we're well-placed to help less-well-funded students among the top 10% succeed.
The Fredonia University Senate called attention to the cost of attendance (again) back in
October 2023, offering many solutions. So let's turn to Baum and McPherson again to set up what we're calling for:
Children from different racial and ethnic groups, at different levels of income and wealth, and with parents with different educational backgrounds grow up in vastly different circumstances[.] These differences are associated with how well prepared they are for college, how well they can navigate the enrollment process, and what kinds of external support—financial, academic, and social—they need to succeed in college.... As campuses strive for greater diversity and inclusion, they need to accept the need to invest in creating a culturally responsive environment that will encourage all students to see themselves as full members of the campus community. These efforts involve costs that must be factored into the finances of the institutions.... There is strong evidence suggesting that reductions in expenditures resulting from the failure of state appropriations to keep up with rising enrollments have contributed measurably to increases in time to degree and declines in completions rates, particularly at institutions educating less well-prepared students. (11, 17, 20)
Their footnote points us to a 2007 study on "cohort crowding" by Bound and Turner and a 2017 study on "the impact of price and spending subsidies on U.S. postsecondary attainment" by Deming and Walters. Zachary Bleecher, Mukul Kumar, Aashish Mehta, Chris Muellerleile, and Christopher Newfield make a similar point in Metrics That Matter: Counting What's Really Important to College Students (2023):
[In Crossing the Finish Line (2009),] Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson found that the less students actually pay, the more likely they are to graduate.... A student with more grants, fewer loans, and less financial "self-help expectation" (an amount the student must find a way to pay themselves) can work less while in college and therefore study more. A student who studies more and who has more flexibility in their schedules to pour extra effort into courses that are hard for them is more likely to do well academically and to graduate. (46-47)
Think their sources are too old to be relevant? Check out this May 2021 report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO). Check out Jonathan Turk's essay in Unlocking Opportunity through Broadly Accessible Institutions, ed. Gloria Crisp, Kevin McClure, and Cecilia Orphan (2022), which concludes that "Greater financial and human resources will be needed in order for many B[roadly]A[ccesible]I[nstitution]s to be able to provide the comprehensive student support services that many of their students require in order to graduate" (195) and ends on this note:
Federal and state need-based grant aid programs should be expanded—e.g., in increasing the maximum Pell Grant award—and should receive, at minimum, yearly inflationary increases. State governments should reinvest in higher education by restoring appropriations to colleges and universities to help lower their reliance on tuition and fees. Furthermore, states should provide additional funding to support the expansion of student support programs and services at broadly accessible and open-access institutions. Finally, colleges and universities must take into account the full costs of college when putting together financial aid packages. This includes addressing housing costs and food insecurity. BAIs are routinely tasked with doing more, with significantly fewer resources than their more selective counterparts. More resources must be made available to these institutions so that they may better support student success and greater equity in society through higher education. (196)
I could do this all day, but I have other things to do this weekend. The work of making public higher education a true public good is ongoing, but not perpetual for any individual!
