Back to the future

By Kim Ciottone

A $400 million capital investment commitment by the state will be a shot in the arm for the state’s public higher education system, but it’s only a start. Our public college campuses need a serious upgrade in order to graduate students who can hit the ground running in their first jobs. Massachusetts, the so-called "innovation state," ranks 49th – yes, 49th, in the country in terms of state spending on higher education per $1,000 of state income. Education advocates say that’s got to change.

Even the college’s nursing students are using labs that are at least 35 years old, he says - because the state hasn’t been investing in updating its aging infrastructure. And Fitchburg State College is not alone. Most of the buildings in Massachusetts’ nine public universities, colleges and community colleges, which educate 45,000 students annually, were built in the 1950s-1960s. Today, system-wide needed capital investments are estimated at $2.9 billion. And that doesn’t begin to address the issue of the salary gap between Massachusetts faculty and their counterparts in other states where the cost of living is far lower.

So it’s just in the nick of time that the Romney administration is proposing a $400-million capital investment in the state’s public higher education system that will benefit campuses such as Antonucci’s. And, as we went to press, the state had just hammered out a three-year salary contract with public education faculty - after more than two years of negotiations.

The importance of a home-grown labor force

While other states increase their investments in their public higher education systems, Massachusetts today ranks 49th in the nation - second only to Alabama - in state spending for higher education per $1,000 of state income. Massachusetts ranks 47th in the nation in state spending on public higher education per capita, and it’s the only state in the nation that is spending less on public higher education than it was 10 years ago, according to a March 2005 state Senate Report.

"We have to redouble our efforts to strengthen our public higher education system," penned Stan Rosenberg, co-chair of the Senate Task Force on Public Higher Education, in the Senate report. "If we don’t, we run the risk of becoming a second-class state with a second-class economy."

More than 80 percent of state college alumni – and about 92 percent for public community colleges – remain in the state after graduation. Key to countering an already evident "brain-drain" of the Massachusetts’ vital, highly educated workforce, education leaders say, is educating the state’s own home-grown labor pool. That takes investment, not only in bricks and mortar, but in faculty salaries, in order to attract and retain quality talent. Full professors at Massachusetts state colleges and universities currently earn on average, about 14 percent less than their peers in other states. Factoring in the high cost of living – with Massachusetts 100 percent above the national average – that disparity widens to 22 percent less, or about $19,000.

But from 1994 to 2004, Massachusetts was the only state in the nation to reduce support for public higher education, decreasing by 5.3 percent over that period, according to the 2005 Massachusetts State College Report. In 2004, the state spent 3.5 percent of its total budget on public higher education, compared to 6.5 percent in 1988, according to the report. Meanwhile, enrollments at state colleges grew by 5 percent over the past four years, while budget cuts during that same time slashed funding by 25 percent. Tuition and fees at four-year public colleges also climbed by 10.5 percent in 2004-2005, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, and state funds for student aid in Mass. dropped 13 percent in 2003-2004 over the prior year.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau report, Massachusetts has been among the half-dozen slowest growing states in the nation, and the most rapidly decreasing segment of the population is the younger, college-educated workforce, according to Boston-based MassInc. In fact, between 2002 and 2003, a net 61,000 people of working age, half with at least a bachelor’s degree, left the state, according to Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies. Massachusetts was the only state to lose population in 2003 and 2004, with the labor force shrinking by 2 percent compared to a national increase of 3 percent.

The state Division of Employment and Training reports that all net job growth in the state over the past two decades has been in occupations that require a college degree, including executive, managerial, professional creative and technical positions, and that demand is expected to increase. In its employment projections through 2010, the DET predicts that 321,500 new job openings, or 82 percent of the state’s total job slots, will require a bachelor’s degree or higher.

This is where the state’s public education system comes in, because of the high retention rate of its graduates. "We have to produce a highly educated workforce to survive economically," says Fred Clark, executive officer for the State College Council of Presidents. The industries seeking to expand or relocate here are the high-tech and biotech firms, and health care industries, he says.

"We are now where we have reached the point of no return and simply have to make these kinds of investments to survive economically," he says. "[But] on the capital side, we invest less per capita for higher education than any of our competitor states - we are at the bottom."

Meanwhile, enrollments at public institutions are on the rise. State colleges have become the first choice of 60 percent of the students they admit and the second choice of 30 percent of those students, according to the Mass. State College report. "So it’s a very large number of students that are choosing public over private, and those numbers are growing," largely driven, Clark says, by affordability and access.

One million served

The average annual tuition for state colleges – not including room and board – is $5,099, an affordable sum for most families even in today’s economy, says Clark. Statistics show that about two-thirds of Massachusetts high school graduates go on to public colleges in the state. Between the nine UMass colleges, about 1 million people have either gone through or are in the system right now, says Clark. "There is just a gigantic constituency out there that represents a very significant portion of the state’s workforce," he says.

Antonucci is one of them. He’s a first-generation college student and graduate who went on to serve as the state’s commissioner of education from 1992 to 1998 before his 2003 appointment as president of Fitchburg State College. Today, he says, state colleges are still serving that same vital population. "A lot of first-generation students from working-class families are served by the state’s public higher-ed system, who are academically talented, but not economically advantaged to be able to attend college," he says.

The Romney administration’s proposed $400-million capital investment signals a move in the right direction to preserving the role of the state’s public institutions. "That money, we hope we will get once the Legislature approves it, will allow us to upgrade all of our science facilities, which haven’t been upgraded since 1955," Antonucci says. "If you look at the workforce, we as institutions need to be competitive, our graduates need to be competitive."

The infrastructure funding will buy cutting-edge labs, so that when state college students enter the workforce, they can be competitive, with a high degree of skills that will jump-start them in any profession they enter, he says.

"We are not a Harvard and we don’t intend to be, but many of the graduates of Harvard leave the state upon graduation – in fact the majority do, but that is what Harvard does, that is their niche," Antonucci says. "We at Fitchburg are trying to be the number one state college – and every president wants their college to be that. But [also] we have to demonstrate that we contribute to the workforce – and we do. Without the niche that we all serve, we would have significant holes in our workforce."

The average student at Worcester State College is 28 years old, says President Janelle Ashley. Many attend school part-time, while raising families and holding down full-time jobs. "These are individuals who will stay here," she says. While the state’s renowned private colleges also play a very important role in the state’s economy, 60 percent of those students come from other countries and states, and will not remain here after graduation. "We know we have the workforce of the future," says Ashley. "It’s vitally important that we continue to invest in these students."

That investment extends to faculty. Ashley is one of many education advocates who have publicly called for increases in faculty salaries, to send a message to students that education is a priority. In a November 2004 commentary in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, she warns that low salaries "greatly hinder our ability to attract, recruit and retain new faculty members," and that, coupled with excessively high living costs, is driving faculty candidates to other states.

Maxed-out labs

Most of the state colleges are at or near capacity. Many of their nursing programs have two- and three-year waiting lists and are turning away hundreds of fully qualified students every year, adds Clark. "Our labs are just maxed-out, and getting qualified nursing faculty requires funds."

Without those investments to increase capacity and faculty salaries, local education leaders agree, the state is at risk of not only losing a portion of its student constituency to public colleges to other states, but also its existing, and future faculty.

"You can only do so much to build the classroom, but to actually produce successful students you also need to have quality faculty at the front of the classroom - whether it’s a traditional setting or online," says Clark. Because of relatively low faculty salaries, he says, "we have trouble at this stage converting our first choice faculty searches into successful searches, and we are starting to lose good faculty that are here to other states with much lower costs of living."

The state has just ratified a contract that will result in a net salary increase of 9 percent over a three-year period for faculty. "Frankly, that keeps us from falling farther behind. We are at some point going to need to make an equity adjustment to get our faculty a competitive range," says Clark.

Sandra Kurtinitis agrees. She is the outgoing president of Worcester’s Quinsigamond Community College, who is leaving to become chancellor of the Community College of Baltimore County. "We’ve nearly doubled our enrollment over the last two years. We need every square foot of space," says Kurtinitis. "I appreciate the sense that I am feeling within the Commonwealth that investments have to be made particularly at the institutions of public higher education – so we can do the jobs that we need to do on behalf of our communities and in terms of our state’s economy."

Ninety-two percent of QCC graduates stay in the state, she notes. "You can’t give someone second- or third-rate training on outdated equipment and expect them to find a good job, or to transfer to a university ready to actually engage in a higher level curriculum, so it is a very refreshing step forward. ... You need to be able to support your people at a competitive level, you also need to be able to show them that you value them as much as a piece of equipment in order to attract and retain them."

The workforce of the future

Massachusetts has benefited a great deal from the presence of world-class institutions of higher education both public and private, says Michael Goodman, director of policy and research at the Boston-based Massachusetts Donahue Institute. "Massachusetts is a knowledge state. We don’t necessarily have the best weather, or the lowest cost of doing business, but we do trade on our intellectual innovativeness," he says. If innovators systematically choose to leave the area, he says, "then the investment that draws and retains businesses that we’ve come to rely so heavily on, won’t last long in the absence of those people." Making the same kind of commitment to public education as we have to K-12 would help to increase the supply of these knowledge workers in the future, he says, and would also play a key role in advanced career and workforce training and continuing education.

"The capital bill is providing quite a lot of money for investments in buildings and construction having to do particularly with science and math and we are very happy to be part of that," says Helen Heineman, PhD, president of Framingham State College. Important to note, she says, is the fact that upgrades made to lab facilities will not solely benefit the college’s science programs. "All of our students take a strong liberal arts core curriculum that includes courses in science, so all of our students pass through those labs," she says. And the newly signed faculty contract, she says, will go a long way in bringing faculty salaries up to the level of their peers in comparable states and colleges. "So I think the long trend of disinvestment in public higher education has come to an end," she says.

Kim Ciottone can be reached at: kciottone@wbjournal.com