SUNY to categorize campuses for better funding allocation

Headrick briefed committee members on the effort to develop a new resource allocation method (RAM), as requested by the SUNY Board of Trustees.

Toward the end of the process, which involved representatives from SUNY administration and the various campuses, "it became clear to everyone that it was pretty hard to go forward with that unless you had some understanding of what the various campuses expected to do and what their missions were within the system," Headrick said.

A Task Force for Academic Mission Review-of which Headrick is a member-was set up and has been trying to place the various groupings of campuses within the system into a set of categories and define the particular qualities that would put a campus into a certain grouping, he explained.

"Groupings would then constitute a kind of boundaries for institutions," he said, noting that institutions would not move from one grouping to another without significant review.

Groupings also are designed to control what is known within the SUNY system as "mission creep," which Headrick described as a situation in which an institution, once established in a certain category, begins to expand the level or kinds of degrees it offers in order to "expand its attractiveness, and then it begins to look like something that it wasn't 10 years ago."

The latest draft from the task force outlines eight categories, he noted.

Universities are divided into two categories: those with first-professional degree authorization, which would include UB and Stony Brook, and those without, which would include Binghamton and Albany.

The colleges are divided into two groups: comprehensive colleges and those that are primarily undergraduate colleges.

Headrick pointed out that there are three categories for specialty institutions: those with a discipline focus, which could include the School of Environmental Science and Forestry or the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell; those with a medical specialty, which would include the Health Science centers at Brooklyn and Syracuse, and those with a technical specialty, which could include the Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome and the technical colleges, formerly the agricultural and technical colleges.

The community colleges make up the eighth category.

Once each institution is placed in a category, there "should be some differentiation among the institutions within the category," Headrick argued. "In other words, there ought to be special characteristics that are peculiar to each institution within the system. The notion of categories is not to sort of homogenize the characteristics, but to set them apart from others and then further increase differentiation among them within each category."

The task force will present its set of categories to the campus presidents this week, Headrick said, adding that once that is done, the task force will place individual campuses into specific categories and bring that proposal to the board of trustees.

After that, the "general understanding" is that SUNY administration will develop a mission review process and "invite the members of each group to come in and further define their mission within each of these categories and have that mission approved," he said.

Resource allocation, he said, is supposed "to flow out of having done this.

"The theory was that we couldn't decide how we would divide up the money until we knew what kind of institutions and for what purposes we were dividing it up."

Although he estimated that it might only take six to eight months to institute this process, he was not optimistic that it would happen within that timetable.

Headrick stressed that each campus would be encouraged to develop its own unique mission, and that UB would use its current mission statement "as a starting point."