A Wish List

The Biden administration will be hearing soon from community colleges through the Association of Community College Trustees. By necessity, the ACCT tends to focus on immediate matters: bills about to be (or already) introduced, for the most part. That’s helpful and appropriate, but it goes only so far. So while we’re in the early days of an administration that many of us assume will be friendlier to community colleges than any of its recent predecessors, I’ll offer a few items for a longer-term wish list. These are the sorts of things that can play out over time.

The single most important, of course, is to save the states. Given that states provide much more operating funding to community colleges than the federal government does, and that nobody seems likely to upend that arrangement anytime soon, the first order of business should be to ensure that states are again on solid fiscal footing. Some, like California, already are, and that’s great. But many are still struggling from pandemic-related losses of sales tax and income tax revenue.

The obvious short-term method for saving the states is to give them money. In the context of a pandemic, I find the moral hazard argument ridiculous; no state is just a bailout check away from firing up another global pandemic. If anything, more resources could help get the pandemic under control more quickly. The key here will be a meaningful maintenance-of-effort requirement to keep opportunistic state and local politicians from simply replacing their own support with federal support.

The longer-term method, which is conspicuously absent from the larger political discourse, is the restoration of the tax deduction for state and local taxes. The SALT deduction, as it’s known, created political room for states to raise the revenue they needed to raise to provide necessary services. People bought homes on the assumption that the property taxes would be deductible, as they had been for over 100 years. The previous administration hacked the SALT deduction to punish the (mostly) blue states that tended to benefit from it.

Otherwise-smart people often refer to the SALT deduction as some sort of sop to the wealthy. That misses two major points. The first is the variation in the local cost of living. A salary that might look impressive in much of the country buys a lot less in the areas where the loss of the SALT deduction hit hardest. The second is the impact on state tax revenues, and who gets hurt within states when state tax revenues drop. Hint: it’s not the wealthy.

Beyond saving the states, the Biden administration has a chance now to help build institutional capacity at community colleges in ways that will pay off for decades to come. It could do that through grants -- not competitive, but sectorwide -- for community colleges to beef up staffing in the areas of institutional research and fundraising.

IR, as it’s known, provides the local data that campuses can use to improve results for students. But IR itself is a cost that doesn’t generate revenue directly, so it tends to get short shrift. That’s penny-wise and pound-foolish; without good information, decisions will get made based instead on hunches, history or internal politics. As it happens, most campuses have just enough (or not quite enough) IR staff to handle mandatory reporting and some predictable grants, but deeper dives can be a strain. We aren’t going to get meaningfully better without deeper dives. The insights that deeper dives can offer can more than pay for themselves over time, but they require up-front investment. This is well within the range of the possible.

Fundraising should be self-explanatory, but many people misunderstand it. Beefing up fundraising capacity involves spending money up front to make money later; the payback happens over time. That makes it an excellent candidate for external support. Philanthropy isn’t going to substitute for adequate operating funding in the near term, but done right, it compounds over time. Community colleges as a sector have been late to the fundraising game, and many are still in the high-effort, low-payoff part of the learning curve. Some early help here could change the game, over time. (Again, any new federal money needs to come with a maintenance-of-effort requirement.)

From a student perspective, obviously we need financial aid systems that better reflect reality. As Sara Goldrick-Rab has been showing for years, in many cases, students are supporting their families rather than the other way around. The pandemic has shown us that good broadband access is not universal, and probably won’t be for a while. But let’s not make the mistake of assuming that, say, bumping up the Pell Grant is enough. Pell is great, as far as it goes, but most community colleges already charge less than the maximum Pell Grant. Raising the maximum a little higher will help some students, but it won’t help colleges at all. Conflating the two doesn’t do justice to either.

Finally, there’s the power of example. I have some confidence here. Academic freedom implies, among other things, that the party registration of college employees should be irrelevant to how the colleges are treated. That’s just basic. Conspicuous and explicit endorsements of academic freedom could go a long way and wouldn’t even cost anything.

Wise and worldly readers, what would you add to a wish list for the new administration?