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Degree of chaos

To get a sense for why Florida keeps tossing higher education blueprints into the waste can, listen to two university presidents react to the mere suggestion that their institutions could focus primarily on undergraduate degrees:

John Hitt, University of Central Florida: "The carrot to get UCF interested in this will fail the steroid test."

John Cavanaugh, University of West Florida: "It's going to take one hell of carrot for an institution sitting at the adult table to sit at the children's table."

Sit at the children's table? Nearly 90 percent of the students at UWF today are working on a bachelor's degree. Does that make them, or the professors who teach them, children? Does that make the university childlike?

After having commissioned a consultant to study the state's nearly incomprehensible maze of higher education, the Board of Governors faces a nearly impossible task. It is inviting a statewide debate, calling it "Forward By Design," with the goal of drawing a cohesive master plan for higher education. The last board to try this was abolished by state lawmakers.

The report, by Pappas Consulting Group, was unusually blunt but wholly accurate. With higher education, Florida is cheap, overwhelmed and discombobulated. It offers the lowest tuition in the nation while stuffing freshmen into classes held in movie theaters. It is 43rd in the percentage of bachelor's degrees it awards, yet in the past decade it has increased master's and doctorate degrees at a faster rate. It has built one new university in the past 34 years, and now it has roughly half the number as Georgia, a state with roughly half the population.

The lack of a coherent plan has promoted inefficiency and duplication, and it has worked to the advantage of meddling politicians. Since 2001, for example, three new medical schools were approved by the Legislature. Pappas estimates that the start-up costs for those schools could have helped start three to five new full universities.

There will be no single solution to meeting the demand and improving the quality of Florida higher education. Universities, their branch campuses, community colleges, even online courses will all play a role. But higher education cannot afford to keep growing so randomly.

Voters gave the Board of Governors constitutional standing in part because they were tired of the old politics, and that puts the board in the best position to present a blueprint for how all postsecondary institutions can align themselves.

Florida may or may not want to follow a tiered system akin to California's, with some universities focused on research and graduate degrees and others focused on undergraduates. It may or may not want all community colleges to offer four-year degrees, akin to the successful example of St. Petersburg College. But it can't continue to pretend that every institution will be like the University of Florida, either.

"What is striking in Florida," the Pappas Group wrote, "is how rarely, if ever, analytical reports with substantial comparative state-by-state data and with solid goals, objectives, and metrics ever find their way into implemented state policy."

Dispassionate analysis and objective metrics have consistently lost to turf protection and political muscle in recent years, but the Board of Governors is trying to change that. "Forward By Design" deserves a dignified and orderly debate. Those who fear sitting at the children's table may not belong at this one.

[Last modified January 27, 2007, 17:50:46]