EDITORIAL ON COLLEGE OPPORTUNITY FUND
Performance Contracts for Higher Education: A Faculty Point of View
The 2004 Legislature passed the College Opportunity Fund Program, which requires institutions of higher education to sign performance contracts with the state to qualify for student voucher funds. Voucher funding is the only way institutions will get state money in the future. This indirect funding is another effort to avoid TABOR without amending TABOR. The American Association of University Professors opposed this legislation, primarily because, after the state cut funding for state schools of higher education by 21.8 percent from 2002 to 2004, it now will magnify the effect of these cuts by distributing voucher funds both to private as well as public institutions of higher education. In fact, the first three institutions to get contract approval are private.
The performance contract requirements themselves have a number of worthwhile goals, including greater accountability, cost efficiency, guaranteed transferability of core courses from two year to four year institutions, minority recruitment, increased retention, faculty pay linked to performance, better teacher education, and increased repair and maintenance of facilities. The performance contract requirements have a number of inconsistencies and glaring omissions however, and in general, do not further their stated goals very well.
The first requirement of the performance contracts limits tuition increases to the rate of inflation. In return, the Colorado Commission on Higher Education (CCHE) claims the contracts will free colleges and universities from much of the current state regulatory requirements. Nationwide this approach is touted as trading administrative freedom from state regulation for taking greater financial responsibility for funding. Yet Colorado is radically decreasing funding for higher education at the same time performance contracts place a cap on tuition increases. Sound familiar?
Another requirement, "pay-for-performance," attempts to build incentives for teaching and research performance. At Colorado’s community colleges, where more than half of all freshmen and sophomores attend, as many as 80% of the faculty are part-time, a.k.a., "adjunct." Over 60 percent of faculty for all Colorado colleges and universities are adjuncts. Adjunct faculty make as little as $10 per hour (or $1,500 for a three hour, semester long course) counting lecture preparation time, testing and grading, and meeting with students. Yet under performance contract guidelines, pay for performance does not apply to them. How can you build incentives when you are only addressing a small fraction of the faculty?
Pay for performance requirements use teaching and research performance as criteria for merit pay raises. The state does not address its responsibility for funding research, however. Further, some technical provisions in the performance contracts specify that, at four year universities, tenured and tenure track faculty must teach a fairly large ratio of specified core, or lower level courses. These core courses are usually taught by adjunct faculty, primarily to lower costs. Tenured or tenure track faculty usually teach higher level specialized courses because generally they are more qualified. Shifting these faculty to lower level, core courses will require either significantly more highly qualified faculty to be hired (an impossibility given the budget squeeze), or greatly increasing the workload of the full-time faculty. A number of studies have found that tenure and tenure track faculty at four year institutions spend and average of from 55 to 60 hours per week performing their duties. Thus, increasing their workload significantly will not happen either: instead, educational quality would decrease as faculty spend less time on lesson preparation, testing and grading, career advising, etc. The CCHE performance contracts create this dilemma, but do not offer a way out of it.
The performance contracts require a rigorous, streamlined core curriculum. The idea is to guarantee transfer of core courses from one institution to another. This is an admirable goal, one which we support. Some of the work already has been done by the GT Pathways initiative which was required by state law. This effort lists which community college courses are needed to transfer credit to satisfy each four year college course. The CCHE performance contract appears to extend this by mandating course-for-course transferability for core courses. To make course-for course transferability work, the content, rigor, level of textbook, and grading standards in the course must be very similar. Developing inter-institutional standards for core courses to facilitate transferability requires faculty input. Faculty from each discipline at each college and university must be involved.
Combating grade inflation is another worthy effort of the performance contracts. When combined with the requirements of increased recruitment, retention and graduation rates, however, the goals become contradictory. One reason for grade inflation is that the squeeze on the financial resources of higher education institutions encourages recruitment and retention, which result in not only taking students who aren’t prepared, but also passing students that don’t merit passing, faculty being overruled at higher levels for failing students, and even turning a blind eye to student plagiarism. If we are to provide a rigorous core curriculum of math, science, history, writing and critical thinking, then by definition, retention and graduation rates will be challenged.
If only performance contracts were that simple: in reality, Colorado’s higher education system is experiencing decreased funding, tuition caps, requirements for community colleges to accept all applicants, high adjunct teaching numbers and unconscionable low pay, a high attrition rate among full time faculty and presidents, and lack of faculty participation in decision making. The system is crumbling. The CCHE mandated performance contracts do not address these realities. Performance contracts, if properly implemented, will help with some problems but will aggravate others. The ultimate reality here is that inadequate funding is the single factor underlying many if not most of these problems. The citizens of Colorado will get only what they are willing to pay for – no more, no less. Quality of higher education is the real bottom line.
Primary Author: Dana Waller
