Like K-12, shouldn’t Maine’s universities be efficient?

Two headlines greeted readers of the Bangor Daily News the other morning. One described how state legislators and Education Department officials appear headed toward a plan to eliminate more than 200 school districts across the state in order to save $36 million in administrative costs. The other, sharing space on the front page with the first, reported that the board of trustees of the University of Maine system approved a proposed 12.6 percent hike in college tuitions, the largest single increase in at least 10 years.

One system is reorganizing dramatically to cut costs; the other is seemingly pushing its costs onto the backs of its students.

Indeed, the following day’s Bangor Daily News outlined how at least some of those additional tuition dollars will be spent: helping to pay for a new 87,000-square-foot, $25 million “fitness center” for the Orono campus.

It seems strange that with all the months of work that have gone into trying to squeeze more efficiency out of the state’s K-12 school system, little mention has been made of asking the same of the university system.

This is especially curious given that one of the reports that helped to launch the K-12 consolidation effort was the Brooking Institution’s now ubiquitous “Charting Maine’s Future” study, which reported that “inefficiencies in Maine’s higher education system may be costing the state $14 million a year.”

Those inefficiencies were revealed when analysts looked at the percent of university payroll going to instructional staff, such as professors and researchers versus non-instructional staff. They found that for every dollar spent on instructional staff, $2.13 goes to pay non-instructional staff, the highest such ratio in the nation. The university system’s 2006 Annual Report reveals that only 1,483 of 5,093 university system employees are identified as “faculty,” 29 percent of the total.

In a report authored in August of last year, the University of Maine’s own Philip Trostel suggested that “Maine having 15 separate public colleges and universities serving only 30,611 full-time equivalent students creates the suspicion that there may be excess duplication and costs in the state’s administration of higher education.”

So why don’t we see pressure on the university system to find some administrative savings of its own?

University officials might argue, persuasively, that they recently proposed doing just that. Readers may recall that the university system proposed a relatively dramatic set of reforms in 2004 that would have meant the merger of several of the system’s smaller campuses. The plan was quickly quashed under opposition from university faculty and staff members, labor unions, state legislators and others.

The university has also argued in the past that in order to attract students, it has to hold its own in the modern academic “arms race,” which requires that colleges have the latest technology, top-notch teaching and research staff, and modern housing and amenities for students. University documents reveal that the Orono campus all by itself boasts $600 million worth of facilities alone. Providing much the same across the system’s seven campuses, officials argue, is extraordinarily expensive.

The numbers bear that out. The university system has about 34,000 full- or part-time students enrolled and grants about 5,500 post-secondary degrees a year. With an annual budget of about $570 million, the system is spending more than $100,000 for each degree conferred. The University of New Hampshire system, spread over three residential campuses rather than seven, also enrolls about 30,000 students and graduates about 5,000 each year, but the $413 million that system spent in 2006 means that each degree conferred there costs the New Hampshire system $82,000.

It should also be remembered that the state spends another $45 million or so a year on the community college system, which maintains seven campuses of its own, has its own separate administrative bureaucracy, and no doubt offers many of the same classes and programs as the university system.

In a state with as low a level of higher-education degree attainment as this one, it may seem impolitic to be critical. Indeed, there can be no question that access to higher education opportunities is essential to Maine’s future, and the recent enrollment growth in both the University of Maine and community college systems is something to be celebrated.

But Maine’s K-12 school system has been criticized for years for its apparent inefficiency, despite the fact that it puts a higher percentage of overall education spending into actual classroom instruction than do 48 other states. We are told repeatedly that there is too much waste in the K-12 system, too much administration, and that those resources could be better spent improving student achievement and building better schools.

Couldn’t the same be said of Maine’s systems of higher education?

Stephen Bowen is a teacher, former legislator, and adjunct scholar with the Maine Heritage Policy Center.