After years of rapid expansion, Georgia’s University System is considering a U-turn: Down this road, the way to cut costs is to consolidate colleges.
The course change has been carefully mapped by the state’s technical school system, which has merged 15 campuses to save money on presidents, vice presidents and other administrators. The schools remain in place, but eight of them are under new management, and the cuts in administration are saving at least $6.7 million a year, officials say.
Now the University System is looking at doing the same thing, cheered on by lawmakers who want colleges to cut back. But it’s a delicate business at best: Each of the state’s 35 colleges is a political hand grenade that will go off the moment someone says “merger.”
“It takes real guts and true visionaries to take on this type of issue,” said state Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, a leading critic of system spending. “They should turn a deaf ear to the turf battles and political cries from those who defend the status quo at the detriment of state taxpayers.”
University System spending on administration has exploded in recent years, a review by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found in July. Less than two months after the newspaper published its findings, the system’s chancellor, Hank Huckaby, told the Board of Regents he wants to look at consolidating campuses. Gov. Nathan Deal has already signaled his support for the review.
“We need to be organized in ways that truly foster service to our students in the most effective way and that ensure our faculty are properly deployed and supported,” Huckaby told the regents, the system’s government body.
College systems across the country are doing much the same, proposing mergers in an effort to combat the twin problems of rising costs and funding cuts to state schools.
But Huckaby, a former state lawmaker and budget director, knows a move to consolidate universities could ignite a political firestorm, with alumni, politicians and possibly civil rights groups leading the charge against any changes.
He only needs to look at what happened when the technical schools merged to get a small taste of what lies ahead.
‘They rushed into it’
While the technical college mergers, which began in 2009, have had limited impact on students, they remain a sore spot for some locals, who feel as if they lost a piece of their community and who doubt the state saved much money in the end.
“I think some people lost a lot of pride and a feeling of ownership,” said Rep. Butch Parrish, R-Swainsboro, whose technical college was merged with another in Vidalia. “I think they rushed into it without much thought.”
Georgia’s technical college system, like the University System, has seen explosive growth over the past few decades. Governors Joe Frank Harris and Zell Miller put big money into the system during the 1980s and 1990s to ensure that Georgians were within a short car ride of a technical school.
When the Great Recession hit, lawmakers began cutting funding to technical colleges. State funding declined about 14 percent since 2008. However, overall spending is expected to be 27 percent higher this year than in 2008, thanks in large measure to higher tuition and enrollment.
The system’s commissioner, Ron Jackson, and other technical college officials began looking at merging some of Georgia’s 33 technical colleges even before the recession hit.
Jackson said it became harder each year to defend the overhead — the presidents, vice presidents, business staffs, etc., at small technical colleges with 500 to 700 students. A review found that each school needed a minimum of 26 administrative positions to operate, at a cost of about $2.1 million a year.
In fiscal 2010, the last year for which figures are available, most technical college presidents earned $140,000 to $160,000 a year. Most vice presidents got between $80,000 and $135,000 a year.
“We knew that with the budget constraints coming up, we couldn’t justify 33 college administrations,” he said.
At the time, the system had a number of college presidents who were retiring, so that made merging of some schools easier because officials didn’t have to fire a bunch of top leaders.
The plan was to merge colleges but not close campuses or slash programs to students. Some schools lost their names as they became a campus of another college, and they lost some of the administrators.
North Metro Technical College in Acworth and Appalachian Tech in Jasper became campuses of Chattahoochee Tech, which has its main campus in Marietta.
Swainsboro Technical College, which once served one of the largest areas in Georgia, became a campus of Southeastern Technical College in Vidalia.
Melody Mulkey, a student at North Metro at the time of the merger, said classmates were apprehensive because they didn’t know what to expect.
“Going into it, a lot of us had a negative perception of Chattahoochee Tech,” she said. “It was like the difference between the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech.”
But now, Mulkey, who runs a tutoring program at the school and still takes classes, said she has seen no difference in the academic programs.
Larry Calhoun, who went from being Swainsboro Tech’s president to the campus provost in the merger, said there was almost “unanimous disbelief” when the state announced the school would lose its name.
“There are some folks going to their graves upset about it,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent have probably moved on.”
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