Report on “for-profitization” of CSU

Last week the California Faculty Association (CFA), the CSU’s state-wide faculty union, released an important report on the commercialization of higher education: “For-Profit Higher Education & the CSU: A Cautionary Tale.”

Under the guise of increasing student access, the report persuasively argues, the CSU trustees have been adopting policies that echo the approach of private, for-profit universities.

For-profit universities have been getting a lot of publicity — the P.T. Barnum kind. Driven by unmet public demand and slick marketing, they’ve been growing like weeds: in 1990 about 1 percent of American college students were enrolled in for-profits; today it’s 12 percent. Studies of for-profits have repeatedly found exorbitant executive pay, precarious faculty employment conditions, high student tuition and student debt, low graduation rates, and low post-graduation student employment rates. And that’s not to mention the executive fraud and two-bit pedagogy.

Maybe not the best model for the CSU.

But as the CFA report documents, for-profit thinking is spreading throughout the CSU. You might consider this a major public issue.

Unfortunately, that issue is not being debated – in fact, the question is not even being asked – because what might be described as a process of “for-profitization” of the CSU is taking place quietly, with virtually no accountability for system leaders, with limited faculty and staff participation, and with no involvement of the public or elected officials.

The CFA report examines “for-profitization” in four areas:

Executive compensation. As you’ve probably heard, both CSU faculty salaries and the number of permanent faculty positions have stagnated, despite student enrollment growth of 18 percent over the past decade. But campus presidents have been struggling through these tough times fairly well, enjoying a 71 percent salary increase during the same period. As Sacramento State history professor Joseph A. Palermo asks, “Why should these people be paid more than the Governor of California, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and even the President of the United States?”

Of course, reducing top executive salaries is not by itself going to solve the CSU funding crisis, and some may say the issue is merely symbolic. But symbols reflect and reinforce attitudes, and attitudes lead to policies.

Student fees. In the past, when love of learning didn’t motivate my students to finish the assigned reading, I would sometimes tell them to consider their obligation to the California taxpayers who were paying for most of their education. That argument isn’t going to fly anymore: Over the past ten years, the report states, student fees have gone up 318 percent, and last year, seven CSU campuses got more money from student fees and tuition than from the State.

Extended Education. One of the CSU administration’s ideas for responding to the budget crisis is to expand Extended Education (also known as Continuing Education), which was long the preserve of a modest number of mid-career “non-traditional” students. Unlike regular student fee increases, tuition increases for Extended Education are not subject to California public notice and comment requirements. So it’s not surprising that undergraduate tuition for Extended Education in 2010 was 51 percent higher than average fees for the regular CSU, and in some cases it was double.

The target population for the administration’s planned expansion of Extended Education includes, of course, the most appropriate groups: students who need remedial courses, students who postpone their studies for a term or more, students who require high-demand “bottleneck” courses, and students who have not completed their degrees within five years. Nice to see the CSU planning to help out these students with more expensive courses.

There are currently various legal barriers to a radical expansion of Extended Education, but:

In the coming years, if the administration and Trustees succeed in overcoming these barriers, more and more matriculated students may find themselves paying both higher tuition to attend the public university and a bounty to Extended Education in order to get the classes they need to graduate.

Online education. The CFA report notes that online education potentially offers increased access for some students. But the new initiative called Cal State Online raises serious concerns about quality and cost that need to be more thoroughly and publicly addressed, especially since studies suggest that “quality online education is NOT cheaper than more traditional modes of instruction.”

The report concludes with a call to:

• Democratize the CSU Board of Trustees by including more voices and improving public access to its meetings.
• Control the salaries of top CSU executives to make them similar to the salaries of other public servants.
• Improve student access by increasing public funding and lowering fees, rather than by reducing quality.

Sounds like a plan to me. But the developments described in this report have been gathering momentum for a long time, and they’re happening throughout higher education. Serious improvements will depend on the “strong and slow boring of hard boards.”