M. Roy Wilson

Free Press guest writer

We were pleased to see that the governor’s fiscal year 2017 budget proposal includes reinvestment in higher education. This is good news for Michigan, and the proposal is described as fulfillment of the governor’s commitment to restore funding to prior levels before its massive cut in 2011.

However, the proposal will not restore all universities to pre-2011 levels. For example, Michigan’s three major research universities (University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Wayne State University, known collectively as the University Research Corridor, or URC) will not see their funding levels fully restored, even though the URC is an economic driver that yields an economic impact of more than $17 billion annually for Michigan. Wayne State, in particular, remains at 7.5%, or $16.6 million below its 2011 budget level, and for the fifth year in a row will receive the lowest percentage increase of all of Michigan’s universities.

How can that be? Half of the increase in new funding to the universities will be through what is known as “performance metrics” and Michigan’s current metrics model disadvantages Wayne State. Metrics models used by states across the nation range from fairly rudimentary to highly sophisticated. The best consider the unique missions of the various universities, and ensure that the final allocation is fair and reasonable, passing the commonsense test while taking into account the workforce and knowledge needs of the state.

Michigan’s performance metrics model can be improved to better align it with the state’s workforce needs and economic development.

First, the value of research should be given more than only 5% weight in the metrics.

Second, graduate degrees are not included in the “critical degrees” metric, yet they are certainly critical to Michigan’s success.

Third, the model should incorporate instructional costs as a percent of expenditures, rather than an overall administrative cost, since this is most relevant to the student experience.

Most importantly, each university’s performance should be evaluated in relation to the other Michigan public universities as well as in comparison to its own historical performance. The current methodology uses the Carnegie Foundation’s classification of universities, which results in nonsensical peer groupings such as Wayne State being measured against Ivy League universities.

Even accepting these inadequacies of the model, the final funding allocation of the current model is not based on performance.

Wayne State actually received a final merit score in the middle of the pack. In fact, only four Michigan universities had scores that were higher. From a commonsense standpoint, scoring in the middle but receiving the lowest percentage increase in funding doesn’t compute. This occurs because the final score is multiplied by the number of undergraduate students in the institution, and ignores graduate students and professional students. This simply does not make sense since there is a cost — in fact, a higher cost — to educating graduate, medical and law students. Further, upon graduation, these students contribute disproportionately to the economic and civic well-being of the state of Michigan.

All of this may sound like inside baseball, but these details matter.

The current metrics model for Michigan is constructed in a way that makes it extraordinarily difficult for Wayne State to rise from the last position for funding increases. This year we received the maximal amount of points possible on the one area of performance for which we had some level of control — improvement in the six-year graduation rate. There is little else we can realistically do to impact our relative standing.

As Michigan’s only public, urban research university, we educate a higher proportion of students who arrive from more difficult circumstances, yet with the desire and talent to achieve great things.

We think providing an opportunity is the right thing to do for these students, and for all of our students, who gain by living, striving and learning together in a microcosm of our increasingly diverse world. We think this also is the right thing for Michigan, which benefits in numerous ways from these students’ success. It would be a shame if an ill-conceived funding allocation model compromised this important mission.

M. Roy Wilson is president of Wayne State University.