Audit: Here's what can be done about Utah's degree-granting institutions losing students

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

Some Utah higher education institutions are losing students to private and nontraditional schools.
A legislative audit suggests improving decision-making and accountability for targeted funding in high-demand areas.
Better coordination with the Department of Workforce Services is also recommended to align workforce data.

SALT LAKE CITY — Some institutions in the Utah System of Higher Education are losing student market share to private and nontraditional institutions, according to a legislative audit released Tuesday.

Since 2018, the Utah Legislature has commissioned four audits of Utah's higher education system to identify areas where the Utah Board of Higher Education and the commissioner of higher education can operate with stronger governance across the system.

Overall, Tuesday's audit found governance has improved, but auditors still believe the board and commissioner can improve the overall system in other ways.

The audit also comes at a time when Utah's higher education landscape is shifting, with a recent report finding Utah's college-age population will likely start dropping in 2032 and decline for over a decade before rebounding.

"While Utah's general population is projected to increase due to natural migration, USHE will need to adapt to an era of enrollment decline and act more efficiently with existing and future resources," the audit states.

When it comes to institutions losing student market share to private and nontraditional institutions (think Brigham Young University, Western Governor's University, BYU Pathways, and Joyce University of Nursing) the audit found that the Utah System of Higher Education institutions are sometimes unable to meet workforce demands, leading to a loss of students.

"When this happens, USHE institutions risk diminished revenues that could result in reductions in force, higher taxpayer subsidies, or higher tuitions. Further, we found private nontraditional institutions have demonstrated the willingness and capacity to fill gaps in the labor market," the audit says.

To evaluate the workforce responsiveness of Utah System of Higher Education institutions, the audit conducted case studies of university programs that relate to nursing, accounting, software engineering and data science — four areas of high workforce demand.

The audit identified the following trends:

In some areas, Utah System of Higher Education institutions are losing market share to private nontraditional institutions.
Targeted legislative funding has helped increase the number of graduates at Utah System of Higher Education programs in some areas of high workforce need.
In some areas, institutions have responded to workforce demands without targeted legislative funds.

The case studies led to a myriad of conclusions, which informed the audit's recommendations for Utah's higher education system.

The first recommendation regarding student market share says the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education "should improve their decision-making by working with institutions to identify why students choose to attend private nontraditional institutions and why institutions are losing market share for some programs."

The second recommendation said the Legislature should "consider the costs and benefits of providing targeted funding to areas of high workforce need and consider holding institutions more accountable for the funding they provide to these areas of high workforce need."

Additionally, the audit suggested better coordination between Utah's system of higher education and the Department of Workforce Services could go a long way toward better aligning workforce demand data.

Currently, the Utah System of Higher Education and its institutions rely on multiple sources of data — including Department of Workforce Services occupational projections, job postings aggregated by third-party providers and qualitative feedback from local employers — to understand workforce needs.

"These different data sources indicate dramatically different levels of workforce demand for nurses in Utah. We found that other occupational areas experience similar discrepancies. These discrepancies have sometimes led to disagreements between the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education and institutions regarding whether newly proposed programs corresponded with workforce needs," the audit states.

To this end, the audit recommends the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education should work with the Department of Workforce Services to curate and coordinate use of regional and state workforce data to drive proper programmatic investment of taxpayer funds.

Overall, the audit said the Legislature wants the system of higher education to be more coordinated and that the system, its institutions and the Legislature can provide "added work and leadership to ensure a more coordinated system of higher education."

This can be accomplished, the audit said, through more clearly specifying institutional roles and providing stronger oversight of those roles and through the Utah Board of Higher Education creating a long-term plan outlining the unique rolls each degree-granting institution should fulfill over the next 20 years.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.