Under a directive from the state legislature, Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission recently released a report on spending and efficiency at public universities to ensure their long-term vitality.
Universities have faced strong headwinds, including rising costs, declining enrollment and inadequate state support.
The report recommends targeted institutional integration by January 2027, periodic program review and a separate salary pool for essential compensation increases, among other things.
But at an SOU Board of Trustees meeting Friday, some attendees raised concerns about the focus on efficiency.
Faculty Senate Chair Dennis Slattery said that’s the wrong metric to focus on and misses the point.
"Walk this campus today, and you will see students sitting in faculty offices, discussing ideas, seeking advice, finding mentorship," he said. "It is deeply inefficient, and it happens every day, as it has for the nearly 50 years I've been associated with this university. Caring is not efficient."
SOU President Rick Bailey questioned whether the recommendations would solve universities’ funding problems. As he sees it, the main issues are a lack of state support and rising personnel costs for benefit programs like retirement and insurance.
"The real pain point in higher education today is not institutional inefficiency," said Sage TeBeest, president of SEIU 503 Sublocal 84, which represents classified staff. "It is chronic underfunding."
Commission Executive Director Ben Cannon said they chose to focus on other solutions in their recommendations.
"I am not suggesting that they are a complete and total answer to this or necessarily even a fundamental answer to this," he said.
He thinks the solution involves both state investment and regional partnerships to make the best use of limited resources.
"We are not a state that funds higher education well," Cannon said.
But at the same time, he said, they're looking for creative solutions to ensure long-term viability.
"As much as we will advocate for a big surge in state funding," Cannon said, "We think that's pretty unlikely. [...] And so we're trying to look at this realistically and say, in order to protect affordability, in order to protect access, are there some other options? Are there some other tools that we can put on the table?"
SOU in particular has suffered a series of financial crises in recent years. The Ashland-based university approved a plan last fall to cut more than $10 million over the next four years.
In recent testimony before the commission, Bailey said all seven of the state's public universities are more efficient than the national average in terms of student-to-staff and student-to-faculty ratios.
"How much more efficient should our seven universities be? Efficiency is a tool, but it's not a destination," he said. "If we view financial stewardship merely as a series of subtractions, we will eventually subtract our way into irrelevance, and that's a bad outcome for Oregon, where our economy and workforce are struggling."
The next step for the commission’s report is the state legislature.
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