New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
The state of CSCU
Connecticut’s higher education system chancellor addresses budget fight, financial challenges
HARTFORD — Terrence Cheng has had an eventful two and a half years as chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system.
He arrived in 2021 as the system managed the COVID-19 pandemic and prepared for the merger of the state’s 12 community colleges into one school, eventually finalized last year. The system’s finances were, and remain, on shaky ground, leading to concern that Western Connecticut State could shut down permanently.
For two straight years, CSCU has fought a highstakes budget battle with Gov. Ned Lamont and state legislators, who have increased funding for the system — but not enough to cover the loss of expiring pandemic relief funds. In anticipation of a budget shortfall for the coming year, Cheng has administered tens of millions in cuts across CSCU, while the system’s Board of Regents recently voted to increase tuition 5 percent next fall.
Along the way, Cheng has faced sharp criticism from students and faculty, who blame him, at least in part, for the system’s financial state. Earlier this month, the university senate at Eastern Connecticut State declared their disapproval through a no confidence vote.
CT Insider spoke with Cheng in his Hartford office Friday about the state budget, his relationship with faculty and what regrets he has about his tenure so far. The conversation has been condensed and edited lightly.
CT Insider: You have told the legislature you need $47.6 million to avoid deeper cuts in the CSCU system. What happens if that money doesn’t come through? Terrence Cheng:
Unfortunately, if we don’t get more support from the state, we will be forced to enact even further reductions. And that will hit almost every single component of the institutional operations. It’ll be academic. It’ll be student support. It’ll be student services. It’ll be in class offerings. The impacts would be enormous. We would have to make even further reductions to our parttime staff, and we would have to start looking at our full-time staff and our academic programs. I think we would be forced to look at even more tuition increases.
At the end of the day, what makes that so painful and so tragic is that it hurts students. When you’re not able to offer the appropriate number and level of courses to students, it slows down their graduation, and ultimately it slows their ability to get into the workforce. When you don’t give them the mental health counseling that they need, when you don’t give them the career counseling that they need, the academic advising — when you don’t give them the things that 21st century students need, it hurts students.
The Lamont administration has basically said: ‘Enrollment is down, state block grant funding is up. Why can’t
the system make this work?’ What has been your response to that?
The first thing I’ll say is that our enrollment, spring to spring, is actually up this year. It’s the first time in several years where we are seeing an uptick in enrollment. So we are stabilizing.
What I would say about the resource levels is that
if we are serious about developing a strong higher education system that benefits the workforce, that benefits communities, that benefits both local and statewide economies, then we need to continue to invest in higher education at the commensurate level to the outcomes that we’re hoping to achieve.
We certainly need to continue to evolve. The market has changed. We have to look at what students find valuable, and we have to look at what we’re doing so that we can adapt more nimbly. At the same time, we have to recognize that we have faculty and staff that are part of bargaining units, we have contracts that we must adhere to. We’re really pushing to a change, but we’re going to need more time.
You’ve also faced criticism from the other direction. There have been several recent rallies with professors and students who want to see your administration do more to stand up for the system, to resist cuts. What has been your response to that line of criticism?
Listen, I want to recognize that our faculty and staff have gone through a lot for a long time, and I understand where they’re coming from. Because when the state’s financial situation was not great, going back to the Malloy administration, the system was being told, ‘Do more with less.’ And now when the state’s coffers are actually quite full and the state is doing well financially, it seems we’re being told to do more with less. That’s very frustrating.
I came up through the faculty ranks. I know what it feels like to have more students added to your classroom because we have fewer adjunct faculty. So what I would say to our folks is that I understand that this has been a very hard time, that there’s been a great deal of frustration both with the way the state has handled our appropriation and also with the way folks who have been in my seat previously have tried to negotiate this conversation.
We need their partnership and their understanding. We want what they want, which is more funding for the system, which is better working conditions for our faculty and our staff. And we want better conditions and opportunities for our students. But it’s a challenging time. We are part of a state that is working through a very complicated period in terms of how the finances are managed, and so we’re doing the best that we can to advocate.
What have your conversations been like recently with the Lamont administration and with legislators? What is your level of optimism over whether you’re going to get some or all of the money that you say that you need?
We’ve been very transparent with our needs. We’ve been very upfront and transparent with the impact that we believe we make on the state. We’ve been explicit with the governor’s office and [the Office of Policy and Management] and with our state leaders about how we have gone about mitigating over $100 million in budget deficit. But it leaves us a delta, and that delta is specifically for our community colleges and for Western at this time.
Folks are listening to us, they are wanting to help us. But of course, there are many needs out there that are being voiced. The best thing that we can do for our state leaders is give them all the information that they need to make the best decisions that they can for the state.
You mentioned Western, and there’s been a lot of attention on the financial situation there, which looks pretty dire. How did Western get to that point, and what is the future for that school?
If we could go back and rewrite the history of Western, let’s say in the last 15 years, things would have been approached with maybe a bit more detail a bit more alacrity and a bit more understanding of the kind of domino effects of decision-making and the ultimate impacts.
Western has the tools that it needs to come out of this situation. It’s up to the system office and hopefully to the state to give them the the extended runway that they need to really start to calibrate their offerings, to assess some of their academic programs, look at some of their operations.
At times, it will require hard choices. We’re going to have to change how we do things at Western and, frankly, across the system in many ways. If we look at enrollment trends across the Northeast and in New England, if we look at demographic trends for our country and for this region, it’s undeniable that if we don’t make significant changes, then we’re going to become obsolete.
Western is a good example. They are at, unfortunately, the kind of front of the line right now in some ways.
How would you evaluate how the community college merger has gone?
It’s been challenging in a variety of ways. When you were dealing with something so big, and so complicated that it requires external accreditation approval, not to mention new organizational structures, new operational structures, this is massive endeavor.
We’ve received our accreditation. We received our federal approval to be an institution. We are functioning that way as a merged community college. It has created more access, it has created more opportunity. So many students are taking advantage of the fact they can have a home campus but then also take classes at other campuses, which actually increases their ability to graduate faster and move on to the next phase.
It doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of growing pains. The difficulty of the last few years is definitely real. But where we’re trending now, it’s very positive.
You mentioned a lot of these issues predate your tenure. But what’s something in the time that you’ve been here that you kind of look back on now and say, ‘I wish I had done that a little bit differently?’
Having cut my teeth as an academic on campuses, I know that communication to every single level of an organization is really important. I wish I had communicated more consistently and more effectively with our union leaders, with our faculty leaders at every single institution.
I did visit every campus, I did town halls, I listened, I learned a lot, but at the same time, you could always do more. When I look back at last year’s effort in the legislature, trying to gain an investment from the state for the long term, I wish I had engaged again our faculty and staff leaders more intensively in that effort.
As we look forward to gaining support for this year, I would hope to have that coalition of the willing pulled together sooner rather than later.
Last year, there was a report from Education Reform Now that said CSCU schools had higher tuition and lower graduation rates than some peer schools. More recently, a report from the Community College Research Center found Connecticut
was below the national average in terms of community college students transferring to fouryear schools. How would you evaluate the performance of the system — not financially, but in terms of outcomes for students?
I will never be satisfied. I feel that if we allow ourselves to be satisfied, then we will become complacent, and we will stop being ambitious and striving to achieve the best that we can.
Being an immigrant, being a person of color, being someone who didn’t grow up with a lot of money and didn’t have the opportunities, public higher education was my ladder to become something that I never thought I would be able to become. So I take it personally when we’re not doing anything and everything we can to give the best to our students.
We have to be better with the number of students that transfer from our community colleges to four-year institutions. We have to be better with our direct job placement, the number of internships and apprenticeships that we create, the direct impact on workforce. We have to be better when it comes to our K-12 systems and our technical school system, feeding their students directly into us.
I would also say that this is not only the responsibility of the higher education system. We are a public system. Without the support of the state, we are going to be in deep trouble.