Maryland's Public System of Higher Education

The USM in 2010: 

Responding to the Challenges that Lie Ahead

Accountability

As both tuition rates and public investments in higher education rise across the country, public colleges and universities are increasingly being held accountable for results.

The USM institutions share at least one key trait with their counterparts across the country: they are accountable to a variety of stakeholders who want to know what they're getting for their significant fiscal investment in public higher education.

The following reports, which are rooted in statute, executive order, or legislative request, form the core of the USM accountability efforts:

• MHEC's accountability report, which includes a set of indicators and benchmarks.
• The Department of Budget and Management's Managing for Results (MFR) report, which includes goals, objectives, indicators, and benchmarks.
• The annual report on efficiency efforts (formerly, the cost containment report).
• The annual report on faculty workload and productivity.
• The minority achievement report (every three years).
• The student outcome assessment report (every three years).

All of the above reports are unique to public higher education institutions except MFR, which is the statewide performance accountability system used by the executive and the legislative branches to assess all State agencies. Newly implemented federal requirements on teacher training programs will also require institutional "report cards" that include outcome information.

In addition to these State and Federal requirements, the Board of Regents, through its Organization and Compensation Committee, annually evaluates and assesses the performance of each USM president. This assessment is driven primarily by institutional performance on a number of goals agreed to by the Regents and each president.

And, as an additional accountability incentive, new funding guidelines adopted by MHEC incorporate the goal of adding aspirational peers in the estimate of funding need for each USM institution. This goal was included in the funding priorities established by USM governance legislation (SB 682) passed in 1999. These aspirational peers will be phased in to each is institution funding formula as they demonstrate improvements in performance (as measured by the Governor's MFR program). The funding guidelines were passed into law by the Governor and the Maryland General Assembly earlier this year and, when fully implemented, will provide USM institutions with a level of resources comparable to that of their national peers.

USM Response

USM institutions will:

• Work with MHEC to develop a process to reduce the overlap between the Department of Budget and Management's MFR and the MHEC accountability report and to incorporate MFR into the funding guidelines.
• Work with MHEC to reduce the diversion of System resources away from educational outcomes that is necessitated by this range of accountability reports. In particular, eliminating the student outcomes' assessment report by incorporating its key elements into the MFR report is one method to combine accountability efforts and free up staff resources.
• Include, as a key component of annual USM presidential evaluations, institutional progress toward goals adopted through the MFR and other accountability processes. This will place the locus of accountability at the highest level at each institution.
• Continue to submit annual efficiency reports which demonstrate how they are making prudent and effective use of State resources.