With their financial and political options exhausted, Florida's university presidents are having to consider turning away new students.
Published July 20, 2003
Florida lawmakers may be focused on medical liability insurance these days, but malpractice jury awards aren't the only caps that should concern them. Public university presidents appear ready to institute a cap of their own - on enrollment - and this is a crisis of similar proportion.
The universities have suffered $490-million in budgetary cuts over the past dozen years, and, for the past two, have been asked to add 22,000 new students without any state subsidy for them. Even former Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan, now president of Florida Atlantic University, knows where this leads. Last year, FAU lost nearly $8-million by taking in new students the state refused to pay for.
Brogan's question: "At what point are we running the risk of having to take out of the hide of quality for all of our students in order to serve the interest of quantity?"
The university presidents, who met by conference call on Tuesday, say that next month they will decide whether to take the only sensible course left to them by a stingy Legislature: They will have to turn away new students.
This is not a decision to be taken lightly, but then neither is the predicament that universities face. As high school enrollment and statewide population have soared in the past three decades, the Legislature has pretended as though universities could just keep cramming more students onto their campuses. That's one reason that, of the 30 largest universities in the nation, five are in Florida. At the same time, universities are being told to shoehorn in these new students with no money to support them. Tuition covers only about 23 percent of the cost of their education, and the Legislature is acting as though universities can simply drive to the bank ATM and make up the difference.
FSU president T.K. Wetherell, a former House speaker, echoes the words of Brogan: "The message is that there is an enrollment crisis in higher education. We can't maintain the current pace. We are running out of space. We are running out of money."
Gov. Jeb Bush says he opposes enrollment caps, but he has yet to identify how universities can afford to teach students for free. The university Board of Governors is scheduled to meet next week but its new chairwoman, Carolyn Roberts, says talk of enrollment caps is, at best, premature. "What we need to be talking about is planned growth," she says.
The people who are paid to run Florida's universities don't have the luxury of waiting for another round of blue-ribbon studies or empty promises. They have exhausted their financial and political options, and their move to limit enrollment must be viewed in that context. But lawmakers, who can't agree on how to make sure that doctors can afford malpractice insurance, face a much simpler proposition with the university enrollment cap. Congress gave Florida $950-million that was intended to help the state meet its budgetary obligations during the current economic downturn. Just $66-million from that pot would cover the enrollment growth for the coming year, and could begin to demonstrate that there may be other options.
The governor and Legislature are telling doctors that their crisis is a priority and must be resolved. What will they tell high school graduates who find there is no room at the university for them?
