Eliminating unprofitable majors not tied to college funding under SC Senate plan
When it comes to cutting costs and improving outcomes at the state’s public colleges and universities, South Carolina senators seem to favor a less hardline approach than their House counterparts.
Unlike the House, which earlier this year passed a budget provision requiring colleges that accept tuition mitigation money to suspend persistently unprofitable majors, the Senate Finance Committee last week advanced a competing proposal that would merely make schools review the efficacy of new and existing academic programs.
“There are some particular programs in some colleges that there’s no way for them to break even,” said state Sen. Ronnie Cromer, R-Newberry, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee’s Higher Education panel. “But they’re necessary and they’re needed.”
While Cromer said it might make sense to cut money-losing majors at some public institutions, he wants to empower schools to make those tough decisions rather than forcing the elimination of potentially valuable academic programs.
“We felt like we ought to give them the opportunity to at least take a look at (academic programs), if they’re really necessary, on the one hand.” the Newberry Republican said. “But on the other hand, not force them to delete those programs, if they were necessary.”
Regardless of which chamber’s plan is adopted, public institutions of higher learning appear to be in for a relative decrease in the amount they receive for tuition mitigation.
Both the House budget and the Senate Finance Committee plan approved last week send public colleges and universities a combined $26.3 million in exchange for assurances they’ll hold tuition flat for in-state students.
That’s less than half the $65 million schools received last year for tuition mitigation and barely a quarter of the $104 million they requested.
College officials, whose state budget requests uniformly ranked tuition mitigation as a top funding priority, have remained silent on the proposed reduction in funding and any impact it might have on operations.
Schools that accept the money, which the General Assembly has appropriated since 2019 to incentivize schools to freeze in-state tuition, must institute a “comprehensive academic program review process,” according to the Senate’s plan.
Under the proposal, schools would be required to review new programs annually and established programs periodically, with any findings used to inform program improvements, consolidations or terminations.
Schools would also be responsible for submitting an annual report to the governor and the chairs of the House and Senate finance committees detailing the programs they’d consolidated or terminated, and the cost savings achieved.
The Commission on Higher Education would be responsible for providing three-year reviews of all new programs and any programs that were consolidated, terminated or retained despite being recommended for termination.
While the commission would be required to generate a new report under the Senate proposal, it already collects all the information necessary to populate that report between its existing productivity report and its annual report on added and terminated programs, CHE spokesman Mark Swart said.
The commission’s most recent productivity report, which covered the five-year period from 2016 through 2020, found roughly 20% of the academic programs at four-year public colleges and universities did not meet enrollment and completion thresholds and recommended 54 of them for termination.
Public institutions of higher education aren’t required to follow the commission’s recommendations, but do routinely assess program performance and discontinue degrees with low enrollment or completion rates, officials said.
The University of South Carolina, for example, has eliminated 10 more programs than it has added over the last six years, spokesman Jeff Stensland said.