LANSING – Michigan would benefit from having a more coordinated university structure instead of its current system with 15 completely autonomous public universities, said Bill Sederburg, a former senator and president of Ferris State University who now oversees Utah’s colleges and universities.
Sederburg, in an interview with Gongwer News Service, said the Utah structure, in which all public community colleges and universities are part of a network he runs as the Utah higher education commissioner, is a good middle ground between the systems in California and Wisconsin and what he called the “laissez-faire” model in Michigan.
“I think Michigan needs a little more networking and little collaboration among the schools,” he said. “It really hurts the students of Michigan not to be able to transfer their credits easily from one school to the next.”
As the commissioner, Sederburg oversees the hiring of presidents, as well as tuition and academic programs for all eight universities in the state. A board of regents, appointed by the Utah governor, hires the higher education commissioner.
Sederburg began the post four years ago after five years as president of Utah Valley State University, one of the schools in the Utah system. The other seven schools in the system are University of Utah, Utah State, Weber State, Salt Lake Community College, Snow College, Southern Utah University and Dixie State College.
For Sederburg, his work in Utah is the extension of a lifetime in and around higher education. He holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees and taught a variety of courses at different universities well before becoming president at Ferris State. While in the Senate, Sederburg was chair of the Senate Appropriations Higher Education Subcommittee, which determines funding for public universities.
Having a network of universities with different missions enables savings on purchasing of computer systems, library collaboration, sharing of various resources and joint online databases, Sederburg said.
State funding and tuition in Utah is a world apart from Michigan. In Utah, state funding provides 60 percent of universities’ operating budgets. In Michigan, state funding has dropped to below 30 percent with tuition making up the rest.
While tuition at Ferris State is about $7,200 per year, tuition at Utah Valley, which Sederburg said is a comparable school, is $4,600.
“Our tuition out here is very low compared to Michigan schools,” he said.
There’s greater coordination of each school’s offerings in Utah. For example, while some Michigan universities are launching new medical schools, Sederburg said such moves in Utah would require the approval of his office.
“We try to coordinate the services of the schools as much as possible,” he said. “We try to think of it as more of a network where we try to give a lot of autonomy to each school.”
Not everything is rosy though. Tuition has gone up an average of 8 percent to 9 percent in recent years to address a 22 percent rise in enrollment in the past three years, as well state funding cuts of 14 percent.
Michigan universities have struggled to convince the Legislature to prioritize higher education funding, which has taken repeated huge cuts in the last decade. And public polling has shown voters don’t rank higher education funding especially high. At one point, Sederburg said a former House speaker in Utah told him of proposed funding cuts that university officials are smart and would find a way to make their budgets work no matter how tough the cuts.
Sederburg said his office commissioned a survey in Utah and officials were shocked to find that only 20 percent of the public knew the state funded universities, having instead thought they were all funded through tuition only.
“I thought that could explain a lot of this,” he said.
THE NIXON CONNECTION: Sederburg knows well Budget Director John Nixon, who came to Michigan after serving in the same capacity in Utah.
“An honest, straightforward, true professional,” Sederburg said of Nixon.
After Nixon first indicated that officials with the transition team for Governor Rick Snyder had contacted him about coming to Michigan, Nixon told Sederburg he was not interested, but Sederburg suggested he take another look.
“I said, ‘John you really ought to reconsider that. Michigan’s going to turn the corner and what a great professional step up,'” he said. “It was fun for me to kind of brief John when he would go back to his interviews. I felt for a while I was as much on top of Michigan politics as I was on Utah politics.”
Sederburg has another connection to the Snyder administration. Snyder recently appointed Sederburg’s daughter, Kari Sederburg, as director of the Office of Services to the Aging.
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