Can colleges be run as a business?

There is a new plan for the state’s public colleges and universities — from the top to the bottom — and not everyone is so sure the plan is going to work.

As all things in a major political shift, there seems to be plenty of initial support for this plan. Until, that is, the “devil in the details,” jumped up recently to sour what was perceived by the administration of Gov. Asa Hutchinson as a good policy change he championed.

It was during the last two times Hutchinson ran for governor (once unsuccessfully and once successfully) that the Bob Jones private college graduate spoke of wanting to “change the culture” of funding the state’s public colleges and universities.

For decades, under both the watchful care of Republican and Democratic governors, Arkansas’ public colleges and universities have been underfunded, the leaders of the schools constantly tell lawmakers.

Representatives of the colleges, who masquerade as lobbyists or government relations specialists from each campus, stalk the halls seeking financial support. They, in unison, carp at lawmakers each legislative session about needing more money for buildings, salaries, academic programs and mostly just expansion as more and more students are seeking admission to the state’s twoand four-year colleges and universities.

Why are more and more students going to college?

Well, during some of the past few years, jobs, quality jobs, are found lacking — especially if the students do not have a college degree or some sort of technical certificate attesting to their above-the-average skills.

Many of these colleges and universities have taken on other ways to earn additional and also more public tax dollars. Such ventures as federally funded research and often integrating state programs — such as workforce training and retraining displaced workers, which have earned the schools millions.

Some schools have even gone so far as to absorb the older, and more-often underfunded community colleges and vocational technical training centers of the 1960s and 1970s, which, by the way, in the 1980s and well until about 2010 spawned a new quasi-formula of community colleges.

Not only has the flagship University of Arkansas system reached out to such communities as Morrilton, Hope and Batesville, but Arkansas State University in Jonesboro has satellite campuses in Mountain Home, Beebe and Newport. ASU also has a central office in Little Rock, where the president of its system holds court.

The University of Arkansas system also has a separate president’s office and compound in Cammack Village, (a tiny city nestled in the Little Rock upscale metro area) where the hub of the UA’s business is done. The UA is run from Little Rock — not on its satellite campuses in Monticello, Pine Bluff, Morrilton, Hope or Batesville — or even at the system’s founding campus in Fayetteville.

Even Arkansas Tech University, formerly one of the four district agricultural schools, has a satellite campus at Ozark, just a few miles up the road from its Russellville campus.

But let’s get back to the funding formula.

Throwing more tax money at colleges and universities just because they can show enrollment growth — sadly — has not worked. The way statistics and marketing campaigns go does not equal academic success or graduates.

Allowing community colleges to count the enrollment of students taking less than a full load isn’t always fair. But the two-year colleges say if not for them reaching the nontraditional student, the state would be even further behind in the statistic of the population of the state without a college degree.

That statistic, everyone knows, is a job killer. It’s an industrial recruitment hurdle that’s often higher than the lack of a freshwater port, railroad line or interstate highway.

The uneasiness of the governor’s much-talkedabout plan simply is this: There has been no plan presented that shows who will win and who will lose, definitively, according to some state representatives who sounded the alarm about the ghost proposal this past week.

Everyone needs to see the plan.

But, can we, in Arkansas, really run public colleges like a business? Maybe we can find out.

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