In front of a room full of Foundations of Nursing students at Oklahoma State University, professor Nichole Jackson dons an inflatable red suit to represent a red blood cell. Students line the aisle, ready to play their part as plaque to gunk up the artery.
Students call out other risk factors, like sedentary lifestyle and smoking. Jackson squeezes through the students to carry oxygen to the rest of the body.
“This is coronary artery disease,” Jackson tells the students. “You might feel effects; you might not. That’s why they call it the silent killer.”
At OSU, about a quarter of nursing students are adult learners or Pell-eligible. It’s one of the metrics that helped the school earn more than $350,000 in additional funds from a new performance-based funding formula recently adopted by the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education.
Enrollment, which includes standards like adult learners and Pell-eligible students, is a quarter of the evaluation formula. It also contains retention and success, workforce, and opportunity.
But unlike a benchmark system, the formula creates three pots of money that the largest research universities, two-year colleges, and everyone else compete for.
In February, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an executive order requiring the Regents to develop a performance-based funding plan to serve as a roadmap for changing its formula based on metrics like workforce outcomes.
Chancellor Sean Burrage said the state regents were working on the formula years before the executive order.
“To steward taxpayers’ dollars, we believe that the funding should follow the students served, and then outcomes achieved,” Burrage said. “Outcomes being, students get an education, [and] find a job that makes a difference for them and the state.”
This year, 5% of state funding is subject to the new formula. That will go up each year until it reaches 25%. There’s also a hold-harmless provision to ensure institutions don’t lose funding this fiscal year.
But that provision only lasts one year, unless the state regents and the legislature decide to re-up. Burrage said that is a possibility. He is also hopeful the state will funnel more dollars into the formula to make the pots bigger.
Asked whether he believes the formula creates a system of winners and losers, Burrage said the intent is not to punish any institution, but to reward the ones best serving students.
“I believe some will do better than others, yes,” Burrage said. “But that’s not the goal. The goal is to put the dollars where the students [are] that are getting degrees that make the difference.”
As the state’s two largest research universities, OU and OSU compete with each other. If not for the hold-harmless provision, OU stood to lose nearly $360,000. OU declined an interview and did not respond to written questions.
Seventeen of the 27 institutions under the state regents would have lost funding this year.
Burrage said the system “incentivizes competition.”
“It incentivizes, I think, good behavior that benefits students and benefits the economy,” Burrage said. “That’s how I look at it.”
While $360,000 may not devastate an institution the size of OU, smaller institutions have smaller overall budgets.
The University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma stood to lose about $125,000. USAO President Kayla Hale said the university is bracing itself to operate on a smaller budget.
“We are obviously focused on building up our cash reserves,” Hale said. “We are looking at what operations, the non-academic and the academic operations, that we can streamline to withstand these kinds of cuts.”
She said it’s making the university more reliant on finding private donors and other partnerships with community leaders to ensure its service to students can move forward uninterrupted.
USAO recently made headlines for institution-wide changes focused on workforce outcomes — one of the formula metrics. But regardless of the institution’s improvements, it must contend with all of Oklahoma’s regional universities.
“The big variable in all of this is how the other institutions perform, as well. In some of those categories, we perform exceptionally well,” Hale said. “And in others, we see where we have to do some improvement in that performance. But these are questions every single Oklahoma university president is considering, just like I am.”
The funding formula emerges in the echoes of other fiscal policies coming to colleges and universities nationwide. This summer, the Trump Administration finalized the Student Tuition and Transparency System and Earnings Accountability rule, which applies an earnings test to college programs to determine eligibility for federal financial aid.
Critics fear policies that penalize institutions and students for majors outside of higher-earning jobs like STEM and business will cause fine arts and liberal arts programs to deteriorate.
The state’s performance-based funding formula measures STEM and critical occupation completions, as well as wage outcomes. Burrage said while he hopes that focus does not discourage institutions from investing in fine arts and humanities, Oklahoma’s economy needs a boost from new grads.
“Anytime you talk to a business looking to come to Oklahoma, they point towards the fact that 28% of our population has [a bachelors] degree or higher, which doesn’t sound that bad,” Burrage said. “But when you consider the national average is 37%, it puts us at a disincentive to compete for businesses to come to our state.”
Next year, more than 160,000 Oklahoma higher education students will see how their school stacks up, and what this competition means for their college experience.
Hale said institutions across the country feel the pressure to perform.
“In a time where higher education is in a very disruptive state — there are institutions that are massively retrenching right now, some that are on the coast that are closing — we are working as hard as we can with our state legislators and with the State Regents for Higher Education to be able to be more responsive in this environment,” Hale said. “It’s just challenging right now, to be sure.”
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