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More Funding, Not More Miracles

The community that makes up the Commonwealth’s community colleges – staff, faculty, administrators, trustees, parents, family, friends, etc.– are a dedicated, resilient group of individuals who, under some of the most challenging of circumstances in the world of higher education, pull off miracles to help move students along the pathway of academic achievement and lifelong success. From the financial advisor, who spends hours assisting each student to navigate a sea of confusing forms and rules, to the instructor who writes multiple drafts of letters of recommendation to help a student win a competitive scholarship, to the college president who enriches the experience of the Student Trustee by involving them in advocating for pro-community college legislation before Congress, students can rest assured that their college’s community has their back.

We, the community of the Commonwealth’s community colleges, have taken, and will continue to take whatever comes at us because we genuinely care about our students and about their prospects for success in the future. We keep doing our best because, frankly, we are on a mission. None of us are in this for the money or other forms of tangible rewards. We want our students to succeed no matter the cost to us.

And herein lies the problem. More often than not, it is the hard-working miracle workers that get taken for granted. Because we get the job done despite funding cuts every year, decision makers find it easy to cut even more. This was the inherent flaw with the Vision Project, a brainchild of Richard Freeland, the former Commissioner of Higher Education. His plan was to adopt a series of metrics to show the public how effective and successful our public higher education intuitions were. He operated on the theory that once the public understood our success, they would be eager to in-crease funding. It did not work out that way. After we allowed ourselves to be measured in every way possible to show how effective we were, decision makers decided that our revenue stream was more than adequate, and so the pattern of yearly funding cuts continued. Meanwhile, the Vision experiment left us with a slew of unhelpful measures for student success, a significant increase in the number of part time un-benefitted employees, increases to our healthcare premiums and co-pays, And herein lies the problem. More often than not, it is the hard-working miracle workers that get taken for grant-ed. Because we get the job done despite funding cuts every year, decision makers find it easy to cut even more. This was the inherent flaw with the Vision Project, a brainchild of Richard Freeland, the former Commissioner of Higher Educa-tion. His plan was to adopt a series of metrics to show the public how effective and successful our public higher educa-tion intuitions were. He operated on the theory that once the public understood our success, they would be eager to in-crease funding. It did not work out that way. After we allowed ourselves to be measured in every way possible to show how effective we were, decision makers decided that our revenue stream was more than adequate, and so the pattern of yearly funding cuts continued. Meanwhile, the Vision experiment left us with a slew of unhelpful measures for student success, a significant increase in the number of part time un-benefitted employees, increases to our healthcare premiums and co-pays, pay raises that are less than inflation, and more stress all around.

Continuing to depend on and demand the unwavering efforts of the college community’s “miracle workers” is unsustainable. Funding support per student is more than 30 percent down from where it was two decades ago. No matter our energy, no matter our honest desire to support our students, we cannot keep this up. We need more funding.

Last month, Senator Joanne M. Comerford (Hampshire, Franklin, and Worcester) presented a bill to get more funding support for public higher education. SD.740, aka the “Cherish Act,” An Act Committing to Higher Education the Resources to Insure a Strong and Healthy Higher Education System, will take us back the funding levels from 2001. This is potentially a $500 million infusion into the Massachusetts public higher education system. If we, the whole community behind the Commonwealth’s community colleges, step up to work together, we can put our community colleges back on the pathway toward future success – for our students, yes, but also for ourselves, and for our communities.

In the weeks and months to come, when the call comes from our Strategic Action Leaders, asking us to make the phone calls, attend the rallies, and send the emails, we need to pick up the phone, go to the rally, and write that email. What we have done for our students, we now need to do for ourselves and for the future of our institutions. I have no doubt we will prevail. We are miracle workers, after all.

Yours,in solidarity,
Margaret Wong

Enrollment vs Funding

Declining enrollment. This is what is driving most of the administration’s decisions these days. I have been in the system long enough to have seen this movie before. When money is tight, what is available tends to be spent on three things: 1) hiring more administrators, 2) hiring expert consultants, and 3) adopting new technology. Interestingly, when enrollment is up, and revenue is flowing in hand over fist from all those student fees and tuition from DCE courses, the dollars are also spent on hiring more administrators and more consultants, and adding more technology.

As a result, our community colleges are choked with non-education-based administrators focused on generating the right optics and metrics to justify their hire, piles of unheeded reports from expert consultants, and expensive technology systems, many of which are outdated and obsolete and cannot talk to and often undermine each other. The colleges’ decades-long inability to get out of the cycle of spending money on this tripartite promise-land means money not spent on support for faculty and education professionals who work directly with students. In this newest round of declining enrollment, there is indication already that the colleges will once again be dedicating scarce resources to generating optics, metrics, and reports, and purchasing technology instead of where they should be going – to directly support teaching and learning.

Take for instance one resource-starved staple of teaching and learning: the office hour and faculty office space. Upwards of two-thirds of all courses at the community colleges are now taught under a contract that neither requires nor compensates instructors for holding office hours so that students can have reliable access to their professors outside of class. Even if instructors teaching under the DCE contract wanted to offer, voluntarily, office hours to better serve their students (as many do), they are usually provided with no office space in which to do so. Much has been written about this abysmal new status quo of dedicated adjunct professors holding office hours in hallways, stairwells, and parking lots. Less has been understood about how this failure to dedicate resources to teaching and learning makes our students feel about themselves.

My suggestion on how to address the issue of declining enrollment is this: re-focus the colleges’ resources on teaching and learning. Back fill the full-time positions of retirees with and hire more full-time faculty and professional staff. Make the learning environment such that students have a chance to develop rapport with all their classroom instructors, by, for example, providing office space and compensation to adjunct faculty to offer office hours, and getting the names of all instructors into the course schedule by the time students start registering for classes, so that student have a chance to take another course from an instructor with whom they have connected. Make sure that the students’ advisors, and other front-line education support professionals (reference librarians, financial aid officers, learning coordinators, etc.) have the suitable physical spaces and resources they need to fully serve the students who seek them out.

It is the focus on teaching and learning, and not the pretense that our students are our customers, that has the potential to draw students to our community colleges. If resources were focused primarily on supporting our direct interaction with students and not allocated as an afterthought, our community colleges might have a chance to stop serving as the punch line of jokes in poor taste about personal missteps. And fiscally responsible college-bound high school students might more seriously consider attending their community’s colleges for their general education requirements before they transfer to their more debt-generating choices.

Right now, the Massachusetts Teachers Association is gearing up to fight for increased funding for our public schools, including our public higher education institutions. In work-shops on this initiative, participants have been asked to imagine how they might want to spend this money. This is a good exercise. We need to be ready to advise on how we think the money should be spent. Otherwise, should more funding materialize, we will find ourselves with more misguided metrics, unhelpful reports from experts, and yet another piece of software that will once again fail to deliver student success as promised.

In solidarity,
Margaret Wong

Recognizing A Con Game

As the newly elected MCCC President, I would like to welcome you all to the 2018-19 academic year and to wish everyone a productive semester. As a matter of history, we are living in interesting times. In terms of the MCCC and public sector unions in general, these are uncertain times. Nevertheless, I believe we will persist and prevail.

27 days after I assumed the reins of this office, while I was in the air on my way to Minneapolis for the NEA Representative Assembly, the Janus vs. AFSCME decision hit. Once the plane landed and airplane mode was turned off, my phone buzzed and chirped non- stop – announcing emails, voice mails, text messages, as if impatient for me to address them all. Right. Now. I felt put on notice. The union world as we knew it, was at an end, and we would need to adapt or perish.

Within minutes of the decision, the anti-union forces were at the ready with their emails encouraging members to drop union membership. These mailings tried to take advantage of our members confusion about the Janus decision. They tried to peddle their “looking out for #1” ethos, and to appeal to members greed. They tried to get members to turn on one another and to turn against their union.

Except it didn’t really work. Union members, it turned out, were not that confused by Janus. They recognized a con game when they saw it. They recognized the value of unions, and they were not interested in only “looking out for #1.” Instead they had the backs of their union brothers and sisters and trusted that their union brothers and sisters had theirs as well.

In the short time that I have been MCCC president, I have seen examples of perseverance, determination, and courage as well as kindness and selflessness on the part of union leaders and members that have left me feeling immensely proud to be a union member and humbled to be one of the leaders.

There is of course the other viewpoint, borne of righteous anger and cynicism that, as a union, we have not gone far enough, have not tried hard enough, do not care enough. No doubt we can, and must, always do better. The acts of perseverance, determination, and courage that I witnessed must be multiplied ten- fold. The acts kindness and selflessness a hundredfold. There is a lot of work to be done. But I am up for it. I hope you are too.

I want to close this statement with a couple of notes of appreciation. First, to the three former MCCC presidents whom I ’ve known personally and on whose shoulders I now stand. Although their respective leadership style and vision for the union differed one from the other, Rick Doud, Joe LeBlanc, and Diana Yohe worked hard for and cared deeply about the union. It is this work ethic and earnestness that I aim to emulate. Secondly, to Phil Mahler who has devoted his entire professional life to the health and wellbeing of the MCCC, serving, in turn, as President, Vice president, and Treasurer. To the extent that our union makes it through these uncertain times, it will in large part be due to Phil’s capable stewardship. I am most grateful that Phil continues to serve the MCCC in his capacity as office manager.

In solidarity, Margaret Wong MCCC President