Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities

by James C. Garland

America’s public universities educate 80% of our nation’s college students. But in the wake of rising demands on state treasuries, changing demographics, growing income inequality, and legislative indifference, many of these institutions have fallen into decline. Tuition costs have skyrocketed, class sizes have gone up, the number of courses offered has gone down, and the overall quality of education has decreased significantly.

 

Here James C. Garland draws on more than thirty years of experience as a professor, administrator, and university president to argue that a new compact between state government and public universities is needed to make these schools more affordable and financially secure. Saving Alma Mater challenges a change-resistant culture in academia that places too low a premium on efficiency and productivity. Seeing a crisis of campus leadership, Garland takes state legislators to task for perpetuating the decay of their public university systems and calls for reforms in the way university presidents and governing boards are selected. He concludes that the era is long past when state appropriations can enable public universities to keep their fees low and affordable. Saving Alma Mater thus calls for the partial deregulation of public universities and a phase-out of their state appropriations. Garland’s plan would tie university revenues to their performance and exploit the competitive pressures of the academic marketplace to control costs, rein in tuition, and make schools more responsive to student needs.

 

A much-needed blueprint for reform based on Garland’s real-life successes as the head of Miami University of Ohio, Saving Alma Mater will be essential for anyone concerned with the costs and quality of higher education in America today.

Genres: Education

296 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2009

Reviews

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book nails many of the dysfunctional attributes of the public higher education enterprise. Many of these--including the overreliance on committees, the culture conflict between administration and faculty, the ways in which elected officials act vicariously and arbitrarily with their budget cudgel--are rightly seen as systemic problems. Working as I do at the fringes of academia (for a university foundation), so many of these dysfunctions are familiar to me, and while some seem obvious, they are laid out here in an unusually lucid way.

The author proposes also that the budgetary construct for public higher education also faces a fundamental systemic deterioration, and makes a great case for this as well.

So I give him four stars simply for outlining the problems in a way that rings true to me.

I withhold the fifth star for two reasons.. One is the prose style, which is a bit pedantic and obsequious... it's like he's the tour guide at the zoo, showing you the monkeys. Two is that while the author clearly has diagnosed the problem well and his proposed budgetary therapy is well intentioned, I don't believe it would actually work (it involves weaning public universities from state subsidies, and getting them via some PR sleight of hand to instead fund it indirectly via scholarships). Nonetheless, good food for thought, and essential reading for anyone for whom public universities bring home the bacon.

[Yvonne O'Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Garland was a physics professor at OSU for 26 years and then was hired at Miami University of Ohio as President. Educated at Princeton and Cornell (PhD) and doing a fellowship at Cambridge, he posits the notion that public Universities are in a downward spiral and must learn from private institutions and become autonomous, with public funding redirected to the students to result in maximum results in opening higher education to as many as possible and maintaining/enforcing the highest standards for quality of the institutions themselves. His own efforts at Miami (from 1996-2006) worked wonders and he believes the same is possible on a national scale.

I found this book to be brilliant - so well-researched and well-reasoned. While the model at Miami might not work everywhere given the various states and their different regulations, Garland recognizes this and suggests that the free market and deregulation are the keys to rescuing the public universities because we can't go back in time and to continue the current pattern would be devastating to all institutions. It is a shame the government systems overseeing the public universities will never give-up their power and Unions would never allow a true free market, because the only group that will really suffer are the future generations of students who might not be able to attend college without drastic actions taken now.

[Elise · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Garland, former president of Miami University (of Ohio), argues that in order for American public universities to remain solvent, major reform must take place to make these schools more affordable and financially secure. His basic premise centers on doing away with state appropriations directly to public higher education institutions and instead allocating those tax based dollars in the form of scholarships directly to the students based primarily on financial need. In this model, he argues employing some marketplace forces will compel the individual universities to increase their productivity and become more efficient as the students will be able to "shop" with their state scholarship dollars to find the best "value". For too long, universities have gone with the status-quo, avoided calculated risks and experimentation and resisted needed change despite years of reduced government subsidies and increased tuition costs.

Not coming from an academia background myself, I was a bit surprised by a lot of the antidotes about university culture e.g. friction between faculty and staff, un-qualified trustees, etc... His ideas are thought provoking and intriguing and very well may be what is needed to keep the fundamental premise of public higher education alive.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wait and see.