Systems of higher education institutions enroll 75% of students in public four-year institutions across the nation. Part of their mission is to amplify their member institutions’ impact and ensure they do more together than each could do alone. While this assignment is practical, putting it into action can be incredibly difficult, as evidenced by the challenges facing higher education today. Declining birth rates are currently at historic lows, and recent trends indicate that fewer and fewer of those children are choosing to attend college. Though fall 2023 and 2024 enrollment shows slight upticks, the long-term future outlook for the enrollment of students aged 18-24 represents a sharp departure from historical enrollment patterns of growth that shaped institutional organization and staffing trends that largely persist today.
At the same time, public higher education forms the bedrock of economic and workforce development in communities across the nation. This makes it imperative that states and systems act in concert to respond productively to these challenges. At NCHEMS, we believe that public higher education, as an asset and public function of the state, must act to confront these headwinds and enact its public mission in new ways.
Making these changes, however, can be controversial.
Take, for instance, NCHEMS’ recent organizational study of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) system. The study’s findings were presented last week at a special meeting of its Board of Regents. This study was commissioned by the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management (OPM) as called for by the state legislature during its 2023 session. Early reporting on our work highlighted the report’s observation that CSCU has not managed to adjust its staffing levels to match a decade-long enrollment decline, leading to unsustainably high costs. In conveying the views of faculty members, readers of such articles may be left with an overly simplistic reading of our report: that cuts to staffing levels are tantamount to reducing postsecondary enrollment options. While the report does in fact recommend adjustments to staffing levels, it urges CSCU to do so in a strategic way that enhances affordability and improves the performance of the system to bring scale and efficiency and add value to the work of institutions.
Besides staffing, the report identifies numerous substantial changes to be made by the system to meet the needs of the state and its students more effectively. Additional recommendations require action not by CSCU, but by the state, which has a responsibility to create a policy environment that fosters CSCU’s success. Reporting that zeroes in on the headline-grabbing recommendation about staffing while giving less attention to these other important recommendations oversimplifies the substance of the report, focuses the public’s understanding of CSCU’s challenges and opportunities too narrowly, and risks creating conditions that will help perpetuate the budgetary standoff between Connecticut’s policymakers and CSCU.
Although CSCU must take bold, strategic steps that include staffing adjustments, it must also reform the way it functions. Without enumerating all of them, our report makes recommendations designed to reinvigorate the system to add value and restore its credibility with the state by:
While the focus of our study was on CSCU’s organization and performance, it is vital to consider how state policy and practice contribute to or impede CSCU’s strong performance. Therefore, complementing our recommendations to the CSCU system are recommendations for the state. Among the most critical of these are:
Despite being only about a dozen years old, CSCU stands at a crossroads. With the state asking questions about the value the CSCU System Office is delivering, our report also puts forward options for restructuring the governance of CSCU’s six institutions. That governance alternatives may be under consideration should signal that there is waning public patience with the System’s efforts to deliver on its mission of providing broadly accessible, relevant programs efficiently and affordably. While the report includes those options, NCHEMS concluded that a system model provides the best organizational and governance structure to address the needs of Connecticut in the years to come. But that is true only if CSCU can take urgent actions such as adjustments to staffing levels that understandably capture the attention of faculty, staff, policymakers, journalists, and the general public.
