Higher education – some news about where Massachusetts stands

The new edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual almanac came out recently, and I thought it would be interesting to look at how Massachusetts stacks up in some of the statistics assembled there.

There is, as always, a lot of good news. We have the highest proportion of adults with bachelor’s degrees (38%). Some of our independent universities rank at or near the top in various categories, and we’re bringing in a lot of grant funding.

We are different from the run of the mill in other ways. Massachusetts remains the only state with more than half (57%) of its higher education enrollment in independent institutions. (Many of those students are of course from out of state). In part for that reason, we are one of nine states – and the only largish one – with 80% of enrollment in four-year institutions. Our campuses annually grant about 11,000 associate’s degrees, 50,000 bachelor’s degrees, and 8,000 doctorates and professional degrees, an unusual balance; North Carolina, for example, produces about twice as many AA/AS graduates, while trailing us in the other categories.

The pattern carries significant workforce implications, because there is considerable evidence that postsecondary education short of the bachelor’s is a weak point in our workforce development system, and that we face shortfalls in qualified workers to fill jobs at that level. There are parallel implications in terms of individual opportunity and social mobility – it’s notable that minority students are nearly twice as well represented in 2-year colleges compared to 4-year institutions.

Where Massachusetts looks bad, by the numbers, is public financing of higher education. From FY09 to FY10, Massachusetts cut state appropriations to higher education by 18.4%; this is the second-largest reduction in the nation, behind only Nevada, a state hit much harder by the recession. States like California, New York and New Jersey, in worse fiscal straits than ours, managed marginal increases. It is true that Massachusetts has to some extent filled in with federal stimulus funds – but how do we expect that to play out going forward, without the federal money? The five-year funding trend is equally unfavorable. Meanwhile the state’s student aid programs, once a key component of building both access and political support for higher education spending, have withered away in terms of buying power – at $132 million, they’re approximately equal to the institutional aid program at Harvard College.

The Almanac devotes a section to international comparisons, underlining the fact that while the best American (and Massachusetts) institutions rank very high indeed, the overall performance of the U.S. is fading compared to competing nations on several continents. (Massachusetts schools, incidentally, appear to be losing ground among American campuses in attracting international students, but that’s mostly a different issue.)

Meanwhile, the Times of London has released its annual ranking of the top universities worldwide – a more broad-based analysis, by the way, than the Chinese ranking. The U.S. dominance at the top of the table continues: the top 5, 15 of the top 20. Massachusetts schools do well, with five in the top 60 (Harvard 1, MIT 3, Tufts 53, UMass 56, BU 59). Apart from the U.S., Britain is the only entire country with as many top-60 institutions (6). The UMass result is interesting; it ranks 33rd in the U.S., much higher than on ratings based heavily on undergraduate admissions like US News’s. It is, in fact, the top-ranked public university in the Northeast – though behind six individual campuses of the University of California (that’s without UCSF, the graduate medical campus). It’s a good showing for UMass with plenty of room for improvement, and at some risk in view of the funding situation.