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Printer-Friendly ModeHigh time for more housing and students
January 28, 2008 —
Taking it private -
In Thursday's State of the University address, SVSU President Eric Gilbertson explained how SVSU has become more and more dependant upon its tuition - and thus strong enrollment - for its financial health. As state appropriations gradually decrease, SVSU and other public institutions in Michigan are finding themselves less public than ever.
One needn't look any further than the catfight between Michigan State University, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University over state appropriations to see how this is playing out. Last year, the three colleges petitioned the state to award them larger shares of public funds because of their considerable economic and cultural contributions to their respective areas.
On the surface, their pleas seemed earnest enough. But it also seemed an awful lot like a ploy to simply guarantee continued funding in the near future. Such is the situation for Michigan's institutions of higher learning.
SVSU is particularly threatened by the state's diseased economy and its lawmakers' inability to effectively deal with it. As a smaller, less established institution, SVSU cannot rely on alumni and other donors to finance major operations. Charitable contributions play a niche role at SVSU, unlike some other universities, which receive hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable contributions annually.
SVSU is also a smaller institution in terms of students. Enrollment has held steady around 10,000 students for several years now. That's nowhere near city-sized enrollments of other colleges in the state, however considerable it may be.
And perhaps most importantly, SVSU has the least expensive tuition among state universities in Michigan. So SVSU receives less money per head than any other state university, and it enrolls fewer students than any other state university. The fact that it has managed to create quality programs in all of the academic disciplines is something worthy of admiration.
As Gilbertson mentioned in his speech, the sad truth is that SVSU is becoming less and less public of a university. But that also means that the university cannot rest on its laurels. It needs to recruit more aggressively than ever. State funds are probably not coming back - at least any time soon - and continued growth of the college's physical plant and intellectual capital rests upon continued strong enrollment.
In addition to aggressively recruiting students - both out of state and in state - we feel that it would be wise to pop the unspoken cap of 10,000 students. SVSU's most valuable service to the community and to the state is its quality in-class instruction at a reasonable cost. So it seems natural to spread the tuition burden across more students in order to rein in the steadily increasing cost of tuition, which is outpacing inflation by a considerable margin.
To do this, SVSU needs more housing. While the proposed nursing and health sciences facility is naturally the number one priority in terms of construction, SVSU should immediately begin construction on a new housing facility once the funds are available, in order to attract more students and remain the least expensive public university in the state.