Last year, after University of Illinois President James Stukel announced a 37 percent hike in student tuition over two years, enough goodwill existed about Illinois’ academic standing and reasonably affordable rates to nod in approval.
This week, the president asked his board of trustees for another 10 percent tuition hike in the face of a state budget crunch.
The state’s budget tribulations are real. So are the increased costs of running a university. Illinois’ public universities aren’t the only ones to see their tuitions creeping ever closer to the private schools. As a marketplace decision, the tuition increase can be justified.
But as state and school ledgers turn a deeper shade of red, the responsibility falls on university officials and state legislators to take a hard look at the excessive clutter in their own houses.
Stukel has a $42.6 million problem. He has asked students to shoulder $10.7 million of it through higher tuition. One might think trustees would start asking difficult questions about where else in the system’s $2.6 billion budget they can come up with at least some of that money. The trustees need to start questioning university bureaucracy, freebie giveaways and other traditions that can no longer be afforded.
They won’t have to look very far. Gerald W. Shea, the chairman of the U. of I. board and chum of Gov. George Ryan, pushed the university to spend $100,000 to remodel a Chicago office. Shea wants each board member to be given $50,000 a year for expenses.
On Thursday the trustees approved a $400,000 pay raise to Illinois football coach Ron Turner, bringing his total compensation to $900,000 a year.
Financial travails? What financial travails?
State legislators have plenty of soul-searching to do, too, but we’ll get to their part in this mess in a minute.
There’s a certain convenience in addressing budget “crises,” because they appear sudden and urgent and demand short-term fixes. It’s easy to say there’s no time to revisit existing bureaucracies to determine whether they still make sense. It’s equally tough to demand a sudden end to wasteful practices when they have become so entrenched in university culture.
U. of I. officials could demonstrate leadership here and attempt to clean house with a wide broom. At a time when higher education is more essential than ever in the job market, one of the key responsibilities of a public university is to make sure it remains affordable. That’s all the more difficult at a public school, where politicians may hold more sway than professors.
And yet opportunity abounds at the U. of I. Here are some examples.
Academania. Like the private schools, each of the three U. of I. campuses has its own chancellor, vice chancellors, provosts and deans who do the substantive work of overseeing the school’s academic programs and budgets. But the University of Illinois has a mysterious administrative layer that sits atop these folks like an overweight elephant squealing for a purpose. Among the legion of vice presidents is this bureaucratic pretzel, taken from the uber-system’s organizational chart:
The Assistant Vice President and Director of Academic Policy Analysis reports to the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, who, along with a second Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Executive Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs, reports to the Vice President for Academic Affairs, who in turn reports to the President. They, in turn, have more than two dozen support staff.
Campus insiders say they’re not sure what most of these vice presidents do other than organize retreats that few attend and issue reports that nobody reads.
Priority raises. According to a state legislative analysis, administrative raises at the University of Illinois have outstripped those of professors in recent years, even though most acknowledge that faculty raises have more catching up to do with other campuses in order to be competitive.
Tuition party favors. Nearly a quarter of all students at Illinois’ state universities pay no tuition; nearly half pay less than full price. Most of these waivers are granted by university faculty or administrators to graduate students in exchange for research and teaching assistantships. But less justifiable is the deal that children of faculty or staff members get: 50 percent off the tuition price. It’s time to consider a less extravagant discount. Every dollar those kids don’t pay in tuition has to be made up by another student . . . or taxpayer.
Tuition political party favors. And now we come to the mightiest boondoggle of them all, one that state politicos have been loath to relinquish for nearly a century: the legislative scholarship. General Assembly members get to dole these out to children of the politically connected the way they would hand out palm cards. Each year, by absurd law, each one of the 177 state legislators gets to hand out eight Get Into College Free cards to whomever he wants, good for one full year of college tuition at any public university in Illinois. The universities eat the bill. For years, some legislators have grossly abused this privilege, handing out scholarships to the children of friends, political sponsors and other legislators. In the 2001 fiscal year, 743 students used these free rides at the University of Illinois’ three schools. Cost: $3.6 million.
If the University of Illinois trustees agree to President Stukel’s proposal when they meet in March, next fall’s freshmen could be shelling out $13,000 in tuition, fees, room and board to attend the University of Illinois at Chicago, $10,400 to attend the University of Illinois at Springfield and nearly $12,700 to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. No one argues that that is not still a good deal, compared to private schools and many public schools. That may turn out to be the best response to the state’s increasingly grim budget predicament and the university’s higher costs. But the university administration needs to do a better job of proving that’s a last resort, rather than the first.
