2/8/2012: Berdahl’s handout from the city club debate. UO gets half as much per “fundable student” (which apparently means in-state student) as OSU. This does not adjust for the fact their students are in more expensive programs, OSU has extension responsibilities. We do not seem to be giving huge subsidies to WOU, EOU, SOU. (Some, but these are small schools.) UO’s cost to students is high, but our cost for the lowest income students is the second lowest. Our graduation rate is the highest. If the state starts some sort of performance compact, we have nothing to fear.
Dog on small but maybe important point:
One of the things that is missing from this nice compact presentation of data is transfers. SOU. EOU and WOU are becoming 2 year feeder schools (WOU/EOU to OSU; SOU to UO) which drives their “graduation” rate lower. The system needs to better account for between schools transfer.
Still, this is no excuse for the generally poor
performance of the smaller schools. Eliminate them and build a brand new University in Bend – put the 161 million dollar EMU over there :)
Why did he use external sources for this when OUS’s office of instituitionsl research is right here on campus.
These numbers are being misread- OSU gets funding for other program’s we don’t offer that the legislature asks them to run(extension etc). These numbers are not accurate for OREGON FTE- they spread the numbers over the entire student population – not the roughly 51% in state students we actually serve.
Don’t be so sure about that. The Delta Project gets its numbers from accounting that is reported to the federal government — IPEDS it’s called — standard categories that all universities must use. They break things out into education-related expenses and things like “public service.” It may well be that the numbers used don’t include Extension. I don’t know that for sure. But using the Delta Project figures is probably a good deal more accurate than using raw figures from OUS.
See the top chart for Fundable FTE — with “in state” marked in by hand — that is completely accurate and answers your point.
You have something of a point re OSU extension — but the rest of the claim about UO being underfunded is very much on target.
There’s a formula that OUS uses based on national costs per field of study. (The “matrix”). They apply that uniformly, but then they add in all sorts of extra subsidies for selected schools. Some for “regional” schools; some for favored fields of study (hint: OIT and OSU).
Bottom line: UO is subsidizing the rest of the system (with the possible exception of PSU, which may also be getting cheated).
Dog agrees with financial duck
the essential simple numerical point is that
Fundable FTE for UO is 75% of the average of the
other 7 institutions. That’s not right.
Another thing that you can find from a report issued a year or two back, by the Delta Project in this post: in Oregon, the community colleges receive a MUCH greater state/local subsidy per student than the state subsidy/in-state student received by the 4 year colleges. For UO, the ratio is something like 3:1. Yup, an LCC or PCC student gets three times as much state/local tax money as a UO in-state student. Bizarre!
Dog tells a dog-tale
A long time ago, I was at a legislative session representing OSSHE (before OUS days);
The community college lobbyists were there as well. We gave our presentation followed
by the CC who basically said – OSSHE educates 60,000 students (which it did at that time);
the CC system in Oregon educates 320,000 students. That carried a lot of weight
then, and probably still does – especially with east of the mountain legislators.
It is a fact, for a variety of reasons, that it costs more to educate an engineering student than a liberal arts major. From these numbers it is impossible to determine how much of the OSU-OU gap is simply due to the nature of the majors (i.e. the matrix) and how much is from pet projects targeted by the legislature/OUS board.
You’re right, you need the detailed OUS budget table broken down by institution and expenditure category to really tease this out. But Berdahl is right to get the discussion going and out in the open — this is quite a lot of information already for a City Club presentation. What did Pernsteiner have to say in response? What do the other schools and their backers have to say about the justification for this?
Ah, those legislators! I’ve had to honk at a few of them. Dangerous out there in the rural areas, especially during hunting season — don’t want to offend their pride. But they don’t understand the difference between SUBSIDY PER STUDENT and TOTAL SUBSIDY. They must not have take Math 95. At least not at UO.