Higher Education:

North-south fight over money may get new life

Legislative, system leaders want look at funding formula that some say slights UNLV

By Jean Reid Norman (contact)

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford

John Oceguera

Rogers: Northern, southern colleges should be funded equally (6-18-2009)
With colleges' budget cuts final, what now? (6-2-2009)
Panel approves university system's budget with 12.5 percent cut (5-15-2009)
Funding inequities have no simple fix (2-6-2009)

Archive of Sun education stories

Nevada System of Higher Education

Recalculating the state’s formula for funding higher education will take some higher math, but one part of the equation is already in place.

Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford and Assemblyman John Oceguera, the heir apparent to the Assembly speaker’s post for the next session, say it’s time.

Soon-to-be Chancellor Dan Klaich and outgoing Chancellor Jim Rogers agree, and several regents are on board.

Even Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio, the Reno Republican who was an architect of the current formula, says it’s due for a look.

Raggio, like other northern leaders, isn’t saying he is convinced the southern schools are getting shortchanged by the current formula, just that “it’s probably a good time” for an “objective review.”

A study is nothing new; this is academia, after all. But in the past each side has come up with results that support its point of view.

“Everybody has studied it before,” former UNLV President Carol Harter says. “We’ve been talking about it for years and nothing has happened.”

Harter and Gerry Bomotti, UNLV’s vice president of finance and business, added one more study to the pile June 16, and it was sent out with Rogers’ weekly memo. It concluded that the southern institutions — UNLV and the College of Southern Nevada — lag the northern ones in funding and should receive a combined $22 million per biennium over three legislative sessions to make up the difference.

Rogers endorsed that view in the memo, writing: “When Southern Nevada businesses provide 75 percent of all the funds that Nevada’s higher education system receives, and when Southern Nevada has 65 percent of the higher education system’s students, it seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong when the Southern Nevada higher education institutions receive only approximately 50 percent of the total education budget.”

University of Nevada, Reno, faculty Senate Chairman Elliott Parker and UNR Associate Vice President for Planning, Budget and Analysis Bruce Shively shot back with another study. It concluded that the extra money for UNR was to take care of older buildings and administration of statewide programs, such as the Cooperative Extension.

When you look at the cost of instruction at UNR and UNLV, they wrote, the budgets are nearly identical.

Harter and Bomotti responded with another report of their own, disputing UNR’s contentions point-by-point.

It all highlights that higher education funding isn’t that simple no matter how you look at it, Regent Michael Wixom says.

“It’s a little misleading to compare dollar for dollar because of programs. You have to take a look at the underlying issues.”

One key issue that was ignored in 2001, the last time the Legislature examined and modified the funding formula, was UNLV’s transformation into a research institution, says Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., who, as state Senate minority leader, served on the committee that dealt with the matter.

“The formula does not take into account changing priorities or the cost of research,” Titus says. Although the formula does provide more money for doctoral programs, she says, it does not look at whether any students are in the programs.

The Harter-Bomotti response notes that 15.4 percent of UNLV’s students are in graduate programs, while at UNR the percentage is 14.1 percent, not including the medical, dental and law schools, which the reports excluded to keep the comparison apples to apples.

But beyond that, Bomotti says, the formula does not adequately support research for either institution. California, for example, provides $16,330 per student to the campuses of the University of California, which do research, and $8,708 to campuses of the California State University system, which are teaching colleges. UNLV gets $8,361 per student in state funding.

Wixom says the debate has made at least one problem with the formula very clear to him. “We’re using one formula to fund different types of institutions — research institutions and community colleges. That’s taking a broad brush across all institutions.”

The root problem, Rogers maintains, is that higher education is not getting enough funding overall. The aim of the memo, he says, was not to suggest taking money from UNR to give to UNLV but to increase funding for all and give UNLV an extra boost.

After a legislative session in which higher education faced 36 percent cut, chances of that might seem laughable.

But Horsford says the tight budget highlighted the differences between the schools and gave legislators a desire to look more closely at the formula.

“My goal is to find ways to enhance the whole system and address the inequities over time based on a strategic plan, so that we get it right,” he says.

A bill to fund such a study did not make it through the final hours of the 2009 session, but Oceguera says he is committed to finding a way to fund it through the Legislative Commission, which he chairs, and the Interim Finance Committee, on which he sits.

The incoming chancellor says he, too, is committed to a thorough study, and it should be done in partnership with the Legislature. But if the Legislature cannot find a way, the system of higher education will get the study done on its own, Klaich says.

“It is incumbent on the system to take a leadership role,” he says. “For the formula to be credible, it has to be equitable.”

Discussion: 10 comments so far…

By brst

6/30/09 at 7:19 a.m.

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While UNLV and the Chancellor are trying their best to avoid the robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul scenario, the public isn't necessarily going to see it that way when these arguments flare up. Parity may sound great, but it is likely to draw UNR down to the bottom US News tier with UNLV.

I disagree that because Las Vegas has 75 percent of the state economy that southern colleges should receive that proportion of the funding. After all, nothing prevents Las Vegas students from access to UNR. (Those students may even discover the beauty of Northern Nevada.)
By mywallet700

6/30/09 at 7:25 a.m.

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Of course Horsford wants more money for UNLV. His wife works there. This is a fix. In other states, this is called a "conflict of interest". In Nevada, it's calling "lining your pockets with the public's cash."
By OG

6/30/09 at 7:37 a.m.

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UNR is a better academic institution - it has been ranked higher than UNLV (which is a bottom quartile institution) for a long, long time...

Maybe what legislators should do is find a way for souther Nevada students to afford 4 years in Reno, perhaps with a housing voucher or tuition discounts.
By LasVegas2009

6/30/09 at 8:27 a.m.

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From what I know about UNLV is that it is a cheap school compared to others int the country. I have heard from several students from other states that say they chose UNLV because its cheaper to attend than other institutions. Raise the cost to attend and get the cost inline with others. If people are moving here to attend because of cost then its too cheap. Quit wasting my tax dollars to supplement people from Ohio and California.
By Sands

6/30/09 at 9:02 a.m.

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OG--It would be nice to have two well-ranked universities in the state. If you read the article it states that the intent is not to divert money from Reno, but rather to raise more money and direct most of the new funds to UNLV.
By peegee76

6/30/09 at 9:13 a.m.

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LasVegas2009,

The tuition has been raised. And again. And then again two more times because of this fiscal crisis. What's more, is that very little (proportionally) of your tax dollars goes into UNLV.

You may also find it interesting that because of UNLV, a lot of local industries do better. Which makes life better for you in turn.

And to you Reno-lovers... Reno is great. UNR is a nice school. That's not the issue. The issue IS parity and the fact that Southern systems have been shortchanged for so long may have something to do with the... long, long.. disparity in rankings. Right?

And I don't agree totally with that anyway. There are several degree programs at UNLV that far outshine UNR (e.g., Educational Psychology - top 25 in the country). In fact, the whole college of education, college of hospitality, etc. trump Reno ... and most peer institutions.

But these are Grad programs. So you may be arguing Undergrad programs, I don't know. But if you are, that's pretty myopic and reminiscent of a day when UNLV was the southern nevada extension for UNR.

And lets not forget that UNR (originally in Elko) was founded in 1874. UNLV was founded in 1957. If you doubt that the age of an institution has anything to do with its quality, start investigating places like Harvard, Yale, Mit, etc. OR check out their funding per student in places like Stanford, UCBerkeley, etc.
By Randy

6/30/09 at 9:24 a.m.

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Hey -- here's an idea. Put all those geniuses at UNR and UNLV to work on finding a solution. We are paying all that brain power -- we might as well have them solve their own problems.
By EP

6/30/09 at 10:25 a.m.

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Let me make a minor correction. The piece I wrote with Bruce Shively was not a shot in response to the memo by UNLV's former president and current financial VP, or an attack of any sort on anyone. It was written as a service to our faculty and our community, and it followed on an earlier piece we wrote that focused on UNR's budget alone, which is on my website at http://www.business.unr.edu/faculty/park.... It is called a Guide for the Perplexed.

I also want to clarify that although I coauthored it with our budget director, it was not an official UNR report. Though I am confident we said nothing in it that would discomfit our adminstrators, readers should know it was neither requested nor approved by them.

Chancellor Rogers argues that we are all underfunded, and that the desire to increase UNLV's budget is not meant to hurt UNR or the other NSHE institutions. As the recent legislative stop-loss maneuver demonstrated, this sentiment is not easy to put into practice. UNLV's stop-loss funding came at the expense of everybody else, especially CSN. When the biggest kid in the class starts complaining that he doesn't get enough allowance, the other kids in the class get nervous about their lunch money.

As the Donner Party so well demonstrated, in times of shortage it is tempting for us to eat one another. While it is fun for our students to compete with each other on the ball field, our institutions need to cooperate with each other for the sake of the state. We are all in this together.

Peegee76 makes a case that UNLV has improved over the past couple of decades. I agree. Though I am only a Nevadan by choice, not birth, I applaud UNLV's efforts because I see them making the state a better place to live, both north and south.

I hope I am making it clear that I think it is harmful to Nevada's higher education for UNLV to play tug-of-war with UNR and the other institutions. I want UNLV to improve, but not at the expense of our institutions and our students.

Bruce and I showed that in our 2008-2009 budgets, UNR and UNLV had almost identical instructional budgets per student FTE. UNR spent more per student, but less overall, for administration, operation, and maintenance. We argued that this can largely be explained by the other budgets that UNR is responsible for.

I guess I can understand why former President Harter and Vice-President Bomotti would like UNLV to have more administrators per student, but I am not sure how that makes a difference to the quality of UNLV's teaching and research.

This week the institutions are putting together their detailed budgets for 2009-2010. Once I can get this new budget data from UNLV, I will rerun the comparison. I will make these results available on my website, however it turns out.

Elliott Parker
Professor of Economics
University of Nevada, Reno
By bill777

6/30/09 at 10:42 a.m.

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1. If you actually look at the US News criteria, you quickly discover that the reason UNR is ranked higher is budget. 30% of the US News criteria is budget per student. According to a report the NSHE chancellor's office made to the Regents, the rankings of the two schools would be identical, if the budget per student was identical.

2. The RAND Corporation did a study for the NSHE which concluded the CSN, UNLV, and TMCC are underfunded.

3. UNR has 200 square feet of space per student, UNLV less than 100. That's much of the budget difference. According to the chancellor's office, UNLV and CSN are 2,000,000 square feet short of space, UNR over-spaced. Build some classrooms and labs in the south, and the funding problem eases.
By LasVegas2009

6/30/09 at 11:46 a.m.

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peegee76

I dont care how many times the rate has been raised it should be just as expensive to go here as anywhere else in the country. I should not be forced to pay for someone from out of state to get a lower tuition. Even 1% of my tax dollars are too much. We pay way to much in taxes in this state and get very little in return. Im a home owner in Las Vegas and I work six days a week ten hours a day and Im tired of seeing the government take my hard earned money and waste it on things that do not help me. If they can't pay the full cost of an education then they should get jobs. If the university can not support itself from the tuition then shut it down. Stop wasting my tax dollars.