Rapid City Journal, Rapid City, Aug. 13
Regents should reject another fee proposal
Sometimes you have to wonder how the Board of Regents interprets its own reports while making decisions concerning the continued viability of the state’s six public universities.
In May, the Board said it wants more state residents to earn degrees and released a report, prepared by the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, that among other things said “South Dakota universities have become less affordable over the last decade in comparison with regional peers.”
The report noted that undergraduate enrollment rates declined by 4.3 percent from 2010 to 2015 when high school students taking the far less costly dual-credit courses were excluded. “If this trend continues, undergraduate awards may begin to fall unless advances are made with respect to graduation rates.”
So what has the Board done since then? It has begun discussing a South Dakota Higher Education Enhancement Fee that would increase fees by $5.07 per credit hour to boost the pay of instructors who find themselves teaching a shrinking pool of students.
If approved by the Regents, the fee adds $150 to the cost of a full-time load of 30 credits, raising the annual cost of tuition and fees to $8,705, which doesn’t include room, board and books. Tuition and fees were $7,925 in 2014 and are now $8,555. The proposal, unveiled at the Regents’ Aug. 2 meeting, could increase by $5.07 for each of the next ten years.
It is expected to generate an estimated $4 million in its first year and would be shared by the universities. Black Hills State University President Tom Jackson is among the supporters.
At the same time, a mandatory activity fee for all six universities is scheduled to increase by 2.9 percent for the next school year. Currently, Jackson’s BHSU students pay $43.80 per credit hour for that one.
Full-time students also pay a Higher Education Facilities Fund Fee for campus building projects that costs $916 a year.
How do South Dakota students and their families cope with what is becoming the annual increase in fees? Increasingly, they are taking out student loans and going further in debt. What kind of enhancement program is that?
According to the Project on Student Debt, seven out of 10 South Dakota college graduates left school in 2015 with student loan debt. The average amount was $30,000 with interest rates of 6 percent and higher in some cases. In 2013, the average debt was $25,750.
Student debt is a major issue in the U.S. It often takes years to repay these loans. It is particularly challenging here where state officials like to say that our low cost of living makes it easier to live on wages that are less than in most states.
As a result, South Dakota ranks second in the nation in the percentage of students with college debt and 17th in average debt, according to the Project on Student Debt.
The other issue identified in the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute report is that South Dakota relies on students more than other states to pick up college costs. In 2012, students covered 62 percent of college costs, while the state picked up 38 percent.
It wasn’t long ago that Gov. Daugaard touted the state’s fiscal policies after balancing its budget as the state Constitution requires. At the same time, however, he is presiding over a state that is putting its youth further in debt by increasing college costs. Some graduates will spend as many as 20 years paying off student loans.
If the Board of Regents continues on its current path of raising either tuition or fees every year, there is little doubt that the trend identified in the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute report will continue unabated.
Perhaps, the Regents should re-examine their own report and look for efficiencies and waste within the university system before once again asking debt-burdened students to pay more while at the same time discouraging others from pursing a higher education in the state.
The Regents can start this process by rejecting the proposal for the South Dakota Higher Education Enhancement Fee and telling university presidents to make cuts if they want more money for faculty.
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The Daily Republic, Mitchell, Aug. 16
Two school board members made error in judgment
A short discussion on the consent agenda was held during the Mitchell Board of Education’s meeting Monday night.
And typically, that’s not a big deal.
Except this week one of the five topics listed under the consent agenda was “conflict disclosures/waiver requests,” a policy in place due to South Dakota Codified Law 3-23-6. The reason for the policy is to avoid school board members and other school officials from having an interest in a contract or receiving a direct benefit if the school district is a party to the contract.
It’s a good open government law that helps ensure public officials are acting in the best interests of the district when making financial decisions, rather than doing something that would otherwise benefit them.
On Monday night, school board members Kevin Kenkel and Matthew Christiansen, along with the rest of the five-person board, voted to approve the consent agenda. While the vote seems harmless, Kenkel and Christiansen declared they have potential conflicts of interest.
Kenkel is employed with Dakota Wesleyan University, and Christiansen works for Avera and is an adjunct professor for DWU. Both DWU and Avera have contracts with the Mitchell School District, so when the time came to approve waivers for Kenkel and Christiansen, those two board members should have abstained from voting on the consent agenda or asked to have that section of the agenda pulled out as a separate item. But they didn’t, and that itself is a conflict of interest.
On Tuesday morning, school district officials admitted the mistake and said the item should not have been listed under the consent agenda. With a five-person board, Kenkel and Christiansen could have abstained from the vote and there still would have been enough other members to earn a majority vote to approve the waivers.
While we see no purposeful wrongdoing and we feel this was likely an oversight, for Kenkel and Christiansen to vote on the topic was careless. For their sake and the comfort of the taxpayers of Mitchell School District, anyone listed to have a possible conflict of interest should not be voting to approve their own waiver.
We are pleased Superintendent Joe Graves admitted the mistake Tuesday morning and commend him for taking the blame, but it shouldn’t be his job to tell board members to be ethical.
That’s why we hope all of the school board members learn a valuable lesson here. For the comfort of Mitchell School District taxpayers, board members always must be aware when they need to abstain from a vote.
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Capital Journal, Pierre, Aug. 16
Fight to save the CUC
In what can only be described as a slap in the face to the cities of Pierre and Fort Pierre, the South Dakota Board of Regents, last week, ordered its staff to come up with a plan to “wind down” the BOR’s involvement with the Capital University Center.
Meanwhile, the university centers in Sioux Falls and Rapid City - both of which have multiple universities within an hour’s drive - are being reorganized, not wound down.
The state’s three university centers have, without doubt, been struggling in recent years. The numbers of students and course hours are down. So is revenue. Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the internet. Online courses and degree completion are much easier than they were when the university centers first were conceived. This reduces the need for satellite campuses.
Our state’s economy has played a significant role in this situation, too. We’ve got an extremely low unemployment rate, so there aren’t as many folks needing to beef-up their educational credentials to find better work. Naturally, this lowers the demand for help with completing a four-year or two-year degree.
The CUC’s recent switch to four-year nursing degrees also seems to have caused a drop in enrollment. The longer it takes to finish a degree, the tougher it is to pay for that degree, which further limits who chooses to enroll in the program.
There is an ebb-and-flow to every industry. Education is now different. Tough times call for tough decisions. That’s reasonable, it’s understandable and should be encouraged. Tough decisions should, however, be smart decisions, not knee-jerk reactions to a set of uncontrollable circumstances.
The Capital University Center is unique among its peers in that there is more than two hours of drive time between it and the nearest college, university or tech school. That fact was the reason that the foundations for what would become the Capital University Center were laid back in 1981. The CUC’s isolation also should cause the Regents pause when they call for winding down their involvement with the center.
There is no other entity in central South Dakota that can pick up the slack left by a degraded CUC. Nowhere is the risk of losing our region’s sole institute of higher education more clear than in the field of nursing.
The BOR may not know this, but rural South Dakota, indeed rural areas all over the U.S., are suffering from a shortage of health care professionals. It is difficult to recruit doctors and nurses to places that are a long distance from where they went to school. That’s one reason why the CUC’s nursing program is so important to the area. It provides a pipeline of nurses for clinics and hospitals from Chamberlain to Gettysburg.
Removing that pipeline of nurses will make providing health care in central South Dakota more difficult than it already is. Is that really something for which the BOR wants to be responsible? Surely, the CUC nursing program is worth saving.
Why wouldn’t the BOR consider “winding down” the university centers in Sioux Falls and Rapid City, where access to higher education already exists? They could then dedicate some of the savings to investing in the CUC, which happens to be in a location where more access to higher education is actually needed.
It must be noted that no decisions have been made about closing the CUC. And, even if the BOR ultimately does decide to abandon the CUC, the people of Pierre, Fort Pierre and the rest of central South Dakota need to step up and fight for the CUC. We’ve all got a dog in this fight. We may need to pony-up some economic-development money and come up with some innovative ideas of our own, but the alternative - losing our only higher education opportunity - is something we can ill afford.
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