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Education Committee takes up House version of higher education funding formula

CHARLESTON -- Even though the West Virginia Senate passed a bill creating a performance-based funding formula for higher education with program approval exemptions, the Senate Education Committee recommended the House version of the bill Thursday without those exemptions.

The Senate Education Committee recommended House Bill 4008 for passage Thursday afternoon, empowering the state Higher Education Policy Commission and West Virginia Community and Technical College System to create new funding formula based on several performance metrics. The bill heads next to the Senate Finance Committee.

Officials with the state's 10 four-year colleges and universities, and the nine two-year community and technical colleges have been working towards a funding model for the past two years, developing a model based on Tennessee's program. HB 4008 would allow the HEPC/WVCTCS to put this model in place.

The model being developed would base public funding to colleges/universities and community and technical colleges on several metrics, including credit hours, the number of degrees or certificates awarded, the number of graduates working in the state, academic research and more.

The Senate already passed a similar bill, Senate Bill 550, on Feb. 10, sending the bill to the House. That bill skipped the Senate Education Committee, going through the Senate Finance Committee chaired by state Sen. Eric Tarr, R-Putnam.

The Senate Finance Committee added a section to the bill during its Feb. 3 meeting allowing exemptions from HEPC oversight for new college programs that would be incentivized by the new funding formula. It also said that four-year higher education institutions have to have a state appropriation that is 40 percent less than the operating expense of the college or university in order to be exempt from HEPC oversight.

SB 550 passed the Senate in a 28-6 vote, with Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson, voting against the bill. Rucker also offered a failed amendment to the bill on the floor to strip out the exemption language from the bill, stating after the vote that "… it should have been in a separate bill and it should have run through the Education Committee."

During Thursday's committee meeting, Rucker and Tarr offered a compromise amendment that marry parts of SB 550 into HB 4008. The approved amendment would exempt any four-year college and university that offers a two-year program from having new programs approved by HEPC/WVCTCS as long as the school's state funding is less than 40 percent of the school's operating expenses for three years straight. The amendment failed by voice vote.

"When the schools are looking at adding any kind of program, they're also looking at the market for that program and the risk to go and do that," Tarr said. "The funding formula applies to two-year institutions and they have no program approval whatsoever now … The two-year institutions are still way nimbler than that four-year institution."

"Two-year institutions and four-year institutions are always distinct," said state Sen. Mike Romano, D-Harrison, asking skeptical questions about the bill. "My concern is that a four-year baccalaureate institution, which is generally better financed, would be able to … permit a four-year institution to start a two-year program that maybe the local two-year community and technical college would want to start."

Sarah Armstrong Tucker, the chancellor for HEPC/WVCTCS, said it was her preference to keep two-year and four-year institutions separate and focused on the areas they are best at.

"My strong preference is that associate degree programs stay with community colleges and baccalaureate programs stay with baccalaureate institutions," Tucker said. "For a lot of reasons, that makes sense."