This commentary is by John Bramley, former acting and interim president of the University of Vermont, a UVM provost and senior vice president. He was a professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and in the College of Medicine, where he also served as chair and dean.
In a previous commentary, I described the problems facing Vermont’s higher education and wrote that a radical approach was needed to address those problems. Vermont’s small population and therefore limited means has meant that the University of Vermont and the Vermont State College System are both inadequately funded from public funds.
However, this is not a gripe about inadequate state funding but rather a proposal that the existing resources should be used more effectively and strategically. Over the years, at least three radical approaches to redistribute Vermont’s higher education appropriation have been suggested.
- The state could allocate more of its support for higher education directly to Vermont students, probably through the Vermont Student Assistance Corp. rather than to the institutions. The students could then apply those scholarship funds to support tuition at the Vermont public institution of their choice. Those institutions most able to attract students would receive more of the public voucher funds while those less able to attract students less funds.
In a sense it is a competitive free-market system and similar approaches have been unsuccessfully proposed for K-12 education. It would require the cessation of portability of taxpayer funds to out-of-state institutions. While I have never seen a logical reason for Vermont taxpayer dollars to be used to subsidize out-of-state colleges as they do at present, that has proven to be politically popular. Additionally, I fear this quasi-voucher approach would potentially encourage some detrimental behaviors by the institutions to retain or attract tuition, such as impeding student portability and duplicating popular programs. So I rule out that option out as too radical.
- A second suggestion has been to amalgamate UVM and the Vermont state colleges into a single system. This is the most predominant public higher education structure nationally. It has the merit of some economy of administrative costs — single offices for admissions, financial aid, budget management, communications, human resources, facilities, etc., and requires fewer academic administrators.
However, I doubt that the savings are major and I suspect it would be a recipe for even bigger problems than the current system. It would encumber the university with the existing problems of the Vermont State Colleges, and force together two different cultures and missions. It would not solve the major state colleges’ financial challenges of too many buildings, too many locations, too few students and too much debt. Those problems must be faced and we have witnessed the political furor when suggestions are made to rationalize the overextended VSC. Finally, it creates no more money and probably UVM would end up further subsidizing the state colleges. So that leads me to reject that idea, also.
- The third option is to return UVM to the private land grant status it held from 1862 to 1955 and redistribute the state appropriations in a strategic and targeted way.
There is a very well-known model for this system design in a neighboring state. The State University of New York System operates numerous campuses across the state alongside the private and independent Cornell University, which is also New York’s designated land grant research university. Like Cornell, UVM would receive state funding for critical or unique state programs and would maintain the infrastructure in agriculture, engineering, and health sciences etc.
However, the majority of state higher education funds would go to student support (via VSAC) or to the state college system. UVM would set a single tuition but Vermonters could access programs unavailable in the state colleges system at lower cost through special grants available through VSAC. Undergraduate programs and graduate programs that are available in the state college system would not be eligible for these special grants at the university, although, of course, students could still enroll in them at full tuition if they wish to. This approach frees UVM from its current burden of subsidizing lower tuition and provides significant potential for increasing enrollments at the Vermont State Colleges.
Currently, the state appropriation to UVM is essentially split into three components. A quarter is allocated to the College of Medicine to support medical education, and a quarter goes to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the Extension system to support research and outreach in agriculture and food systems. The remaining half is used to partly subsidize the discounted tuition offered to Vermonters.
The state funds to Medicine and Agriculture leverage substantial federal grants for medicine, food systems and the Extension system, programs critical to the university’s land grant mission. So a compelling case can be made for these targeted state appropriations to continue.
A major benefit for targeted appropriations is transparency and accountability for all to see. The university becomes accountable for how state dollars are used and the Legislature also becomes accountable for the level of support it provides for particular activities. In this model, the balance of the 50% “tuition appropriation” (about $21 million in 2021), could be reallocated to the state colleges, or to special VSAC grants for Vermonters to attend UVM in unique programs.
Obviously, the transition to a new model would be complicated. For example, there is need to develop models for graduate education, non-degree students and so on. It would require interim funding over a multiyear period to transition to the new model (actually a good use of one-time funds) to prevent hardship to Vermont students currently enrolled at UVM and minimize program disruption.
While it may be difficult to transition, it is the only viable way I see for a long-term structural change. Importantly, there is a viable model at Cornell University. I believe strongly that UVM could prosper as a private institution, and evidence tells us that the Vermont State Colleges cannot prosper in Vermont’s current higher education structure. However, in this model the state college system would be more strongly supported, potentially increase its enrollment and approach financial sustainability.
While I think this structural change is needed, there are other steps that I believe can transform public higher education and help make Vermont a national leader. In a subsequent commentary, I will discuss some of them.
