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Text of Commissioner's TESTIMONY

Delivered by Commissioner Richard M. Freeland on March 23, 2009, before the Joint Committee on Higher Education

Introduction

Chairman Galluccio, Chairman Torrisi, members of the Joint Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I am Richard Freeland, and I have been Commissioner of Higher Education for just two months. But I have been involved in higher education in Massachusetts for most of the past four decades, including 22 years at the University of Massachusetts and 13 at Northeastern. I believe our state’s colleges and universities, both public and private, are among our state’s greatest assets. These institutions hold the key to our future, both economically and socially. After an extended career at the campus level, I am pleased to have the opportunity to help strengthen our total system of higher education and reinforce the capacity of that system to contribute to the wellbeing of the Commonwealth.

Overview

Let me begin with a brief overview of public higher education. Our system comprises 15 community colleges, nine state colleges, and the five campuses of the University of Massachusetts. These institutions enroll 270,000 students and serve a majority of our state’s high school graduates who go on to college. We are one of the largest employers in the state, and we have over 800,000 alumni living in every corner of the Commonwealth.

Two gubernatorially-appointed statewide boards provide general oversight for our public colleges and universities. One of these is responsible for the University of Massachusetts and appoints the UMass president. A second, the Board of Higher Education, to which I report as Commissioner, has a dual role: one part of that role involves oversight of the state and community colleges; the second involves leadership for all of higher education in a number of important respects, including statewide master planning. In addition, each of the state and community colleges has its own gubernatorially-appointed board with oversight responsibilities for a particular campus. As Commissioner, I am also part of the Governor’s education team, along with the Commissioners of Elementary and Secondary Education and of Early Education and Care, and in that respect, I report to Secretary Reville.

The Board of Higher Education consists of 13 members, nine of whom are appointed by the governor; one is the Secretary of Education; and three are elected members, one each by the trustees of the community colleges, state colleges, and University. As Commissioner, I am also responsible for the Department of Higher Education, which has a staff of about 50 employees.

There is much that I could say about the accomplishments and contributions of our public campuses, our students, and our faculty, but since you will have an opportunity to hear from our presidents and chancellors during these hearings, I will focus my own comments at the level of state policy. I will use my time to discuss three policy arenas where we are currently very active and where we hope to work in close partnership with the Legislature. I would also like to identify two longer-term matters on which I hope we can work together over the next several years.

Current Focus of Our Work

Improving coordination with K-12 and early education

One of our immediate concerns is improving coordination between our public campuses and our systems of K-12 education and early education and care. Integrating the work of these three systems more effectively was, of course, one of the major reasons the state created the new education secretariat in 2008, and Secretary Reville has already done a great deal to advance this goal.

One area that needs work is clearer communication to high school students about what will be expected of them when they enroll in college. Although the Board of Higher Education has established admission standards for our campuses and has made recommendations regarding an appropriate pre-college course of study, we still find too many of our high school graduates requiring remedial work during their college years and too many of them assuming that successful completion of the MCAS requirements means that they are ready for college-level courses. To address this challenge, Secretary Reville has recently charged a task force to identify additional steps we can take to make sure our high school students, their teachers, and their guidance counselors understand what it takes to be ready for college.

A second way in which we are working to improve coordination between our high schools and our colleges is the dual enrollment program. Through this activity, which is supported by a special budgetary allocation, high school students enroll in college-level courses, often taught on a college campus by a college professor. This program helps high school students gain the confidence that they can do college-level work while also giving them a headstart towards college graduation. There is evidence that this kind of experience can pay dividends in encouraging high school students both to apply to college and persist to graduation after they enroll.

A third area of activity involves building a tracking system that can follow a student from high school into and through college, so that we will be able to determine what aspects of a particular student’s preparation may have been incomplete and use that information to work with our colleagues in that student’s high school to strengthen the pre-college curricula. There is much more work to be done in this critical area of coordination between higher education, K-12, and early education and care, but I believe we have made a good start and that the new, integrated structure of educational oversight is beginning to show its benefits.

Increasing affordability of higher education

A second focus for the work of my Department involves making sure that high school graduates who are academically prepared for college have the financial wherewithal to actually enroll and persist through graduation and that the programs we offer them are of a quality and character that equip them to function effectively as workers and as citizens after they graduate. The centerpiece of our efforts to keep college affordable is, of course, our program of state-funded scholarships, most crucially the MASSGrant program that supports low-income students at both public and private institutions. I am pleased and grateful that Governor Patrick has recommended maintaining all our scholarship programs for fiscal year 2010 at current-year levels, despite the necessity to make deep cuts in most areas of state government. I do think, however, that, as our economy begins to recover from the current recession, we need to take a fresh look at scholarship support, which has not in recent years grown at anything like the increasing cost of attending college. To give you just one statistic, in 1988 the average MASSGrant award covered 80% of tuition and fees at one of our public campuses; in 2008 the average grant covered just 14% of those costs. We have work to do to make sure a college education, including attendance at one of our public campuses, remains affordable.

The question of program quality goes hand in hand with the question of affordability. It is vital that the experiences students have in our public colleges truly prepare them for the challenges they will face after graduation. It has been a long time since the Board of Higher Education undertook a systematic, statewide review of the kinds of learning outcomes we should expect of our college students. We are currently initiating such a review, and we will begin by asking a group of leaders from government, business, and the nonprofit sector to help us identify the most important goals of a college education in the 21st century. I would like to personally thank Chairman Galluccio and Chairman Torrisi for agreeing to serve on this important task force.

Aligning higher education programs with Commonwealth's workforce needs

The third area of current focus for our Department involves the alignment of our programs and majors with the requirements of the state’s economy. Our state and community colleges play a critical role in preparing the workforce upon which our companies and our institutions depend. It is vital, as the Governor’s Readiness Project Report emphasized, that the two-year and four-year programs we offer be congruent with the constantly evolving nature of the Commonwealth’s economy. With critically important support from the Legislature, we are currently working to achieve this kind of alignment in two key areas: Nursing and Allied Health, and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics—the so-called STEM fields. There is, however, more to be done in this area. My goal is to make sure that in every region of our state the programs and majors offered by our institutions are developed with attention to the economic character and needs of that area.

Two Long-Term Goals

Let me now turn my attention to two matters of a longer-term nature on which I would hope to work with the Legislature. The first has to do with financial support for our public colleges and universities. The second has to do with integration of the various parts of our state’s system of higher education.

Increasing financial support for public higher education and financial aid

There has, of course, been much discussion over the years of the level of financial support that the state provides for higher education. We are all familiar with statistics indicating that, compared with other states, that support is modest. For example, we rank 40th among all the states in per capita funding of higher education, 47th in support per $100 of personal income, and 35th in per capita financial aid support for our students. Such statistics are troubling, but they are often brushed aside with the comment that of course our expenditures are comparatively low because, with so many strong private institutions in our state, we have a comparatively small public system. And it is true that when one looks at financial support in relation to, not the size of our state, but the actual number of students in our public colleges and University, our level of spending is respectable, typically ranking somewhere is the middle among the other states. Those of us who care about higher education, however, and believe in its importance to the state, doubt that being in the middle of the pack is good enough for Massachusetts, and are very troubled that our hardworking faculty in both the state and community colleges are compensated well below their counterparts across the country. It is hard to maintain excellence in a system that is not paying competitive salaries.

Several years ago, our public colleges and universities came together to develop a systematic means to determine appropriate levels of support for our public campuses. The formula that resulted from this effort has been widely praised and accepted—for example by the Senate Task Force on Public Higher Education in 2005 and, more recently, by the Governor’s Readiness Project—as a reasonable basis for financing public higher education in Massachusetts at a competitive level. Yet today we are nowhere near the level of funding that this formula would dictate. In 2008, the budget gap for the state and community colleges is approximately $257 million and for UMass is approximately $313 million. I know that it will not be possible for us to address this pattern of underfunding in the current financial context. But I feel compelled to bring it to your attention. I would hope we could find a way, even in the difficult circumstances we currently face, to adopt the full funding of the formula as a critical long-term goal and then begin to move toward that goal as soon as circumstances permit.

In my mind, the statistic that brings this whole matter of financial support most dramatically into focus involves the way in which cuts in state support lead to increased financial burdens on students and their families. We need to be conscious of a troubling pattern. When the economy declines and public revenues fall, there is a tendency to cut the budgets of our public campuses—in part because colleges have the ability to offset such cuts through increased student charges. This happened after the downturn of the late 1980s, and it happened again after the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. The effect of the second of those two episodes was striking. In 2001, the percentage of institutional operating costs borne by students and their families at our public campuses was less than 30%; six years later, in 2007, that percentage was over 40%. I fear we are on the verge of yet another sharp increase in this percentage. As this pattern persists, as we shift the costs of operating our colleges more and more to students and now families, the economics of our public campuses begin to look more and more like those of private institutions. Moreover, in the context of the declining value of financial aid to which I referred earlier, low-income students will inevitably be squeezed out of the system, especially as young people from comparatively affluent families, which in better times might have supported a son or daughter at a private college, apply in ever-increasing numbers to our public campuses. I doubt that anyone of us will be satisfied with a system of public higher education that is not able to serve talented, hardworking students from families of modest means, yet that is the reality toward which we may be headed if we do not pay close attention to this issue.

Enhancing coordination within and among segments of public higher education

A second, longer-term goal towards which I plan to work involves enhanced integration and coordination within each segment of our public system, across all three of these segments, and between the public system and our private institutions. I consider heightened integration a priority for two reasons. First, it will enable us to increase efficiencies and cut costs. I believe that, as we in higher education ask the Commonwealth for greater support, we need also to demonstrate that we are making the best possible use of every dollar we are provided. Efforts along these lines are always important, but they become even more essential during times like this. The second reason greater integration is a priority for me is that it is a way to achieve and sustain quality. By encouraging each campus to focus on its strengths while promoting opportunities for students to pursue particular interests in the college best equipped for that purpose, we enhance the quality of all students learning experiences.

We have a lot to build upon. Within our public system, we have solid examples of intercampus cooperation; including the very successful CONNECT collaborative in the southeastern part of the state, EdLink in the Northeast, and the Colleges of Central Mass. We also have a longstanding program that provides purchasing discounts though the Mass Higher Education consortium. But I believe there is much more we can and should do along these lines. The Higher Education Subcommittee of the Governor’s Readiness Finance Commission has identified a number of possibilities, and I have asked the chair of that group, President Dana Mohler-Faria of Bridgewater State College, to lead a continuation effort that will consider ways to implement these ideas while also identifying other areas of possible savings and cooperation.

As we work to take greater advantage of the potential for savings and cooperation within the public system, it is also important that we build stronger connections between public and private higher education. In my view, our state has never taken advantage of our rich array of private institutions to create a true public-private partnership to advance the educational and research needs of the Commonwealth. Here, again, we have a lot to build on. The Worcester Consortium in central Massachusetts, the Fenway Consortium in Boston, the Five Colleges in the Pioneer Valley, and the Berkshire Compact in the western part of the state all involve both public and private institutions. I hope to build on these initiatives to create a true statewide system of higher education that leverages that enormous strength of both sectors to enhance the wellbeing of our citizens.

Closing

So we have a formidable agenda of work in front of us. Our immediate focus on heightened integration between higher education and K-12, on assuring the affordability and the quality of our programs, and on aligning our offerings with workforce needs and opportunities should all strengthen the contributions of higher education to the state. I welcome a partnership with the Legislature as we pursue these goals. Our longer-term focus on raising support for higher education to competitive levels and achieving a higher level of integration across the several components of our system are intended to strength the capacity of higher education to serve the state for many years to come. None of the objectives I have identified will be easily achieved. Yet all are vital if we are to reap the full benefits that our institutions of higher education can bring to the Commonwealth. I look forward to working closely with the members of this committee to achieve them. Thank you.