Help wanted: NC higher education systems both in need of new leaders
Published April 30, 2015
by Sarah Ovaska, NC Policy Watch, April 30, 2015.
Scott Ralls will be leaving his job as North Carolina’s community college president in a few months, leaving an opening at an institution that’s a central piece of the state’s educational and economic bedrock.
Ralls says it was an opportunity to be back on a campus that led him to take the job as the next president of the 75,000-student Northern Virginia Community College, not any other factors.
He wants to have more interaction with students and teachers, and the ability to try out new ideas, instead of navigating the often-bureaucratic hallways that his system leadership job requires.
“It’s a place where you can run a little faster,” Ralls said about working at the campus level.
He’s leaving, however, with some real worries about the 58-campus system he has steered since 2008.
The student population is increasingly made up of those from lower income levels, making accessibility a major issue. Budgets have tightened and the economy increasingly demands workers come to their jobs with higher levels of education and skills.
One of the biggest struggles since the recession began in 2008 is determining how to provide quality education to as many people as possible while budget levels have remained static post-recession, Ralls said.
“That’s a real tough trade-off,” he said. “I hate that tradeoff.”
North Carolina in need of two higher education leaders
Ralls’ announcement last month that he would become the next president of Northern Virginia Community College this fall also means that North Carolina is looking for leaders of both its higher education systems at the same time.
University of North Carolina President Tom Ross was unexpectedly pushed out of his position in January by a governing board appointed by the Republican-led legislature.
The last time both were open was in 1997, when Molly Broad became the University of North Carolina’s president and Martin Lancaster took over at the head of the state’s community college system.
As the searches for new presidents of both systems get underway, many are wondering what changes may be ahead for the institutions often referred to as the North Carolina’s “crown jewels” that, when combined, educate nearly a million people each year.
“There is a growing sense that a great deal is at risk,” said David Rice, the executive director of Higher Educations Works, an advocacy group promoting the state’s public higher education institutions. “There’s a growing nervousness.”
Tuition at both the community college and university system are among the nation’s lowest, a nod to the commitment North Carolina made in its state constitution to make higher education free of expense, “as far as practicable.”
But pressures are mounting as to whether the state can hold that line, as the state’s portion of higher education funding has dropped while the share that students and their families pay has steadily increased.
In the university system, state funding per student dropped by 25 percent from 2008 to 2014, while average tuition bill for in-state students has gone up by 35 percent, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Public Policy.
In an interview this week, Ralls said he thinks the transition to new leaders for both the university and community college system will be smooth for the state.
“These systems are so big, they’re much bigger than any one individual,” Ralls said.
But not everyone is as reassured as Ralls that the transition to new leaders will be seamless.
Lancaster, Ralls’ predecessor and a former head of the community college system, said he fears what will come, given the shifting political landscape in the state after the 2011 Republican takeover of the state legislature.
“Both of those boards have become politicized and their choices will be made on political grounds rather than what’s best for the system,” said Lancaster, who also served as a Democratic congressman. “Our students will not be educated in the way they should be.”
The UNC Board of Governors’ 32 members consist entirely of appointments made by the state legislature. The State Board of Community College’s 21 members include a non-voting student representative, the lieutenant governor, state treasurer, eight members appointed by the legislature and 10 others that receive their appointments from the governor.
In the first few months of 2015, the university’s board of governors moved to fire Ross without giving any reasons other than a general desire for change, shut down an academic center led by tenured law professor who has been an outspoken critic of Republican state leaders and cap need-based aid while raising tuition to make up for decreases in state funding.
The community college system has attracted far less attention than their counterparts in the university system, Ralls said, in large part because of the primary role the community college system plays in addressing the state’s workforce needs.
“There doesn’t seem to be as much ideology,” Ralls said.
Forty percent of the state’s current workforce took classes at state community colleges within the last 10 years, he says.
He also likens community college system to the emergency room of a hospital, where life-altering work is done, but doesn’t attract much attention when it comes to budgeting and operations.
“We don’t fund the emergency room,” Ralls said.
He said the hardest part about his decision to take the Virginia job was leaving the state.
Ralls grew up in North Carolina, attended its schools and spent his professional career working in North Carolina’s public sector.
Though he’s headed north now, he vows he’ll be back.
“I will always be a North Carolinian,” he said.
