Dealing with explosive growth, the changing demographics of the school population and chronic funding shortages keep officials at school districts and universities burning the midnight oil. As part of its monthly Industry Outlook series, Nevada Business Journal invited leaders in educational institutions throughout the state to meet on January 19th at the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas for a roundtable meeting to discuss issues important to the future of Nevada. Connie Brennan, publisher of Nevada Business Journal, served as moderator for the roundtable. Following is a condensed version of the discussion, which began with introductions. Participants were asked to describe the biggest challenges faced by their organizations.
Steve Brooks: The Art Institute of Las Vegas is a proprietary school in the creative art business. Our parent company is Education Management Corporation, out of Pittsburgh. We’ve been in this market about 3 1/2 years in the creative arts sector, which is interior design, graphic design and visual effects, motion graphics and six other type of disciplines where we offer associate’s or bachelor’s degree programs. Our biggest challenge is the funding opportunities for students. I know the government right now is reauthorizing Title IV and they’re looking at additional money for Pell grants, but that doesn’t really benefit a lot of us.
Keith Evans: Regis University is a private Catholic institution headquartered in Denver, Colo. We have had campuses here in Las Vegas for five years: a Green Valley campus and a Summerlin campus. We offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, liberal arts and business. We have about 350 students and about 75 adjunct faculty. The biggest challenge I face is finding a place for us among the increasing competition in the Henderson area. Henderson has done a great job of attracting educational institutions, and I believe there’s room for all of us if we work together. We also face the issue of funding. As a private institution, we are a little more expensive than public institutions. We have students who are typically working adults, and we need to find better ways to supplement their ability to pursue higher education.
Harry Rosenberg: The University of Southern Nevada started as the Nevada College of Pharmacy. It was incorporated in 1999 as a private, independent, not-for-profit institution and functions under the authority of a separate board of trustees. We changed the name to the University of Southern Nevada with the intent of mounting new programs focusing specifically in the healthcare area. We intend to start a nursing program very shortly and training for other health professions. Our biggest problem is managing growth. This affects facilities, personnel and faculty.
Fred Maryanski: Nevada State College’s first challenge is to get its initial building established and funded by the Legislature, and we’re very hopeful we can work with the state leadership to make that happen this session. There’s a great need for higher education, and our next challenge will be to grow responsibly so we can provide quality services to the students as our enrollment increases. What we face at this stage is increasing the throughput, the output of higher education in general. We need to educate more professionals who will go on to support the Nevada economy as it grows, and that’s what we all have to work together to achieve.
Dave Guerin: I’m with Nova Southeastern University. Our main campus is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and we’ve had a presence in Las Vegas for about 25 years. Our primary focus has been in the area of teacher education on undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels. One of the major challenges that I see with the perpetually changing market we find ourselves in and the incredible growth we’re experiencing, is being able to offer curriculum and course work for our students that will accommodate Nevada’s ever-changing needs. It takes a great deal of good free-flowing communication between all of us here and with representatives of the Department of Education and the Legislature.
Lisa Ackerman: The University of Phoenix has been around for about 25 years – 11 years here in Nevada. We have five locations in Southern Nevada and one in Reno. Our mission has been to break down the barriers to access for education for working adults. We are the nation’s largest private school, with about 228,000 students – about 3,000 here in Southern Nevada. We have university degree programs focused on professional goals. Our largest challenge right now is how the community values higher education, because in the Nevada economy, especially in Southern Nevada, you can get a good-paying job without a degree. Nationally, about 50 percent of our students use tuition reimbursement from their employer to help finance their education, but here in Las Vegas we’re seeing only about 10 to 15 percent of our students use tuition reimbursement. We need to find ways to show businesses the value of an educated workforce.
Thalia Dondero: I’m an elected official on the Board of Regents, and I represent the whole state of Nevada. It’s a fun job because I get to go around and see what everybody’s doing, which is pretty exciting. Growth is a big issue, and I think what is happening in Southern Nevada is really outstanding. We have a lot of new programs and challenges for students, and I think that’s great. We’re out there trying to encourage young people to get a higher education and support them in that effort.
Carol Harter: At UNLV, growth is such an issue we all have to deal with. We are growing at the rate of 1,000 to 1,500 new students every single year, which makes providing services, adding faculty and classes a sort of first-line challenge. One challenge for both universities is to become more and more selective in our student body. Clearly the addition of Nevada State College is going to help us make some changes for the future to create major universities here. The commitment to economic diversification is absolutely essential for our state, and universities – particularly through research and graduate programs and public-private partnerships – can be at the cutting edge of helping diversify our economy. We are very close to the people at the Nevada Development Authority, who see us as a major resource. We need to do more outreaching to the community to create every kind of partnership, from building a more attractive area around the campus, to creating programs in entertainment, engineering, alternate energies, healthcare, public health and other activities.
Richard Carpenter: The Community College of Southern Nevada is listed as the fastest-growing community college in the United States, and it’s the fourth largest in the country. We have about 35,000 students. We provide a number of technical programs that lead directly to the world of work. Those are associate degrees primarily. Like UNLV, we’re adding students much faster than we can accommodate them with space and the other things they need. The state has been very generous in supporting buildings on our campuses, but it’s impossible to build fast enough to accommodate this kind of growth. We have to have a two-pronged approach: distance education and buildings. This past fall semester, we turned away thousands of students because we had no place to put them on campus, and we had 44,000 unsuccessful attempts to enroll in distance-education courses because we didn’t have the capacity there either. Distance education doesn’t require space, but it does require faculty, and distance-education faculty are at a premium.
John McDonald: I’m the vice-president for health sciences and the dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Nevada. Our missions are healthcare education and research. One of our largest challenges is to change to meet the future needs of the state, particularly in the south. We have the second-largest integrated group practice of medicine in Clark County, and we provide the majority of care for indigent patients in Clark County, and we do the same thing in the northern part of the state. Since 40 percent of our faculty revenues come from clinical income, it makes it very difficult to meet the bottom line. Another challenge is growing adequate facilities in Clark County. We’ve been partnering with UNLV, trying to find a permanent home for our operations so we can provide top-notch quality care.
Jim Rogers: I’m the interim chancellor [of the university and community college system] and I’ll be there till June. My biggest job – and I think it will be the biggest job of the next chancellor – is coordinating the efforts of the system, because for too long a period of time the system has functioned as eight separate units, and that simply doesn’t work. The competition has not been constructive; it’s been destructive. The relationships among those eight institutions have been very bad. We don’t have the money to duplicate programs and efforts. I would hope – and I may have to do some of it at gunpoint – that going forward, people will continue to cooperate, because everybody needs everybody else. Nevada State College is very important, and has probably been No. 1 on my list of priorities. Dr. McDonald and I have been talking about joint programs between UNR and UNLV. This North-South foolishness has to stop; otherwise we’re always going to be condemned to mediocrity, and we can’t afford that anymore.
Charlotte Bentley: I’m the vice-president for National University-Nevada. National University is the second-largest private university in California, with 30 academic learning centers throughout California. We are a not-for-profit organization founded in 1971. Our core operations provide educational access to working adults. We have a one-course-a-month format of accelerated classes. We currently have over 50 undergraduate and graduate programs, and over 400 online classes. We had a presence in Southern Nevada in the ’80s and ’90s and are reintroducing ourselves into the market. Our greatest challenges in doing that are navigating all the regulatory and compliance issues with the Department of Education and the Commission on Postsecondary Education, and all the building and construction challenges. We hope to have our classrooms open in May. Our first site will be in Henderson and we are working on five degree programs from the school of business and management to start. We’re working with the Nevada Department of Education on five teacher education programs as well.
LaShung Willis: DeVry University in Henderson is celebrating our one-year anniversary this month, and we will have our first two graduates at the end of this session; both have job offers already, so we’re very proud of that. DeVry has 73 locations throughout the country, and is headquartered in Chicago. The Henderson campus is the only location in Nevada. DeVry offers accelerated programs as well as our regular programs, which offer associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Our programs are focused on business management and technology. Many of you may remember DeVry as a technical institute, and that’s the old image we’re trying to get away from. Our newest focus is to combine business and technology, because we realize that anything in the business arena now has a technical aspect to it, and we try to provide the link between business and technology. Our practitioners teach both in class and online, so students have a choice as to what they want to do. They can be in a classroom or online or do what we call “mix and match.” This is very convenient for working adults. Our biggest challenge is funding. The majority of our students are on financial assistance from the government or some type of a tuition plan from their employer. One of the biggest challenges we face in Nevada is that the Millennium Scholarship is not available to us because we’re private. Many of our students want to be able to use the Millennium, and we’d be more than happy to ease the overcrowding in the public colleges if we could find the means to access some of that funding. There is a need in Nevada for a more skilled workforce, and our goal is to help meet that need.
Carlos Garcia: I’m the superintendent of the Clark County School District. I guess we are the kings of growth; in the last 12 years our school district has doubled in size. We’re the fastest-growing school district in the United States. We are currently at 281,000 students, and it’s projected that in two years we’ll be over 300,000, and in seven years we’ll be over 400,000 students. We average building a school a month, and we grow between 12,000 to 15,000 students a year, so it’s a real challenge finding places for these kids. The demographics are changing radically. Fifteen years ago the school population was 70 percent Caucasian, and today we’re only about 47 percent Caucasian. The fastest-growing segment of the population are Latino students, who are about 35 percent. One out of five students in Clark County doesn’t really speak English. When you look at test scores, it looks like we aren’t doing well, but if you take out the non-English speaking kids, our test scores are around the 68 to 70th percentile across the board. Before the No Child Left Behind Act, our policy was that a student had to be here at lease three years before he or she received a battery of tests, because you can’t learn a language well enough in one year to take a comprehensive test. But now under No Child Left Behind, it’s one year. I think it’s amazing test scores have stayed just about even, because with all our changing demographics, they should be declining tremendously. Our biggest problem is getting the public to understand that things aren’t the way they used to be. We used to have 15 percent of our kids on free or reduced lunch, and now we’re at 35 percent. We have over 3,000 homeless students in our district. There are huge issues affecting us, and probably the biggest issue is funding. During the 2001 legislative session, we pointed out to lawmakers that we ranked 40th in the country in per-pupil expenditure. The Quality Counts report recently put us at 48th. There are only two states that fund education worse than Nevada, and I personally feel that’s a disgrace. We all ought to be ashamed of ourselves and our state. When people start pointing the finger at public education, I say, “You better look in the mirror.” Because in this state, the responsibility really needs to lie on its citizens to support public education. We have one of the highest dropout rates in the country, but we also have the highest high school and middle school class sizes. We’re in the top four of the largest class sizes in the United States. And that makes a huge difference. You always hear people say funding doesn’t make a difference. We’ve never tried it here, so I don’t know how they can say that. Outside of Washington D.C. – which is an anomaly – the states that have the highest test scores in this country are the states that are funding education the highest. That’s something nobody wants to have a dialogue about here, but that is the reality. It’s not fair that with the No Child Left Behind law, we’re all supposed to meet the same standard, when there are school districts that get double what we get per pupil. Right now we’re at least $1,600 below the average, and for us to even get to average would cost a minimum of over $1 billion. I don’t expect that will happen overnight, but I do think there needs to be a vision on how to get there, and there is a lack of vision in this state to get us there.
Donn Nimmer: I’m the director of ITT Technical Institute, and we belong to ITT ESI, which is a corporation that has 77 schools across the country. We have been here in Henderson since 1997, and in March we’ll be opening a satellite campus in Summerlin. Besides technology, we have classes in criminal justice, information technology, design, multimedia and business as it relates to technology. After superintendent Garcia here spoke, I have no challenges. (general laughter). Being last, I would just echo whatever was said before me. For us the challenge is probably the vision of education, and what it can do for you. There are so many distractions, so many things going on, that people don’t place the importance on education that they should. That leads to problems with funding and retention, so we need to encourage partnerships and community awareness.
Challenges Facing Millennium Scholarship
Connie Brennan: Carol, can you give us an update on what’s going on with the Millennium Scholarship?
Harter: Funds for the Millennium Scholarship came from the tobacco settlements. The projection of the funds coming in was probably overly optimistic, and on the expenditure side, many more students are taking advantage of it than was predicted originally. I think we all benefited greatly by keeping some of our very best students in Nevada as a direct result of the Millennium Scholarship, but perhaps the standard is too low for getting it and also for keeping it. The standard for qualifying has gone up from 3.0 to 3.25, which is good, and the standard for maintaining it has gone from a 2.0 to 2.6 GPA in college. It may be that it has to go even higher in order to reduce the number of students who qualify and maintain the scholarship. At the same time, the state needs a new investment in an endowment to continue to be able to fund the Millennium Scholarship over the next 20 or 30 years. It’s very clear that at the rate we’re going, the money will not last past the next four or five years. I hope there’ll be a legislative action to create an ongoing fund by some mechanism or another; and I think the bar will continue to go up for qualifications and maintaining eligibility.
Rogers: I was told that 65 percent of the graduating high school students had a 3.0 or above. What has happened is that every time you raise the grade requirements, you get grade enhancement in the high schools, so you wind up taking all sorts of students who are really not qualified to be in a research university. When you have 30 or 40 percent of the students who are Millennium scholars having to take remedial English or remedial math, you have a very serious problem. I had suggested in my state-of-the-system address that we have two criteria; one would be the grade average, but, secondly, there needs to be some percentage of where you stand in your class. For example, you can’t get into UCLA or Berkeley unless you’re in the top 5 or 10 percent of your high school. Here, if you are in the top 60 percent you can qualify to get in. I had suggested that both UNR and UNLV not take anybody who is not in the top 25 percent of the class.
Garcia: The Millennium Scholarship is somewhat inequitable because if you’re wealthy, you still get it. Is there any thought of capping in terms of income? Kids from wealthy families who can afford to send them to college get the Millennium Scholarship and deprive someone else who may not financially have resources.
Harter: There was a major discussion about that in the Legislature, but I think the governor believed that some of our well-off students need to stay here, go to school here and become taxpaying citizens in Nevada and not go out of state to college and start their careers somewhere else. There was a major battle in the Legislature about making the scholarship needs-based, but there weren’t enough folks who supported that, and Kenny [Guinn] was very strongly the other direction. I don’t know whether legislators now will take another look at that. The universities did promise that, within our other resources, we would try to buttress the Millennium Scholarship for students who are the most economically challenged and use other financial aid to help those students, so we wouldn’t be turning down anybody purely for financial reasons, and I think we’ve all tried to do that as much as we are able.
Carpenter: If there is a state in this country that needs a need-based scholarship program, it is Nevada. People say there are federal Pell grants, but those are for full-time students, and most community college students cannot afford to be full-time students. They’re holding down a job, raising families, and taking a class or two along as they go, if they can afford it.
Rogers: Out of the 30,000 students at CCSN, 15,000 are minorities, right?
Carpenter: Right.
Rogers: Everybody says the tuition in the state of Nevada is among the two or three lowest in the United States, but that becomes irrelevant unless you also say that we don’t have any financial support to help students pay that tuition. Let me just give you an example. In Arizona, the law school, which is the same size as the one we have at UNLV, has need-based scholarships of half a million dollars. There’s nothing like that here.
Carpenter: A good business model is to raise tuition so that people who are able to pay it, pay it. But then subsidize it for the people who are not able to pay it, so you don’t weed those out when you raise the tuition.
Maryanski: You have to look at what the real rate is. In effect, there is a zero discount rate on tuition in Nevada, where many public institutions across the nation have a discount in the 20 percent range because of financial aid, and many private institutions across the nation claim 40 percent. There’s a difference between the sticker price and what you end up actually paying. Richard’s right – if you raise tuition you have to have a set-aside for people who cannot pay.
Garcia: I guess I’m skeptical that they’ll set aside that money, because so far they haven’t done that.
Rogers: It hasn’t even been thought about, Carlos. If you talk to legislators about it, they don’t know what you’re talking about.
Bentley: Other states have gone through this. Like many other states, we are legislatively mandated to support K-12 education. We’re not mandated to support higher education, and in a lot of states, the public institutions are running out of money. Those citizenries are asking for more state money to be given to K-12, and they’re asking universities to raise tuition, cutting Pell grants and Stafford loans. That’s happening across many of these states, so there are probably some models that can be looked at.
Guerin: Maybe we need to take a more market-based approach, where we can have a forum similar to this one and talk to the industry leaders and people in the business community and the education community, and ask, “What is it you see five, 10 or 15 years down the road?” Then we can build programs at our institutions around the projected need of employers and of businesses instead of just throwing a product out there and saying, “This is what we have, and we hope you can benefit from it.
Investing in Nevada
BRENNAN: Can somebody explain to me what the “iNVest” program is?
Garcia: INVest is a program in which the superintendents and school boards of all 17 districts in Nevada got together to create a vision for what the future of Nevada ought to be – one that would be sustained year after year. I think our biggest problem is that when legislators meet, they don’t make a long-range plan of how to deal with issues, because each legislative session is not connected to the next. What we attempted to do was connect the dots for them, to develop a way to get public education where it ought to go. Our biggest fear in the state is that the longer we wait, the harder it is to solve the problem. It’s like saying, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” But if you don’t start biting, pretty soon this elephant just keeps growing. In iNVest, we’ve set out some proposals that really need to be addressed. Believe it or not, we’re not set up to get annual inflation adjustments, so that means if utilities go up or whatever, it’s just too bad, and so we get further and further behind. INVest proposes to set up an automatic inflation-rate adjustment for our budgets, and to do that just over the biennium would require a minimum of $31 million. Protecting our ending balance is also important. We’re lucky if we have a reserve of 2 percent, and if something did happen, what are we supposed to fund it with? Last session, the Clark County School District had enough funds to run the school district in case of an emergency for two and a half days, and Washoe had only enough funds to run it until noon the first day. That’s how low our reserves are, whereas, the average county or city has between 15 and 20 percent reserves. That’s a big issue for us. People forget we’re a business. I run a $1.6 billion budget general fund, and another almost $4 billion in capital improvement funds. We’re one of the biggest builders in America. We spend $42 million a month on school construction. Not having reserves hurts our bond ratings. What used to happen is the Legislature would divide and conquer us. We brought everybody together and said, “Look, we’re one Nevada. There is no such thing as Northern and Southern Nevada; we’re one Nevada. So we got everybody together to focus, and we won’t deviate from the plan. All the superintendents meet on a monthly basis. Over a six-year period, salaries for school district employees have gone up 6 percent – a 1 percent raise per year. That’s embarrassing, especially when you look at what’s happened to housing and the cost of living. Our entry-level teachers earn $28,000 a year. They can’t qualify for any home. How are you going to get the best and brightest paying $28,000 a year?
Ackerman: How is that affecting recruiting from out of state? I know the high cost of housing has hurt us.
Garcia: This is the first year it’s killed us. We got stacks of letters this year saying, “I’d love to come. I love your system. I’d love to work there, and I just can’t afford to live there.” We’re going to show these letters to legislators.
Harter: We’ve lost faculty at the university because of the cost of housing and the cost of living.
Garcia: We’ve been talking about the need to get together to build some housing.
Rogers: Private industry is looking at that right now. Some of the major hotels are looking at building apartment complexes just for their employees, otherwise they can’t bring them in.
Garcia: Another issue we need to look at is funding English language learners. We just plunk them in a regular classroom, and then we wonder why they’re dropping out. The press says 18 percent of students last year didn’t pass the high school proficiency exam. When we analyze that 18 percent, this is what we found: 80 percent of them were non-English-speaking students and 15 percent of the rest were special-ed students. So, in reality only 5 percent of our so-called “regular” students didn’t pass it. There are reasons statistics look the way they do, and the biggest one is full-day kindergarten. The old model has always been trying to get kids to read by third grade. That’s too late. In fact, I’d love for Head Start to be given to the school district, because if we had kids even earlier, we could achieve better results.
BRENNAN: Is it a good thing to start kids in school that early? Shouldn’t they have time to just be kids and be with their family?
Garcia: Yes, it’s definitely good. It may not be necessary in places where you have families who are supportive and nurturing, but what we find here is that we have a lot of families who aren’t families. The kids are alone; there’s nobody there teaching them things. They come into our schools, and they’re so far behind. We have kindergarteners who have no clue about numbers or colors, and we’re seeing greater and greater numbers of that. These kids never catch up. Seventy percent of our prison population is illiterate because they never caught up.
Rogers: What should the [university] system be doing to cooperate with you? We have a vested interest in making sure Nevada kids get the quality of education that makes it possible for them to go to college. Let’s put our heads together and see what we can do to cooperate. Education across the country has done a very poor job of selling itself. We’ve been saying, “We are academia, and you ought to come here and give us money because we’re Nobel Prize winners, and that doesn’t wash.” It especially doesn’t wash in a place like Las Vegas, where the economy can be so strong, nearly separate and apart from the university system. We are finally going to conclude that we have been very successful economically up to this point with this kind of a culture, but to go from this point to the next point, we’re going to have to develop an education culture.
