For Colleges, the Future Isn’t as Rosy as the Present

California’s higher education community expressed its gratitude this week for a second healthy funding increase in as many years--a proposed $848-million boost that would ensure no fee hikes for the 1996-97 school year.

But while Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposed budget enables the University of California, the California State University system and the community college system to maintain service in the short term, analysts and administrators said long-term problems still threaten to undercut quality, access and affordability.

“This budget . . . doesn’t begin to address the long-term problems,” said Patrick Callan, executive director of the California Higher Education Policy Center. “It gives us a reprieve, but there’s no vision about the future.”

Two issues are of particular concern to educators. For starters, many of the buildings that house California’s institutions of higher learning are falling apart, from their leaky roofs to their frayed wiring. Several years of budget cuts have forced even the most basic maintenance to be deferred.

Then there is the so-called Tidal Wave II, the surge of high school graduates that is expected to flood the state’s public colleges in 10 or 15 years. This boom in students will bring new funding problems that have not been addressed during the annual budget debates.

In the wake of Wilson’s budget proposal, which allows the state’s colleges to avoid fee increases planned for this year, higher education officials found themselves in the delicate position of trying to emphasize their long-term funding needs without appearing ungrateful for their immediate good fortune.

“The irony is, here’s a very good higher education budget. And yet, the underlying systemic problems are impervious to a good budget year,” said Barry Munitz, chancellor of the 22-campus Cal State system.

“In the absence of structural change, there’s an absolute certainty that the need for services is going to outrun the resources,” he added, referring to the expected rise in college-bound students. “But no annual budget is going to address that.”

UC budget director Lawrence Hershman was similarly diplomatic.

“This is a good budget that keeps us from getting further behind. . . . I sure don’t want to be the one who sits and complains,” he said. “But this doesn’t solve all of our problems.”

Last January, after several years of budget cuts for higher education, Wilson initiated a four-year compact that promised a more stable funding structure: a 2% increase for the 1995-1996 school year and an average of a 4% increase for each of the next three years. In exchange, college officials agreed to raise student fees 10% each year.

It is a promise they have not yet had to keep. Last year, the Legislature appropriated enough extra money to buy out the fee hike. And last week, Wilson announced that his proposed higher education budget for the coming year would include enough to offset any fee increases.

But the compact is designed primarily to help colleges “get back on track,” as one administrator put it, after years of stiff cutbacks. For the most part, it does not address the problems that loom in higher education’s future, neither in its funding proposals nor in its rhetoric.

“It isn’t that we have a bad plan for dealing with the next 10 years. We don’t have any plan at all,” said Callan, whose policy center is based in San Jose.

If ever the state were to begin making long-term plans, Callan said, now is the time. And he is not alone in that view.

In a sense, some officials said, California higher education is in a race against the clock. It must repair its deteriorating physical plant before Tidal Wave II hits--because that enrollment increase will not only put more pressure on the current infrastructure, it likely will make funding even more scarce.

Wilson’s moratorium on fee increases takes the most contentious issue in higher education off the table this year, providing what some see as the perfect environment for strategic long-term planning.

“The question is, will this window of opportunity be seen as a time to address the future issues, or will it be a time to put higher education on the back burner?” asked Callan.

Munitz agreed.

“You normally don’t do dramatic transformational planning in the up years,” he said. Then, when budgets are down, you can’t do it because that’s “when you have the least flexibility and least breathing room.”

So now, Munitz added, “There’s this great danger that we won’t make best use of the better times.”

Before educators can turn their attention toward such fundamental restructuring, they will first work to publicize a $3-billion bond measure on the March 26 statewide ballot that seeks to provide money for school repairs and construction.

If approved by the voters, the bond sales will generate about $2 billion for elementary and secondary schools and about $975 million for higher education. The three college systems would split that money, much of which will go for seismic retrofitting.

But even if the measure passes, officials stress that it will not begin to fix what’s broken, a list that gets longer every year.

“We’ve got deferred maintenance problems of hundreds of millions of dollars apart from seismic,” said UC’s Hershman.

The money raised in the bond measure would be “the tip of the iceberg,” Munitz said.

A look at the details of Wilson’s budget, and at how colleges plan to use the money, tends to support educators’ contention that instead of striding forward, they are merely catching up.

At UC, the proposed 6% increase in state funding for 1996-97 would enable the university to maintain its current programs, to accommodate all qualified students and to graduate them in a “timely” fashion, officials said.

Moreover, UC will be able to go forward with a three-year plan to raise staff salaries to the level of those at comparable institutions. Currently, UC salaries are believed to lag behind by about 10%.

Wilson’s budget gave Cal State about a 5% overall increase, which officials said would allow faculty raises averaging 4%. Of the rest, about $10 million would go for building repairs, $4.5 million for technological improvements in the classroom and $3.5 million to expand and update three unfinished campuses.

California’s 106 community colleges also got some relief in Wilson’s budget, including $14.4-million to partially offset budget shortfalls brought about by inaccurate projections of property tax revenue. About $10 million would also be provided to expand outreach efforts in underserved areas.

The governor’s budget also increased funding for state financial aid programs by 4.7%, including $10 million to increase grants for students attending private institutions. Callan said this could help public schools in the long run, when the demand for a college education is expected to exceed what’s available from state institutions.

If more students could afford to go to private schools, Callan said, “That could keep us from having to build a new campus.”