UNC adopts new funding model

The annual synchronous firefly viewing event at Elkmont in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park will be June 3-10 this year, with a lottery for passes to attend open for entry 10 a.m. Friday, April 29, through 10 a.m. Tuesday, May 3.

Time of entry does not factor into the likelihood of winning a pass, and 800 total passes — 100 per night — will be issued, with results of a randomized computer drawing available Friday, May 13. Winners will receive a vehicle pass to park one passenger vehicle with a maximum of seven occupants directly at the Elkmont viewing location. Lottery applicants may choose two potential dates to attend.

There is a $1 fee to enter the lottery, and successful applicants will be charged a $24 fee to cover the cost of awarding the passes, on-site portable bathrooms, supplies and personnel costs. Passes are non-refundable, non-transferable and good only for the date issued, with a limit of one application per household per season. To enter, search for “Great Smoky Mountains Firefly Viewing Lottery” at recreation.gov. The synchronous fireflies, Photinus carolinus, emerge every year in late May or early June, putting on a show after dark as they flash in unison. Since 2006, the park has limited access to Elkmont during the eight days of predicted peak activity to reduce traffic congestion and provide a safe experience for visitors and fireflies. During the viewing period, only vehicles with a parking pass or registered Elkmont Campground and backcountry campers may access Elkmont after 4 p.m., including walking or biking the Elkmont entrance road or Jakes Creek Road.

Events to bring awareness to violence against Native women

The National Day of Awareness for missing and murdered indigenous women is coming up Thursday, May 5, and a grassroots effort led by members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is planning events Saturday, April 30, and May 5.

The third annual MMIW Honor Walk and Rally will be held at 11 a.m. April 30, starting at the fire pit next to artist row at Oconaluftee Island Park on Tsali Boulevard. The speaking program will include guests from We Are Resilient: A MMIW True Crime Podcast, the EBCI domestic violence and sexual violence department, and the Ernestine Walkingstick Domestic Violence Shelter. The march will begin at noon, circling the Council House before turning back to return to the fire pit, with the event concluding at 1 p.m.

A candlelight vigil to remember the EBCI’s missing and murdered indigenous women will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 5, at Unity Field, located on Tsali Boulevard next to the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices.

All are welcome to come help bring awareness to this issue, show their support and remember the victims. For more information, visit the MMIW CWY Facebook page at facebook.com/MMIWCWY. To learn more about the issues contributing to the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women that the cause seeks to address, visit niwrc.org/policy-center/mmiw.

UNC System President Peter Hans (from left), WCU Chancellor Kelli R. Brown and Board of Governors Chairman Randall Ramsey take press questions following the April 7

meeting. Holly Kays photo

Formula to reward course completion, performance metrics

BY HOLLY KAYS STAFF WRITER

The decades-old model used to determine state funding requests for University of North Carolina System schools is set to change following a vote the UNC Board of Governors took during its April 7 meeting in Cullowhee. While the current formula looks only at total enrollment when determining funding, the new model will consider performance-based measures, as well.

“Our approach to this change is not static,” Budget and Finance Committee Chair James L. Holmes Jr. said during the meeting. “This committee will continually consider changes to the model and recommendations from this board and other concerned individuals as we consider this to be a beginning, not an end.”

In use since the 1990s, the current model simply looks at the change in enrolled credit hours compared to the previous year and uses various multipliers related to the cost of delivering those credit hours to arrive at a funding request.

But, said Western Carolina University Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance Mike Byers, “simple” would be an incorrect description of the current fourpart model.

“It was a fairly difficult thing to explain, which is part of the reason it needed to change,” he said. “You couldn’t get through an elevator speech with the average citizen and explain how the funding model works. You really need a few hours.”

The new model has just two steps. First, determining the change in performance-weighted student credit hours — completed hours only, not merely enrolled hours like in the old formula — and then multiplying that figure by appropriation per credit hour, which is a figure based on a percentage of the national average.

When the new model was first proposed, WCU used it to calculate what its state funding would have been for the past five years compared to the existing model. Overall, Byers said, it was “basically a wash.”

“In our view, this new funding model isn’t alarming us or making us concerned about the appropriation per credit hour,” said Byers. “Some of the unintended consequences concern us.”

Chief among those potential unintended consequences is the effect on graduate education. The current model incentivizes graduate education, much more than the the new one.

The current model weights instructional cost based both on subject — delivering an engineering degree costs more than delivering an English degree, for instance — and on degree level. For example, while the formula estimates that a single instructor could be expected to teach 709 credit hours of undergraduate English courses, that same instructor would be expected to deliver only 170 credit hours of master’slevel instruction or 116 hours of doctoral instruction.

The new model weights completed credits based only on subject and does not consider degree level — universities would get the same funding for an undergraduate English credit as for a doctoral English credit.

While the model doesn’t fund graduate education at a higher level as a matter of course, graduate education for STEM and health professions will continue receiving more funding than undergraduate education in those fields “to recognize the additional cost of delivery as well as workforce needs of the state, except for schools of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and veterinary medicine, which shall not be included in the funding model calculation,” reads a description of the model included with the Committee on Budget and Finance agenda. “These programs will be required to make a separate appropriation request for class size changes.”

“They key is, how will that change everyone’s behavior?” said Byers. “That’s what concerns me is that if we and other regional institutions — Wilmington, Charlotte, Greensboro, App, the works — we’ve been taking care of the undergraduates, and if the largest schools decide they want to stop focusing so much on graduate education, especially given that it’s not funded nearly at the same level by the state as it used to be, will they increase their undergraduate enrollment at the expense of the regionals?”

There are only so many high school graduates available in North Carolina — with demographics predicting that number to drop in the next few years — so increased competition from large schools like UNC Chapel Hill and N.C. State could cause problems for smaller institutions like WCU.

Byers is also uncertain about how the performance-weighting mechanism will pan out. Each school will have different performance measures, and those have not yet been determined, though Byers expects they will “closely resemble” the metrics used to evaluate chancellor performance. At WCU, those are the four-year graduation rate, degrees conferred compared to total student population, average cumulative student debt at the completion of a bachelor’s degree and cost per degree.

The current funding model speaks only to how much more or less funding a school should get compared to the previous year based on changes in enrollment. But under the new model, performance metrics would be applied to 100% of the funding. That significantly raises the stakes, as well as the possibility that unexpected circumstances beyond the school’s control could mean failure to meet those benchmarks — and deliver a smack to the budget that would dig the hole even deeper.

“In the new model, if you fail to meet these performance metrics, you don’t get 100% of the prior year’s appropriation,” said Byers.

Though Byers has reservations about the new system, he said that overall, the model is “probably good,” and he applauds the Board of Governors’ cautious approach in implementing it. This coming year, the UNC System will run the numbers under both the old and new funding model, and institutions will be able to choose whichever result is most favorable to them.

“We’re going to do a year with the training wheels on so that nobody has to be worried that we’ve got the funding model in perfect condition,” Byers said. “And that way the new funding model, we’ll get a year to try it on. The system can make adjustments to it if it sees that there are problems.”