Dueling Mandates

We lose a pile of money on our nursing program. Should we close it?

My personal answer is “of course not.” It’s crucial to our service area, it provides great jobs for students and with an aging population, the need for nurses is likely to continue to grow.

But if we were to run the college like a business, the answer would be to close the program. It’s a persistent money loser, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

We effectively have two mandates, and they are increasingly in conflict with each other.

The first is to serve the community. That means providing opportunities for job preparation and/or transfer to higher degrees, developing the skills of civic discourse, providing cultural programming, and, most of all, offering second chances to people who need them.

The second is to “run it like a business.” That means keeping costs down, trimming low-enrolled or money-losing programs and generally minimizing what legislators have to provide.

The conflict is clear in an area like nursing. We can provide what the community needs, or we can close money-losing programs. But we can’t do both fully. The only way to make that math work would be to raise tuition to levels that would defeat the access side of the mission, and that would rightly generate toxic political pushback.

If the issue were confined to nursing, it would be straightforward enough. But consistently, the programs employers demand tend to be money losers for us. In a sense, that’s why employers demand them—training in specialized fields is expensive, and they’d rather socialize the costs than pay for them themselves. Given employee mobility, there’s an argument for that. But to then turn around and admonish the institution that picks up the expensive programs for not running even leaner than it already does is a bit much.

Grants help, of course. Perkins has done a lot of heavy lifting over the years, and various other grants and scholarships have made programs possible. But those are subject to the whims of funders and/or legislators, and as we’ve learned over the past few years, those can change quickly and arbitrarily. As welcome as grants and donations are, they aren’t as reliable as income over expenses derived from operations.

As state and local funding have lagged, the tension between the two imperatives get harder to ignore every year.

That tension has really come to a head with dual enrollment. Colleges acting like businesses are crowding into high schools. In states without meaningful ground rules, that quickly becomes a race to the bottom in terms of both funding and academic standards. High schools openly play colleges off against each other, with “winning” coming down to who is the most academically and financially lenient.

Yes, financial responsibility is important. As stewards of public funds, there’s a responsibility to use resources wisely. But at a certain point, the mission requires what the mission requires. The expensive equipment, small class sizes and faculty with specialized knowledge in high-demand fields cost money.

Years ago, John Warner proposed that we should look at public higher education as infrastructure. I agree. The second imperative has gone from a reminder of fiduciary responsibility to an obstacle to the mission. Community colleges weren’t established to turn profits; they were established to serve communities. The first imperative is more important than the second. As a polity, we’ve lost sight of that.