The Oregon State Legislature has adopted a new funding model for its community colleges. It’s… wait for it … performance-based funding! Oregon joins Texas, North Carolina, and Connecticut, which have all adopted performance-based funding models for future fiscal years.
Oregon’s new funding model takes effect in the 2024-25 school year. While some would argue that the new model is better than the old one – which resulted in significant budget cuts for the current fiscal year – performance-based funding is a double-edged sword that most community colleges won’t end up liking.
Performance has never been the community college’s strong suit, and the shift to a new funding model isn’t going to change that. But these moves to induce “performance” from two-year schools signals the growing impatience among state legislators who routinely approve tens of millions of dollars per institution each year and get little to show for their troubles.
At the community college, legislators expect to encounter a simple system of inputs and outputs, like what they have at the state universities. You put [money] in and get [graduates/economic development/an educated workforce/vocational education programs] out. Only, that’s not what happens at the community college.
Community colleges take all comers, but not every comer wants to graduate with a degree. They may want to transfer to another school. They may already be enrolled somewhere else and simply want to transfer credits back to their mothership. Maybe they want to refresh their math memory a bit before they take another run at calculus at a neighboring university. Or perhaps they just want to experiment with computer programming. Community college students also come and go, sometimes in the middle of a semester.
Performance-based funding may be on the way
Life also tends to get in the way for community college students. As people age, a community college becomes a better, faster, and less expensive alternative to a traditional university. Those things fit better with an adult lifestyle. But adult learners have families and work obligations that can become overwhelming. Taking classes is sometimes just too much.
Community college students have chronic money problems. Largely because they don’t make a lot of money – which is usually why they’re taking classes at a community college in the first place. They also have transportation problems, Internet problems, time-management problems, family problems, food and housing problems, and a host of other problems that prevent them from “performing.”
Performance-based funding takes none of this into account. By the time the community college data reaches the State Department of Education, all of these problems have been abstracted away, and the state just gets numbers. When the numbers are good, the community college associated with them gets money. When the numbers are bad, the community college gets less money. That’s not necessarily fair, but that’s increasingly what’s going to happen as more states adopt performance-dependent funding.
The stated goal for community colleges is “60 by ’30.” How long will it be before the Michigan State Legislature gets annoyed by the hundreds of millions of dollars it has dumped into Michigan community colleges and the meager results that’s producing?
Michigan’s current Democratic administration makes the community college funding model unlikely to see significant changes. When the composition of the state government changes, however, Michigan may move uncomfortably closer to results-based funding.
Photo Credit: Charlie Marshall, via Flickr
