180-degree turn on higher ed

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South Carolina lawmakers, through several controversial add-ons in the massive Life Sciences Act, have made it clear the General Assembly has no immediate plans to force efficiency on an overbuilt system of higher education.

This session, lawmakers have shown an alarming comfort with allowing the narrow interests of county delegations to determine program expansions. Worse, lawmakers have made it virtually impossible to shutter any of the 34 public schools or the 78 campuses they operate. This is the same Legislature that just eight years ago imposed funding reforms in the belief that we had too many campuses and each should have to justify its existence.

Today, not even a hint of that sort of responsibility and restraint appears to exist. Against the wishes of the University of South Carolina's president and its board of trustees, the Legislature agreed to expand USC-Sumter into a four-year campus. It also added a culinary arts school in Charleston and agreed to explore whether S.C. State University needs a law school. Both passed as amendments riding the popularity of what began as a jobs bill. Included, too, is a provision that gives the General Assembly final say on any effort to close branch campuses. This was a shot at Gov. Mark Sanford and his proposal to close two USC branch campuses.

South Carolina will pay a high price for this failure to adopt a system of higher education governance free of legislative politics. Funding will remain hopelessly inefficient, which undermines the quality improvement efforts of each state school. And the USC-Sumter proposal, especially, underscores the disregard lawmakers have for the opinions of college administrators and the Commission on Higher Education.

The Life Sciences Act is a reversal of the promise made in 1996 to streamline higher education funding to cut the fat. Lawmakers, realizing that higher education in this state was rife with duplication, agreed to tie all higher education funding to performance. It was expected that lightly used or duplicative campuses would eventually fail funding tests and would be forced to close. Performance funding was supposed to extract the politics that had caused higher education to grow haphazardly and without regard to budget limits.

But lawmakers never gave the CHE the authority it needed to cut programs. And today, we are back to square one on higher education spending, with the system allowed to grow on the whims of lawmakers.

The $700 million this state will spend on higher education — about 14 percent of the state budget — is backed by big ambitions. But as long as lawmakers refuse to transfer decision-making to a system of governance that acts based on careful planning and objective analysis, that taxpayer commitment to higher education is devalued.

Lawmakers must show a willingness to cede control of the higher education agenda in order to improve the quality and efficiency of state institutions without interference from politics. Otherwise, the system will continue to grow and fall short of its potential.