Chancellor outlines new college, university funding plan

Higher education Chancellor Dan Klaich outlined his plan to rewrite how the state’s colleges and universities are funded before legislators Wednesday, but there was anything but widespread agreement on some of the specifics.

Virtually everyone agrees the current formula used to fund the state’s colleges and universities is inadequate.

Faculty, administrators, and students testified as such Wednesday before the Legislature’s Committee to Study the Funding of Higher Education.

The current formula encourages enrollment, but not graduation, inadequately funds the largest college, the College of Southern Nevada, and does not account for the growing importance of research at the universities in Las Vegas and Reno.

Lawmakers created the committee last year to look at rewriting the formula. Klaich, working with the college and university presidents, has come up with the outline of a new plan.

Under that plan, university research missions would receive extra funding, but remedial education at the community colleges would not.

The new plan also includes a cost matrix — basically more expensive classes would get more funding — but it’s not based on Nevada data. Klaich said this piece is the key to the entire formula rewrite.

“If it doesn’t work, then the proposal that I’ve submitted to you doesn’t work,” he said. “The matrix, which ranks lower division courses such as history and English as the cheapest and upper division science and engineering courses as the most expensive, uses data from studies done in other states.

State Sen. Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, the committee chairman, wondered whether using other states’ data meant the system wasn’t comparing “apples to apples.”

Klaich said there was no time to study the actual cost of courses in Nevada. He also said it might lead to misleading data because those courses were funded under the old formula, which probably isn’t providing the right amounts of money for some courses.

Klaich said he thought that the data used, from long-term studies in Texas, Ohio, Illinois and Florida, would translate to Nevada.

A combination of the cost matrix and completed student credit hours would form the basis for funding each institution. More funding would be added based on criteria such as producing more graduates, the number of minority students served, and, at the universities, an increase in the amount of outside research money each institution attracts.

Klaich said he wants the formula to be phased in, so an institution that might come out with less money under the new formula would not suffer a large cut all at once.

Under questioning from Assemblyman Pat Hickey, R-Reno, Klaich said he expected to have estimates of what each institution would receive under a new formula.

“We have run innumerable test-drives with the formula,” he said.

He did not, however, say when such estimates would be made public.

One problem with coming up with an estimate might be that one of the more controversial parts of the current formula is the operations and maintenance portion of the budget.

The University of Nevada, Reno, is seen as benefiting far more than UNLV. UNR’s campus is much older and costs more to keep up, so it gets more money than UNLV does.

Klaich said there is still substantial disagreement about this part of the formula rewrite.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at
rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.