Lori Sturdevant: The gateways: Minnesota's community, technical colleges

Their story is not unique to Minnesota. Around the country, the recession's job losses and squeeze on middle-class family incomes have inspired an enrollment spike at two-year public colleges, where tuition remains comparatively affordable and admission hurdles low. At the same time, shrinking state revenues have sapped appropriations for higher education in many states.

In Minnesota, state spending on higher ed in fiscal 2010, which started on July 1, is down $131 million from the previous year. The result is the dubious distinction of the third-highest two-year public college tuition in the country.

Three metro-area community college presidents called on the Star Tribune on Aug. 11 to describe their effort to fulfill their mission to keep Minnesota's workforce well-educated while state funding for that mission declines. Our guests were North Hennepin Community College's Ann Wynia, Minneapolis Community and Technical College's Phil Davis, and Normandale Community College's Joe Opatz. This is some of what they said:

Opatz: All of us now depend much more on tuition than on state appropriations. This year for the first time, we will be at one-third state appropriation vs. two-thirds tuition.

That's an amazing turnaround. When the state law [setting higher ed funding policy] was written [in 1983], two-thirds was intended to be the state's share.

Wynia: The problem with declining state support is that you have to have relatively high tuition in order to pay the expenses. With community college tuition in Minnesota the third-highest in the nation, we are simply pricing education out of the reach of many students.

More and more students are relying on borrowed money to go to college. The number of students borrowing to attend [North Hennepin] is up over 50 percent, while financial aid grants are up only 5 to 6 percent over the last several years.

Davis: We've had the Power of You program for three years. [It offers free tuition and specialized student support services to graduates of Minneapolis and St. Paul high schools attending MCTC, St. Paul College and Metro State University. It is credited by the Wilder Foundation with doubling enrollment by graduates of those high schools in the participating colleges.]

That program has demonstrated that if you change the perception or the reality of being able to afford to go to college, substantially more people will take advantage of the opportunity. They'll go to college. Conversely, if you raise the cost, you're forcing low-income students away from postsecondary education.

Opatz: Money really matters to our students. Last year, we saw a 13 percent increase in the number of students who received financial aid.

Wynia: Eighty percent of our students don't qualify for [financial aid] grants. I suspect they don't qualify because so many of them are part-time. We serve a huge number of working adults with family responsibilities, who cannot take the number of credits required to qualify for financial aid. In a perverse way, by making them pay full costs, we are penalizing the working adults who want to get ahead in this state.

Opatz: The good news is that our tuition increases are pretty modest this year [3 percent.] We've had a Board of Trustees and Legislature committed to holding down tuition. In combination with the increase in the [federal] Pell Grant, some of our students may see their actual costs go down.

But we are wondering what happens in the next biennium. Higher education has been a convenient place [for legislators and the governor] to seek some help in balancing the budget.

Wynia: Classes are going to fill this year. But the employees who are really feeling the larger enrollment intensely are those who work in student services. The people in the financial aid office, the counselors, the admissions and outreach directors -- they are critical for enrolling students. They're taking on this big increase in students with no increase in their staff, none at all. They've also agreed to work for the next two years with no increase in pay. They're doing it cheerfully; they are serving these students, and we owe them a huge debt for making this work at all.

Davis: We cut $2.5 million this year, about 5 percent of our operating budget. We had to cut instructional programs, because we've been cutting administrative and student services staff for years. Those offices are so thin already. When you have a 30 percent increase in financial aid applications over a four-year period, and no additional help, these are people who are doing amazing work.

We've raised class sizes to balance the budget. We've asked faculty to do more and more. Our classes are more full now than they've ever been. If you are an instructor at our institutions, you have more students at risk than ever before, and the institution is giving you fewer resources. Yet it's in those classes that success is determined.

Opatz: In a sense, we are already limiting access. With the pressure on enrollment and the lack of facilities in which to put the bodies, some students can't take classes at the times of the day and the days of the week that they need them. So they aren't coming, or they aren't taking the load they'd like to take.

We're very crowded. We're at 143 percent of capacity. What if we were at 100 percent? How many more students would we be able to serve?

Wynia: We're all seeing an increase in online enrollment. But we've discovered that if you're really going to do online [classes] well, there needs to be a lot of one-on-one engagement between the students in that class and the faculty member. You simply cannot run an online class with 50 students in it, not if you're going to run a good class.

Maybe over time online instruction will bring about some savings in facilities costs. But we have not found that online done well in any way reduces our delivery costs.

There's also an idea that money is wasted because so many of our students need to take remedial high school classes. The fact is, if we don't provide remediation, there will be many people who will be told "you can't go to college." About 41 percent of our students are 25 or older. For a person who's been out of high school for seven years, odds that they will be able to do college-level math are not high.

Davis: For all of us, improving graduation rates is huge. We're really studying hard the disparity between whites and students of color, especially when you start looking at gender. African-American women graduate at much higher rates than African-American men, and African-American men are graduating at very low rates compared to the overall student population at MCTC.

We're trying to discover: What are the strategies we need to use to see improvement in graduation rates for various cohorts of students, some of whom need more attention than others to achieve success? We're looking for partners. We're not going to be able to solve this by ourselves.

• • •

Community colleges may soon have a new partner -- Uncle Sam. In July, President Obama proposed a $12 billion "American Graduation Initiative" to be used to add 5 million community college graduates to the nation's workforce by 2020. Colleges would be invited to compete for the federal money, with proposals to increase both their enrollments and their graduation rates.

Obama's proposal aims to correct a troubling trend. The United States now ranks 10th among the world's 30 leading democracies in the share of its 25- to 34-year-olds with at least a two-year college degree. Fifteen years ago, the U.S. was No. 1.

Minnesota's two-year colleges ought to be well-positioned to compete for new federal funds if Congress approves the president's plan. One possibility: the expansion of the Power of You to other communities in which college participation lags.

But a new federal partner can't take the place of steady support for higher education from state government. That underpinning is in question as another major state budget deficit looms in 2011. The question these crucial colleges face is as much political as it is financial. It's not too soon to start asking candidates for governor and the Legislature how they intend to respond.

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.