Lawmakers need to prioritize the needs of higher education in California and make decisions accordingly, according to a new report from the Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy.

“Nobody’s looking at the whole picture,” said Nancy Shulock, the institute’s director, arguing the state Legislature’s haphazard approach to funding higher education has not served its institutions well.

The institute, based at Sacramento State, used data from the Delta Cost Project, an annual report on spending in higher education on a national level put out by the Delta Project on Post-secondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability, a nonprofit research organization, over a seven-year period. The data allows the institute to compare California’s spending to that of other states.

The IHELP study, “Dollars and Sense: Analysis of Spending and Revenue Patterns to Inform Fiscal Planning for California Higher Education,” examined higher education funding in California and found some disparities. For example, the study found that while the California State University system was closest to the national average in spending per degree, the California Community College system was 30 percent above the national average.

Shulock said some of that discrepancy is because community college students previously could earn enough credits to transfer to a University of California or CSU campus without meeting the requirements for an associate’s degree.

A law signed last year by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, SB 1440, required community colleges to only offer transferable courses as prerequisites for their associate’s degrees. As more students pass through the community college system and see the effects of this law, more of them will earn associate’s degrees and transfer, which will raise the community colleges’ completion rates, Shulock said.

California has the nation’s highest disparity in per-student funding between its research universities and community colleges, the authors noted. The UC system spends $23,702 per student on instructional expenses – the fourth-highest rate in the nation – while the community college system spends $8,877.

The UC system also spends over a third more than the CSU system and twice as much as the community college system per student on student services, which the study finds puzzling since UC students are ostensibly more prepared for college than CSU or community college students.

These incongruities are a result of a system that is funded by the Legislature without a vision of how the state’s public universities should function, the authors argue.

“Ideally, the sharing of educational costs between students and government should reflect some reasoned judgments about the mix of private and public benefits from higher education,” according to the study. “(I)n the absence of an explicit tuition policy, it is not evident what public/private balance California is trying to achieve.”

The UC system unveiled a four-year budget plan last month that called for escalating tuition increases between 8 and 16 percent each year. At a Board of Regents meeting Sept. 8, the regents could not agree on adopting the plan and tabled the proposal. The CSU system has not released a similar document.

Making long-term budget plans is made difficult by inconsistent funding from the Legislature and the struggling economy, said CSU spokesman Mike Uhlenkamp.

“You cannot predict when there’s going to be a three-, four- or five year recession,” Uhlenkamp said. “No one’s going to predict that. Otherwise we wouldn’t have gone through it.”

The CSU system’s business and finance team analyzes data and reports to the CSU Board of Trustees and CSU Chancellor Charles Reed with their recommendations, Uhlenkamp said, disputing the notion that policy makers were not considering enough information.

Their work was made difficult by the shifting budget allocations of the past three years, in which the CSU system has lost about $1 billion in state funding, Uhlenkamp said.

The system faced a $589 million cut in the 2009-10 school year, then was given $366 million back for the 2010-11 year, and then received a $650 million cut this year.

“You have this roller coaster effect with these wild swings,” Uhlenkamp said.

At the campus level, Sac State’s University Budget Advisory Committee may cope with unstable levels of state funding, but has guidance from campus leaders like Sac State President Alexander Gonzalez, said UBAC chair Fred Baldini, dean of the College of Health and Human Services. The campus has a strategic plan, and has a member of the budget committee also be a member of the strategic plan committee, so that the two groups can more easily share information.

While the group is able to consider the implications of its decisions, it usually is tasked with implementing new budget cuts it had little control over, Baldini said, and Gonzalez is what holds it together.

“Even though we have this unstable, constantly changing budget, we are still guided by some general principles and the president provides that leadership,” Baldini said.

Shulock, however, said current efforts were not enough.

“We confuse having world-class institutions with having a world-class system,” Shulock said, adding too often lawmakers “just figure they can raise tuition, (and) they’ll be fine.”