Shortly after taking office in January, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley met with presidents of the state’s two- and four-year publicly funded colleges and universities to come up with a new, performance-based funding formula for higher education. She brought four performance indicators to the table: each school’s graduation rates, the percentage of in-state students they serve, their role in state economic development and job placement of graduates.
The presidents added one more: enrollment of “underrepresented populations” of students. Haley has said the state needs to get away from funding colleges and universities based on subjective influences like loyalty from lawmakers or the popularity of their football programs and make the funding formula performance- and accountability-based.
As the governor undertakes a broad effort to hold higher education more accountable, some presidents say they are concerned they’ll be penalized and hampered in their efforts to serve underrepresented students, who are in many cases underprepared for college. The definition of “underrepresented populations” remains vague, raising questions of how the new funding formula might affect historically Black institutions and small, technical colleges, which often serve high percentages of the state’s minority and rural students.
“We are in the process of defining it,” says Ken Wingate, chairman of the state’s Commission on Higher Education. “It might be based on race, gender in certain fields like engineering, or economically disadvantaged areas of the state.”
While the state has a large African-American population — 28.2 percent of the total population — just 5.6 percent of African-Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to Census data. Haley, a former state legislator and a Tea Party favorite, will meet with the heads of the state’s 13 comprehensive universities separately from the presidents of the 16 schools in the state’s technical college system. The process of developing a new, performance-based funding formula will extend at least into this summer and is expected to be taken up in the 2012 legislative session for the 2013 budget year, Wingate says.
The pay-for-performance plan isn’t the only option on the table.
“Consolidation (of colleges) is on the fringes of these discussions,” Wingate says. “To what extent can we create greater efficiencies by partnering, by collapsing or pairing this one and that one? To what degree can two- and four-year institutions team up in order to provide services to students in a given geographic area? Maybe one of these University of South Carolina branch two-year campuses is in competition with a technical college in the same general vicinity and we would be getting more mileage out of bringing them together under one roof.”
