Now fast forward, seven years later an expose’ by the Chronicle of Higher Education has confirmed what we have long feared --- Florida’s performance-based funding has advantaged the state’s “flagship institutions” by driving an even bigger wedge between the state’s four-year colleges, making richer institutions richer, and depriving less-resourced institutions of much-needed funds.
“Almost overnight,” said Ralph C. Wilcox, who has been provost of the University of South Florida since 2008, “the rules of the game changed.”
Seven years on, the game is still played according to the rules of performance-based funding, and its reshaped Florida’s public universities.
Metrics disadvantage state’s only public HBCU
The funding metrics Florida’s politicians have chosen don’t serve the university well, FAMU faculty members argued. Take graduates’ employment and salaries. Across the country, young Black Americans with bachelor’s degrees are slightly less likely to be employed than their white counterparts. At every level of educational attainment, young Black adults have always earned less than their white peers, on average.
These trends are tied to racism in American society, so it’s unfair to punish the university for them, faculty members said. “We can prepare our students well, but we don’t control the economy. We don’t control wages,” said Michael C. LaBossiere, a professor of philosophy and a former college runner. He used a track-and-field analogy to compare Florida’s flagship, which graduated a majority-white class in 2019, and FAMU, which graduated a 90-percent Black class that same year. “Most UF graduates, they’re running on a flat track,” he said. “FAMU graduates are having to do the steeplechase.”
No credit for being #1 HBCU
In other measures, FAMU does fare well, but faculty members feel politicians don’t acknowledge it. “We’re No. 1 in what we do, and that’s the education of Black people, primarily,” said Roscoe Hightower Jr., a professor of marketing. U.S. News has consistently ranked FAMU as among the top 10 historically Black colleges and universities in the country. “You never hear the governor or the Board of Governors proclaiming that,” Hightower said.
In particular, FAMU’s graduation rates have long weighed it down. In 2016, its six-year graduation rate was 41 percent, no different than it had been in 2013. In the Board of Governors’ latest accounting, which now uses four-year graduation rates, the number was 23 percent, for a score of one point out of a possible 10 in that category.
FAMU needs more money, not less
Yet as long as these low scores meant FAMU was dealt a smaller budget than it would have otherwise, it was hard to improve those rates, said President Larry Robinson. “To be successful in this model, what’s important, particularly for the demographic that we deal with, is to have the resources that are necessary to continue to improve.”
Many of FAMU’s students need supportive services to help them navigate college, which takes money, Robinson said. He wants to see the state use expected graduation rates, which take into account the fact that students from lower-income families without a history of college-going are less likely to graduate quickly, compared to a student from a wealthier family that’s gone to college for generations.
“I think graduation rates do tell you a story, but I don’t think they tell you a whole story because the lives that students bring to an institution vary significantly,” he said. “The best measure of what we do is how we transform our students’ lives, whether they finish in four years, or, in some cases, a little bit longer.”
Enrollment stagnant or dropped
Under the performance-based funding, FAMU’s enrollment has been stagnant or declined as it began looking more critically at the academic preparedness of its applicants, Robinson said. Sending students it once would have admitted to community colleges, or more likely to other HBCUs.
More recently, the university developed a program to encourage underprepared applicants to go to community/state colleges with which the university has signed agreements. Once program participants get their associate degree, they’re guaranteed admission to FAMU to complete their bachelor’s.
“All of those students, whether they get into the university or not,” Robinson said, “we feel very concerned about their future.” This year FAMU used “number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to transfers from Florida community colleges” as their institution’s choice metric.
Bottom three scrapped
Since the Board of Governors eliminated the “bottom three” rule, Robinson has been happier with Florida’s funding model. Last year, FAMU received $13 million it wouldn’t have otherwise. “You have to work, in the new model. You have to work hard for the benchmarks for receiving money,” Robinson said, “but it gives everybody a shot, a target that’s within their reach.”
Robinson’s faculty were less circumspect. Clement Allen, a computer-science professor, called it racist. Said Hightower, the marketing professor: “I’d like to see performance-based funding dismantled.”
Preeminence + Performance Based Funding
Between the 2013-14 and 2018-19 fiscal years, the University of Florida and Florida State University received a $61.9 million each in state “preeminence funding.” Preeminence funding was a “scheme”, the Chronicle said, that was conceived in the mind of former UF President Bernie Machen which awarded the university extra money for meeting certain metrics deemed important by U.S. News.
In return for getting preeminence funding, Machen supported Scott’s launch of performance-based funding, which he (Machen) also wrote.
The Performance-Based Funding plan also advantaged the flagships
(UF and FSU) by allowing them to “double dip” and receive both preeminence funding and performance-based funding.
Despite the extra money to Florida’s BOG was left red faced in 2015 when FSU, who had received tens of millions in preeminence funds, tied in the bottom three before the BOG reshuffled the deck to pull them out.
John Delaney, former president of the University of North Florida, and former Mayor of Jacksonville, and a well-known critic of performance-based funding, was nonetheless unconcerned about the University of Florida’s and Florida State’s Preeminence funding.
“I believe in the flagship idea, that you’ve got to have, in a state our size, two prominent research universities,” he said. “Appropriating them extra funding, as a citizen, makes perfect sense.” But not at the cost of other institutions: “If you were a policy maker and you wanted a bigger bang for your buck by directly affecting students and graduations, that would be to spend on the regional universities.”
Machen understood from the onset, that to climb the U.S. News rankings, as he had been hired to do, he would need more money. In particular, he would need more money per student. He was unconcerned how UF got their money, even if it came at the expense of the other 11 universities in the system.
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