A white piece of paper boasting bold, black numbers rests on professor Peter Guardino’s desk.
The numbers are not entirely relevant to his everyday work as chair of the Department of History. Yet, each time he sits at his desk, they are a daily reminder that things need to change.
The data Guardino and his colleagues have been tracking is staggering.
During the 2007-08 fall semester, 510 students enrolled in H105 and 499 students enrolled in H106, the department’s intro-level American history courses. In fall 2012, enrollments dropped to 214 students enrolled in H105 and 146 students in H106. The reason: more and more students are entering IU with their general education history requirements already completed.
Under the current budgetary model, individual schools compete for University resources based on their financial activity. This model is called Responsibility Centered Management and each IU-Bloomington school is its own “Responsibility Center,” or RC, led entrepreneurially by deans.
“In a situation where, under RCM, a large chunk of the budget is determined by how many tuition dollars you bring in, the College is losing significant enrollments to this,” Guardino said, explaining how declining general education enrollments shape departmental budgets.
RCM was implemented in 1990 for a University that gave individual schools autonomy. This is how campus looked three years ago. Since then, campus has changed.
In the past three years, unprecedented structural and administrative changes have shifted the nature of RCM from a competitive to centralized model.
“Money” in a university is more than a dollar sign. Money pays for faculty, academic programs, student resources and, because of RCM, control of money means autonomy.
“We’ve lost about half of the enrollment of two of our most popular classes over a period of just a few years,” Guardino said. “We need students.”
Successful in theory
When IU-Bloomington adopted RCM, it was the first public institution to do so, said Provost and Executive Vice President Lauren Robel. Under this budget model, schools keep the money from student tuition and pay a small tax to the campus fund for shared resources, such as the libraries.
RCM gives deans of schools autonomy and forces them to be innovative when revenues go down.
College of Arts and Sciences Executive Dean Larry Singell said he likes RCM.
“As a dean, I have no problem with it,” Singell said. “In places that don’t have RCM, there is more authority of the provost to allocate resources and cost-subsidies across schools. Our system does not permit that as easily.”
The autonomy provided by being its own RC is essential for the Jacobs School of Music, whose fiscal planning includes concert funding and small master classes, said Director of Finance and Fiscal Planning Jill Piedmont.
“Any school under RCM chooses how to structure classes and set their budget,” Piedmont said. “One of the benefits of RCM is that we have that control.”
RCM pits schools against each other in competition for students and credit hours. In doing so, RCM establishes individual incentive and hinders the ability for IUB to move strategically as a whole.
Robel’s recently released Campus Strategic Plan emphasizes this kind of collaboration. It strives to bring schools together for campus-wide initiatives, crossing the existing RCM boundaries.
Singell noted it could shift autonomy toward the Provost’s office and away from the schools. But Robel said she has no intention of increasing central power through a higher tax on the schools.
“Power and authority of an office are related to financial wealth,” Singell said. “You have to trust the provost. I don’t have a concern about it.”
Robel said this year’s University tax rate is actually lower than it has been in past years.
“The Provost fund was put together to support and incentivize common good activity for the campus,” Robel said. “I don’t think that the Strategic Plan will cause RCM to become more centralized.”
Responding to pressure
Administrators have grappled with how to alleviate budgetary concerns for years.
Their solution was change.
“I don’t like small schools,” Robel said.
The resources required to staff these units with an administrative fleet of deans, financial planners, career advisors and other positions can divert resources away from core pieces of the academic mission, Robel said.
“I would rather put money into academic programs and people who deliver them rather than administrative officers,” she said.
This idea has motivated many of the changes to “small schools” in recent years: the closure of the School of Continuing Studies, the School Library and Information Science merger into the School of Informatics and Computing, the merger and creation of the Media School.
These changes mean budget models within the schools have to change, too.
Beginning in July, the College will technically include three deans of different academic programs — College Executive Dean Singell, School of Global and International Studies Dean Lee Feinstein and the future dean of the Media School. Three different “schools” still means three different sets of fiscal offices, even though they will all be under the College.
Because these mergers did not originate from, nor were they caused by, monetary concerns, the budgets of the Media School and SGIS are undetermined, Robel said.
It’s a work in progress to put a big school under the college, she added.
“SGIS has only been a school for a year and it is only now getting its curriculum and dean,” Robel said. “We have to be nimble, but we have to be nimble within the context of a 60,000-person institution.”
RCM needed these changes to support the College.
Until clear College budgets are devised for what used to be an RC and what is an entirely new program, the sub-deans’ autonomy relative to the authority of Singell is unclear.
Robel said she would like the University to oversee fiscal activity of SGIS and the Media School for the first few years.
RCM will respond to the structural changes in the same way it responded to the informatics merger: academics first, money second, said professor emeritus of mathematics Maynard Thompson. He was involved in the 1990 adoption of the RCM model.
“We’re in unknown domain here,” Thompson said. “Let’s get it going first, then figure out with the deans of both schools exactly what fiscal structure makes sense.”
Is RCM outdated?
Each school allocates its budget to its own departments. The school can then support departments that don’t attract student tuition dollars with the surpluses that popular programs generate, Guardino said.
“There are fads in education,” Singell said. “Economics is becoming more popular so we’re seeing that department beginning to grow.”
Most of the sciences need expensive labs and equipment, and although they have good enrollments, they probably cannot pay for themselves, Guardino said.
“To be a top-notch university we have to have excellent departments in disciplines that could never pay for themselves that way,”Guardino said.
The College has not cut the history department’s budget because of decreased enrollments, Guardino said. But if he and his staff cannot figure out a way to fix the problem, they could have fewer resources in the future.
“We know that over the long term they won’t be able to keep giving us what we need if we are unable to reverse, halt or at least slow down the decline in enrollments,” he said.
The music school is not having these problems, since music general education is popular right now. The music school will offer seven new general education courses this fall, Piedmont said.
This is an example of how RCM pushes schools to compete for students, who, in the financial sense, mean money.
The theory behind “general education” is losing steam. Across campus, decreased general education enrollments due to Advanced Placement, Advanced College Project, community college and online education are just as much an educational concern as a financial one, Robel said.
Across campus, different people have tried to combat this trend in different ways.
Robel wants to attract the 18 to 20 percent of students who came in with 24 credit hours.
“We ought to be developing pathways that allow them to take advantage of the fact that, in theory, they could finish in three years,” Robel said.
The history department staff is attempting to alter existing classes so that are more attractive to students.
They launched a survey asking students what they are looking for in history classes, said history’s Director of Undergraduate Studies Deborah Deliyannis.
The department will attempt to increase professionalized course offerings, such as the existing “History of Medicine” course, in an effort to attract non-majors, who Deliyannis said will benefit from liberal arts enrollments as much as the budget will.
“By studying humanism and history, you will become a better citizen,” she said.
Those majoring in history, however, should be concerned about losing their core major-only 300-level classes to the 100 or 200-general education levels, Deliyannis said.
“It’s a paradox that we’ll be wrestling with all of next year,” she said.
“They told us that Gen Eds would be a good thing and that our enrollments would go up. Apparently they forgot about the part where AP, ACP and Ivy Tech transfers would come in.”
At the end of the day, it’s liberal arts versus professionalization. It’s a discussion on the nature of higher education. It’s the sweat of fixing financial planning and tax rates.
At the end of the day, the numbers lay on Guardino’s desk and on his shoulders.
“The College’s numbers affect RCM, so we’re very concerned,” Guardino said. “We’re having to find ways to attract students, which is something we’ve never had to do before.”
Guardino hopes the administration’s consolidation efforts and increased AP, ACP and Ivy Tech general education enrollments will encourage RCM to evolve to a slightly centralized “hybrid” system, with less focus on enrollments.
“You’re putting your budget making in the hands (of) people between the ages of 18 to 22,” Guardino said.
Follow reporter Hannah Alani on Twitter @hannahalani.
