MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A Blue Ribbon Commission on four-year Higher Education is beginning to take shape.
Just days after Governor Jim Justice signed an executive order creating the commission, a 20-person panel was named to the commission with West Virginia University taking a leading role in it’s efforts. The goal of the commission is to focus on the sustainability of the state’s four-year colleges.
“We have the smallest number of women and men with a college degree in the whole country, so we need to do better,” said Monongalia County Delegate Barbara Evans Fleischauer on WAJR’s Morgantown AM.
The commission, which includes WVU President E. Gordon Gee, will be looking at multiple aspects of higher education — including the current funding levels at which four-year colleges receive funding from the state and how these colleges are governed. The intention is to find any issues with how funding is distributed between universities.
Fleischauer feels WVU, despite it’s size, has taken some of the biggest hits.
“WVU has already absorbed a much greater percentage wise cut, than the other smaller institutions, so I think that proposal is what prompted this,” she said.
Marshal University President Jerry Gilbert and Concord University President Kendra Boggess will serve as co-chairmen of the commission. Another area that will be of focus will be determining the value and role of the Higher Education Policy Commission. The HEPC determines the formula for college funding from the state level based on a series of different metrics. A new formula proposal incorporates the amount of in-state students a school has enrolled when distributing funds. This has been disputed by WVU and some other institutions.
“We now do have a system of community colleges, and we need to figure out, for a population of 1.8 million, what’s the best use of our money and the best way to organize things so that there is oversight and that there is local access,” she said.
Under the newly proposed formula only three schools would be losing money — Glenville State, WVU Institute of Technology and WVU respectively. With the changes potentially coming from the commission in the near future, concerns about school closures or consolidations come with them. While Fleischauer is all for a change in the higher education funding, she still hopes smaller schools don’t get tossed by the wayside as a result.
“We have a lot of little, very small schools, that people are very loyal to in their community because they don’t want to have to move to get a good education,” she said. “Education’s expensive and they want to be able maybe to work and stay with their family, not to have to uproot themselves.”
The HEPC will hold a meeting on Monday where they expect to put the search for a new chancellor on hold until the commission concludes.