Saturday, July 20, 2013

San Francisco City College: Lessons Learned?


At City College of San Francisco (CCSF), the unthinkable happened in July. It was issued a death sentence by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges; its accreditation will terminate on July 31, 2014. Despite the shock cast as a lightning strike out of the blue, CCSF has been on notice since 2006 that its academic and financial management mandated substantive reform. Despite the chronic nature of CCSF’s problems, only 2 of 14 concerns identified by the accrediting body following an evaluation in 2012 were addressed to the satisfaction of the accreditors.

Accreditation is the ventilator and feeding tube for private and public postsecondary institutions because it provides access to federal student loans, grants, and state and local tax dollars. Without accreditation—brain-dead or not—public financial nourishment terminates.

CCSF faculty, staff, and their unions blame dark political forces in the accrediting world and demonize its messengers. CCSF’s overarching survival tactic is to enroll as many students as possible in the tenuous belief that the accrediting association wouldn’t dare harm students in their efforts to compel CCSF to operate with even minimal levels of financial rectitude.

The accrediting commission is a straw man in this controversy. The real story is the report issued in September 2012 by the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) endorsed by CCSF’s Board of Trustees to identify their academic management and fiscal problems and recommend the needed steps to solve them. Since the early 1990s, FCMAT has assisted some 850 K-14 California educational institutions. The team needed only five days in late July and early August 2012 at CCSF to generate a report that documented systemic management and fiscal dysfunction even at the most rudimentary levels.

The scope of the review was pure fiscal vanilla: “Determine how CCSF projects and allocates its fiscal resources and determine if … budget assumptions and methods were reasonable.” This is hardly the stuff of a political vendetta as has been suggested by CCSF faculty leaders. Among the findings were the following:

·        In 2013-14, CCSF’s projected annual deficit is slightly over $13 million. In $2014-15, it will grow to over $16 million.

·        CCSF employs twice as many full-time faculty per 1000 full-time equivalent (FTE) students and incurs expenses $17-18 million higher than comparison districts.

·        CCSF’S retiree health benefit obligation indicates a present value debt of $235 million. The estimated annual cost is $6.9 million in 2011-2012, but increases to $13 million annually by 2020-21. CCSF only budgets $500,000 per year to cover this cost, and reserves no funds to cover this liability.

·        92 percent of CCSF’s budget funds employee salaries and benefits; the remaining 8 percent must cover utilities, supplies, insurance, maintenance agreements, and capital outlay.

·        CCSF has not implemented lay-offs, closed any sites, or eliminated any programs in the past five years, even with significant decreases in funding.

·        Regular faculty salaries increased 25 percent between 2005-2012. During the same period of time, the number of full-time equivalent students decreased, and revenues increased by only 10%.

Public educational institutions were created to serve the public, but at CCSF, the public is serving it with virtually no accountability. At its July meeting, the CCSF Board of Trustees appointed a “Special Trustee” to guide them in their efforts to prevent the loss of accreditation.

CCSF is not alone in taking the Californians who pay its salaries and wages for granted. In the rarified climes of the University of California System, an annual budget goal is to ensure that 20 percent of all students are from out-of-state. The U.C. system’s new chancellor allowed that it is only 18 percent at present, but that the 20 percent goal will be attained under his watch. This is the policy of a public higher education system whose charter is to serve Californians.

Faculty and staff at CCSF adorn themselves with their fidelity to their students. In the summer of 2012, rather than finding ways to trim operating costs, CCSF eliminated summer school. Fidelity so exemplified provides an unambiguous picture of where CCSF’s values truly rest.

John D. Murphy was a founder of the University of Phoenix and served as Senior Vice President for Institutional Affairs and Academic Vice President. He was a voting shareholder member of the board and executive committee member of its publicly-traded holding company, Apollo Group, Inc. Murphy also founded and directed a community mental health program while an adjunct professor at San Jose State University. In 2007, he wrote and produced the award-winning film Valley of the Hearts Delight, a dramatic retelling of the notorious San Jose Brooke Hart kidnapping and subsequent lynching of two men accused of that crime. His new book, "Mission Forsaken: The University of Phoenix Affair with Wall Street" was published in July 2013.