Waste and bloat in Minnesota State Colleges and Universities
Our view: MNSCU — It’s unnecessary and expensive
Winona Daily News
When the chairman of the Minnesota House Higher Education Committee says there’s trouble, it must be bad.
Rep. Dan Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, has been one of the Minnesota State College and University System’s biggest supporters. But even he said there are problems and MNSCU needs to be changed. He panned the statewide centralized system in a meeting Thursday at Winona State .
It’s nice to hear that.
We’ve been saying MNSCU needs a major change for months.
Instead, DFL legislators as well as the bloated bureaucracy of MNSCU have insisted the problem with higher education must be somewhere else.
But, through the hard work of folks like Rep. Gene Pelowski and some others, we can see an organizational chart that runs more than 40 pages long, each complete with lots of salaries and benefits.
And sometimes — in the case of a chancellor — a $36,000 bonus. Pity that this mean ol’ economy should have robbed him of his $50,000 taxpayer-funded bonus.
That’s exactly what’s wrong with MNSCU.
It is nothing more than a bureaucracy, providing little necessary support to campus and a lot of price.
With the exception of some regionalized legal counsel and technological support, the rest of MNSCU seems to adroitly duplicate what already exists on local campuses. And speaking of local campuses, MNSCU is a relatively recent invention: These universities survived and even thrived long before MNSCU.
(More here.)
Winona Daily News
When the chairman of the Minnesota House Higher Education Committee says there’s trouble, it must be bad.
Rep. Dan Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, has been one of the Minnesota State College and University System’s biggest supporters. But even he said there are problems and MNSCU needs to be changed. He panned the statewide centralized system in a meeting Thursday at Winona State .
It’s nice to hear that.
We’ve been saying MNSCU needs a major change for months.
Instead, DFL legislators as well as the bloated bureaucracy of MNSCU have insisted the problem with higher education must be somewhere else.
But, through the hard work of folks like Rep. Gene Pelowski and some others, we can see an organizational chart that runs more than 40 pages long, each complete with lots of salaries and benefits.
And sometimes — in the case of a chancellor — a $36,000 bonus. Pity that this mean ol’ economy should have robbed him of his $50,000 taxpayer-funded bonus.
That’s exactly what’s wrong with MNSCU.
It is nothing more than a bureaucracy, providing little necessary support to campus and a lot of price.
With the exception of some regionalized legal counsel and technological support, the rest of MNSCU seems to adroitly duplicate what already exists on local campuses. And speaking of local campuses, MNSCU is a relatively recent invention: These universities survived and even thrived long before MNSCU.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
As someone who has firsthand experience dealing with the intricacies of the MnSCU system from an outsiders perspective, I would disagree with your point that MnSCU only duplicates what is already provided for on campus. You quickly brush over the major benefits offered in technology infrastructure, and then vaguely refer to what is offered centrally. There is something to be said for having a centralized authority to oversee the many colleges in universities in the state of Minnesota. But then you're holding the debate focused solely on the university viewpoint, ignoring the more than 110,000 students in the MnSCU system who don't set foot at one of your precious seven university campuses. The transfer benefits alone more than justify MnSCU's existence. Could the salaries be examined and the structure of governance be cut back some? Of course!! But what you and Gene Pelowski fail to realize is that attacking the administrative costs (among the lowest in the nation for peer systems) while ignoring the ridiculous costs exacted by the faculty and staff unions (which make up the bulk of the cost at MnSCU institutions) is just distracting the people of Minnesota to some real problems.
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