Page 221 - Crisis in Higher Education

192 • Crisis in Higher Education

substandard services. But regulations are costly for governments and
the institutions that must follow them. Government hires staff to write,
assess, and enforce regulations. Universities hire staff to comply with
them and report on a wide variety of input, process, and output vari-
ables. Taxpayers, which include students and their supporters, pay
the governments’ costs, and students and all third-party payers cover
the universities’ costs. Therefore, ultimately everyone pays the bill. It
seems clear that a balance should be struck between the cost of regu-
lations and their perceived benefits. Legislators, who usually approve
regulations, tend to see only the perceived benefits, so it is easy for
them to support regulations for the “greater good.” The term perceived
is used because proponents of regulations can claim that things would
be much worse if these regulations did not exist.
It is important to put a mechanism in place to assess government regu-
lations and determine if they are working as intended and doing so at a
reasonable cost. This is challenging because there are many regulations
coming from three different levels of government, and some may be dupli-
cative, even contradictory. To address what appears to be overregulation,
each state should assemble a Higher Education Committee (HEC) using
existing agencies. Representatives from federal and local governments as
well as from public colleges and universities in the state would be included.
The HEC would have the authority to recommend elimination of the most
expensive and least beneficial regulations. The HEC would do the following:

1. Categorize regulations by type such as tuition and fees, housing, and
facility utilization.
2. Identify and eliminate or consolidate regulations that are redundant.
3. Assess the cost of compliance.
4. Estimate the potential benefits that are achieved.
5. Compare the cost and benefits from a regulation and determine its
overall value.
6. Recommend elimination of regulations that are not achieving
a reasonable benefit given the cost.

HECs would share information about regulatory ideas and planned
changes with HECs from other states. Changes that would impact federal
and local regulations would require approval of these governments.
As shown in Figure 9.2, governments’ focus would be on resource uti-
lization, specifically on ensuring that colleges and universities are good