SUMMARY OF APRIL 18, 2001 OREGON UNIVERSITY SYSTEM STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS WORKING SESSION.

Prepared by David Longanecker, Session Facilitator April 26, 2002

The OUS Board, institution Presidents, Chancellor and Vice Chancellors met in a work session on April 18 to discuss levels of access and quality in OregonÕs post-secondary education system that can be sustained with current levels of state and tuition support. It was generally agreed that Oregon cannot sustain broad access to high quality higher education opportunities in the future without making strategic changes in objectives, available resources or governance.

With respect to the issue of ACCESS.

• Access has been and will remain the most critical issue of public interest in Oregon.
• Access is defined in Oregon as affordability and geographic proximity, which traditionally has been interpreted as making everything available to everyone at as low a tuition rate as possible.
• Despite the ethic of broad access, however, Oregon performs only about average on most indices of access. It is about average in high school graduating rate, college enrollment of recent high school graduates, and graduation of those who do enroll in college. Oregon falls below average in the participation of adults in postsecondary education.
• While there are various reasons for this `average' performance, without doubt the States financing policies contribute. Institutions receive average support, so lack incentives to reach out more broadly. Furthermore, tuitions are slightly above average, but Oregon provides below average state financial aid, so students from below average income families face great financial difficulty in attending college.
• These findings led to a discussion about how the future might differ from the present, if access is to be maintained, and hopefully expanded, in Oregon. This discussion found that:
• The importance of access as the most important focus of higher education policy will not diminish in Oregon in the future.
• It may change, however, in both how access is defined and in what strategies should be used to advance public policy that enhances access.
• Redefining access for the future:
• Affordability and geographic access will remain core components of the access agenda, but may warrant refinement.
• There appeared to be a willingness to redefine access to be `the opportunity to receive a quality education that meets the needs of each student' rather than the current general philosophy that access means access to every opportunity by every potential student.
• Access must be made more contemporary by weaving in the availability of web-based distant education, as a part of the system.
• Access needs to assure that Oregon higher education attracts more of the best and brightest students, both because they deserve access to quality public higher education and because these students enrich the overall educational environment.
• Restructuring the strategies to achieve access:
• Tuition and financial aid programs should be rationalized, substantially increasing the stateÕs investment in financial aid to enhance affordability, not only to respond to future increases in tuition but also to correct for historical inadequacies in Oregon state support for financial aid.
• Whether or not access is redefined as access to a quality education rather than everything for everybody, the missions of individual institutions within the system, both with respect to what programs they offer and what students they serve, will need to be clearly differentiated.

 
• While access may trump quality as the most important focus of Oregon public higher education policy, quality is mighty important, and may be the most at risk in OregonÕs current fiscal and policy environment.
• As with access, indices suggest that the quality of Oregon higher education is about average, even though many in Oregon believe it falls below that mark.
• Quality is seriously at risk for a couple of reasons.
• First, funding for quality instruction is insufficient to provide the courses and services that students need to persist to completion in a timely fashion. As a result, Oregon must hire much of its most skilled workforce from outside the state.
• Second, funding for quality research is insufficient to attract competitive research faculty and to develop competitive graduate programs to respond in ways that will move Oregon into leadership in the new knowledge based economic community.
• While both instructional and research quality are at risk, research quality is perceived to be more at risk than is instructional quality.
• To many in the business community, which has been championing the interests of higher education in recent years, quality issues are, in fact, more pressing than access issues.
• These perceptions led to a discussion about how the future might differ from the present, if quality is to protected and hopefully enhanced in Oregon. This discussion reflected that:
• Current funding streams are insufficient to maintain, let along enhance, the quality of Oregon public higher education.
• In planning for the future, every effort must be made to at least sustain and hopefully increase support from existing funding sources, including obviously the State, but increased support from these sources cannot be assumed.
• Therefore, plans for the future must include contingent/alternate strategies for securing the resources that will be needed to achieve the vision of a higher quality system in the future.
• One key to achieving this vision is providing greater flexibility to individual institutions to respond to market forces as they arise, and not to be constrained by the traditional shackles of state government bureaucracy.
• Institutional flexibility, however, must be accompanied by clear institutional mission differentiation if Oregon, with its limited resources, is to avoid unnecessary duplication, redundancy, and counterproductive competition for students and educational/research services. Mission differentiation is the equation to assure that the sum of the parts equal the desired whole in a relatively decentralized governance structure.
• This mission differentiation should reflect which students will be served by which institutions, thus assuring quality instruction tailored to the students needs and strengths, as well as what programs and services will be provided, so that individual institutions can develop complementary areas of excellence.
• Also, instructional excellence will be enhanced if more students arrive prepared well to perform at the college level. Quality students contribute greatly to a quality educational process. All of which suggests that the OUS must work with elementary and secondary education and Community Colleges to assure that you are receiving more well-prepared students.
• To achieve this will require more resources, because you are an under-resourced system today.

With respect to funding enhanced quality in research and graduate education, it is hoped that the state will increase support for these activities, as well, but this strategy will also require additional support from federal and private sources. To attract these resources, however, the state will need to attract exceptional faculty, which will require some upfront funding. Here, strategies such as KentuckyÕs endowed faculty chairs program are worth examining.

Next steps.

As a result of these discussions, it was agreed that each of the Presidents and Board Members would describe in advance of the May 17 Board meeting on Governance how she/he feels that the institution she/he heads or the Board she/he serves would fit into a differentiated system designed to assure that the sum of the parts equal a wholly accessible system of exceptionally high quality, and how these issues relate to consideration in preparing the fiscal year 2003-04 budget.