The state’s biennial budget might seem complicated, but it has very real effects for the students, faculty, administration and staff that make up the UW System. In the last round, they were forced to absorb a $250 million cut that changed the experiences of students across the state. As the next budget looms, follow The Daily Cardinal’s series on what it could hold for key UW players.
Follow the series for our next installment Nov. 13, detailing the changing landscape of student debt throughout the UW System.
As UW System chancellors scramble to mitigate effects of recent budget cuts, Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled state Legislature are considering a new source of critical state support: tying a portion of the funding for Wisconsin’s 26 state universities to performance.
The performance-based funding model uses a series of metrics to determine how much money schools receive.
Walker has hinted that potential measures could include graduation rates, the number of students entering certain high-demand fields and the amount of debt graduates take on.
More than 30 states already use some form of performance-based funding, either in their four-year or two-year institutions.
The amount of money tied to performance metrics varies by state, with many tying 5 percent or less of their higher education budget to those measurements. Others go much further—every dollar given to public universities in Tennessee is based on institutional performance, for example.
Details of a potential performance-based funding system won’t be announced until Walker unveils his budget in January.
“I will propose an increase in funding for the UW System, and it will be connected to performance metrics,” Walker wrote in an op-ed in August. “Over the past few years, we increased funding for our technical college system, including performance funding, and it is working very well."
The idea is not a new one in Wisconsin—the state’s 16 technical colleges first employed the method in fall 2014 and this year will tie 30 percent of their state aid to performance outcomes.
This model grants funding for the technical colleges based on nine criteria, including job placement rates, programs or courses with an industry-validated curriculum, degrees and certifications awarded in high-demand fields and workforce training provided to businesses and individuals.
The technical colleges have touted the model as a success, saying it has already “demonstrated the link between college outcomes and the funding provided by the State of Wisconsin” and “encouraged continuous improvement by the colleges in areas of strategic importance.”
Donald Moynihan, director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs and an expert on performance-based funding in settings outside higher education, said one needs only to compare their budgets with those of the UW System in the last five years to see that their state aid is increasing. He added, however, that there has also been no indication that the method is improving the colleges’ performance.
“If you’re making the case that this is a form of accountability to the public, I think that’s a reasonable case you can make,” Moynihan said. “If you’re making the case that this is going to actually dramatically improve the outcomes that are being measured, that’s not been the experience of other states.”
While the technical colleges deliver more or less the same product to a relatively homogenized realm of clients, Moynihan argued that such is not the case for UW System schools—a difference seen most notably in comparing smaller campuses to UW-Madison, the state’s flagship university.
In drafting a set of metrics to tie funding to, schools like UW-Oshkosh could produce drastically different ones than a top-ranked research university like UW-Milwaukee, for example.
Moynihan said although he isn’t sure the state would allow each campus to create its own metrics, there may be some room for flexibility in choosing between groups of metrics so a “one-size-fits-all” approach does not have to be applied to such a diverse collection of campuses.
Smaller system schools might also lack the resources to internally evaluate which metrics would work most to their favor.
Nicholas Hillman, an associate professor who researches performance funding in education, wrote in his study that while universities that are already high-performing tend to have the resources to adopt and respond to such metrics, schools with fewer resources may very well lack the institutional capacity to do the same.
Moynihan echoed that finding, adding that it is one way a performance-based funding model could increase disparities between the system’s flagship and other schools.
“A bigger institution like this, we just have the critical mass [so] we have that analytic capacity on hand,” he explained. “A smaller institution is going to have less of that.”
Other issues include deciding which metrics states choose to weigh in determining funding; UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank said these choices often can disadvantage schools that are already showing some success.
Other states have used graduation rates as one of the key metrics, Blank said.
“For the flagship universities, which is already up in the 80s [percent graduation rates] they couldn’t increase their graduation rates very much but for many of the lower-ranked universities, which are at 20 percent, [the graduation rates] should have been much higher years ago. It seriously disadvantages the flagship, which is already attaining [success] at so much higher a level.”
Some states also give bonus points for high-demand fields like science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Hillman said. Since STEM tends to be homogenous, he explained, prioritizing those fields could mean not prioritizing diversity.
Another issue is that performance-based funding could be used to justify faculty or department cutbacks, after the Board of Regents moved to weaken tenure policies last year. While Hillman noted this is a more long-term effect, he said it is a possible consequence of campuses thinking more about the financial effects of their academic programs.
“If this creates the kind of perverse incentives which it probably will … then according to the new tenure policies, departments can close and faculty can be dismissed,” Hillman said. “Performance-based funding in the long run could be coupled with that particular policy and justify or at least help justify department closures.”
Some advocates say performance-based funding is an effective way to encourage institutions to improve the education they offer.
“It is a necessary condition for change to occur,” Stan Jones, president of Complete College America, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Performance funding gets attention and signals a focus on completion.”
Moynihan said that UW-Madison faculty were not necessarily opposed to the idea.
“Most of us think we’re performing pretty well and our institution is performing really well. And we’re not necessarily opposed to finding ways to reflect that,” he said.
But details are scarce about what performance-based funding will look like in Wisconsin. It is likely that Walker will not unveil specifics until next year, leaving universities playing a waiting game.
UW System spokesperson Stephanie Marquis explained that the system likely already collects the data Walker had mentioned tying to funding, such as the number of graduates produced each year.
“We are happy to collaborate with the Governor to develop those metrics,” Marquis said in an email, adding that the system remains committed to measuring performance so students can
move through the educational pipeline quickly and effectively.
Blank said the university was open to the idea, but that she would have to see the design of the program before commenting further.
“Performance-based funding is a reasonable request, the question is what it means,” she said. “This is one where the devil is in the details.”
A spokesperson for Walker did not return
