Commissioners preview changing higher education landscape
Members of the Commission for Higher Education met in Hammond on Thursday for several hours to detail new laws and review the changing landscape for higher education institutions, notably slimmed-down budgets, more state oversight and shifting criteria for certain scholarships.
Like most portions of the two-year budget, state funding for higher education took a 5% hit in the final days, triggered by a grim forecast that predicted $2 billion less in revenues over the next biennium.
Two scholarship programs stayed flat, which Brooke Kile described as a 'huge win' for commissioners. Both the 21st Century Scholars program and the Frank O'Bannon Grants aim to make college more accessible for Hoosier students.
'It's a win for higher education; it's a win for Hoosier businesses that need talent,' said Kile, CHE's senior associate commissioner for business solutions.
However, unused dollars allocated to the Frank O'Bannon fund can now revert back to the general fund, a change from previous years. CHE will be permitted to transfer that money to other programs.
'What we were spending was … $130 million a year out of a roughly $168 million appropriation. With this new ability that we received starting the next fiscal year, we are allowed to spend up to the full appropriation,' said Chris Lowery, the state's commissioner for higher education. 'That is significant, additional help for low-income students.'
In addition to the 5% reduction for some other scholarship programs, CHE's budget line and individual allocations to each public institution were reduced along with restoration and rehabilitation funding.
Also tucked into the budget was language abolishing the Governor's Workforce Cabinet, an initiative touted by former Gov. Eric Holcomb. Instead, the higher education body will take up many of those duties and align the state's educational goals with business needs.
Though the state's educational institutions will be exempt from new contracting rules advanced as part of an accountability and transparency measure, CHE itself will have to operate under the requirements for documenting bids and federal funding.
Under a separate law, CHE will also be required to submit a report examining the utilization of physical facilities at state educational institutions, including an analysis of classroom spaces, laboratories and more.
One of the biggest changes to the operation of the state's public institutions will be enhanced tenure reviews tied to 'productivity.' Such scrutiny will include teaching loads, time spent on instruction and graduate student oversight, and the research produced by a faculty member.
State law now requires that if these criteria are not met, the faculty member 'shall' be placed on probation and could be dismissed. Additionally, professors must publicly post their syllabi.
Schools will no longer be required to have diversity committees under Senate Enrolled Act 289, which also impacts certain scholarships geared toward supporting minority students. In an attempt to still reach those students, the legislation defined 'underserved counties' to include Allen, Lake, Marion, St. Joseph and Vanderburgh. Certain students from those counties may still qualify for the minority scholarships.
Another new higher education law will require several state agencies to collaborate and create a public dashboard detailing secondary programs, such as career and technical education and adult high schools. Such reports must include information related to participation, costs, completion and employment outcomes for students.
As the author of Senate Enrolled Act 448, Terre Haute Republican Sen. Greg Goode highlighted the measure as one with bipartisan support during the 2025 session before the commission on Thursday. He described it as an effort to help universities focus on training the workforce for high-demand priorities such as life sciences, microelectronics, semiconductors and more.
'This is a way to help encourage and inspire department chairs, from my perspective, to grow our enrollment,' said Goode, who previously worked at Indiana State University.
The bill would also study whether the state should have minimum admission requirements for Hoosier students.
Under state law, the commission must also publish its recommendations for tuition and fee increases across the schools it oversees within 30 days after the state budget is enacted. While CHE always recommends a 0% floor increase, the maximum hit a high of 4.7% in 2009 during the great recession.
Following the recommendation of Gov. Mike Braun, commissioners have opted to direct schools to keep tuition and fees flat for the next fiscal year.
'I know that's a real challenge for our institutions, and I'm very sensitive to that. But I think the most important thing is what we've been striving for through our whole agenda: increasing enrollment and getting more Hoosier students to go to college.'
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
11 minutes ago
- New York Post
Trump's Aug. 1 tariff deadline is set in stone, Lutnik says: ‘No extensions, no more grace periods'
President Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs — set to kick in Friday — are set in stone this time and will not be delayed again, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday. 'No extensions, no more grace periods. Aug. 1, the tariffs are set; they'll go into place. Customs will start collecting the money, and off we go,' Lutnick said on 'Fox News Sunday.' 'Obviously, after Aug. 1, people can still talk to President Trump. I mean, he's always willing to listen, and between now and then, I think the president is going to talk to a lot of people. Whether they can make him happy is another question.' Trump announced a 10% baseline tariff rate on all imports to the US and announced a set of customs rates against virtually every country on the planet during his April 2 'Liberation Day' push. The customized tariff rates were slated to take effect on April 9, but then got delayed 90 days and then postponed again until Aug. 1. 3 Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said there won't be a grace period for the Aug. 1 tariff deadline. Fox News 3 President Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs are set to kick in on Aug. 1 for countries that didn't cut a deal with him. Getty Images In the time since, Trump has announced preliminary trade deals with the United Kingdom, Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines. Additionally, the Trump administration reached a tariff truce with China and set an Aug. 12 deadline to cut a broader deal. Lutnick stressed that Trump is prioritizing the 'big economies' right now. That includes the European Union. Trump met with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen on Sunday during his four-day trip to the United Kingdom. 'We set the table. The team sets the table. But Donald Trump does his negotiations by himself,' he emphasized. The EU is a bloc of 27 countries that, taken together, is one of America's largest sources of trade. Negotiations with the EU have proven to be lengthy and tricky for Trump. Trump has a variety of tariffs in place now, such as a 25% rate on automobiles, aluminum, and steel, as well as 25% on imports from Canada and Mexico that don't comply with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. He's also recently mused about jacking up tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Lutnick touted the revenue gains from those tariffs. 3 President Trump has endeavored to overhaul US trade relations during his second term. AP 'What's going to happen is very few products are actually going to move in price,' he predicted. 'And basically $700 billion, $800 billion, maybe it's possible we get near a trillion dollars of revenue, will come into the United States of America, reducing our deficit.' 'What do you think is paying for no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, right?' he added. 'I think if you take a look at the whole thing, it's going to be fantastic.' Trump has also flexed tariffs in the geopolitical realm. On Saturday, he spoke with the leaders and Cambodia and Thailand, informing them that US trade negotiations will stop unless they cease fighting over a long-contested section of the border. On July 15, the president also threatened Russia with 100% secondary tariffs on Russian oil if it fails to make a deal with neighboring Ukraine. That threat could complicate US trade relations with China and India in particular, which have been taking advantage of cheap Russian oil due to the sanctions on Moscow.
Miami Herald
41 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
Legendary Wall Street forecaster Bob Doll is having his best year
Stock market prognosticators are wrong so frequently that observers can rightly wonder if they're making forecasts using the oldest soothsaying methods, drawing pebbles from a pile, dropping hot wax into water, using random dots on paper or, of course, trying to find something magical in numbers. Yet at the start of every year – and again at the midpoint – countless market watchers take their crack at divining the future, mixing educated conjecture, informed hunches and the occasional WAG (wild-ass guess). Related: Veteran analyst drops updated stock market forecast Measured just about any way possible, most of those projections are wrong. CXO Advisory Group analyzed more than 6,500 forecasts-using methodologies ranging from fundamental to technical analysis-made by 68 experts on the U.S. stock market from 2005 through 2012. The investigation found that the accuracy of the forecasts was below 47% on average. That loses to a coin flip. Bloomberg/Getty Images Bad calls tend to be forgotten quickly, as soon as a forecast is updated based on new information. Winning picks are lionized and celebrated, even though the expert may have less staying power than a bull market rally. Wall Streeters sometimes call the tendency to place too much trust in a guru who made the most recent good call the "Elaine Garzarelli Effect." Garzarelli made her reputation as a Lehman Brothers investment strategist by urging clients to get out of the stock market the week before the Black Monday crash in 1987. That call made her one of the most widely quoted strategists on the Street, but it was also the pinnacle of her success. Whether it was brilliant prescience or dumb luck may be argued forever, but she never really duplicated that success. Garzarelli failed to generate much interest when she tried running mutual funds and a call on stocks being 25% undervalued late in 2007 as the global financial crisis was looming, further dimmed her star. While old-timers remember her name – she runs Garzarelli Research and her newsletter suggests that she is currently bullish on small- and mid-caps plus transportation stocks – she is like many one-time stars, known more for one right call than for being right consistently over years or decades. One Wall Street analyst who hasn't shied away from forecasts -- and has a stellar track record -- is Bob Doll, chief executive and investment officer at Crossmark Global Investors. In a 40-plus-year career, Doll has also been the top equity strategist at Blackrock, Nuveen, Merrill Lynch, and Oppenheimer Funds; at each of those stops, Doll-a regular guest on CNBC, Fox Business, and seemingly all financial media outlets-has started each year with 10 forecasts for the coming 12 months. Related: Top analyst sends message on pending ugly earnings miss (plus one big beat) Doll holds his picks up to a grader each year and historically has been right 72% of the time. That's roughly where he stood with his 2024 prognostications. He has said that his best years ever put him at just above 80%. Entering 2025, Doll was expecting "fewer tailwinds, but more tail risks." His picks reflected that, calling for "some bumps in the road, but some good news and probably more volatility," in an interview on Money Life with Chuck Jaffe that aired in January. Now, seven months later, Doll is getting the results he expected. Eight of Doll's 10 picks tend to be tied to the economy and stock market, with one tied to politics and a wildcard. This is what Doll was calling for entering 2025, and how it's turning out: Slower economic growth as unemployment rises past 4.5%. The jury is out on this one, but if unemployment hits Doll's target – it's currently just north of 4% -- mark this as a inflation that stays above Fed's 2% target, causing the central bank to cut rates less than expected. Barring a Fed surprise, this one's on track.10-year Treasury yields primarily between 4% and 5% with wider credit spreads. The 10-year Treasury has spent the year in that range; credit spreads were up around the tariff tantrum but have narrowed since. But if there's an economic slowdown, they will widen and this one will be a fail to achieve the market's consensus 14% expectation entering the year, and yet every sector has up earnings. This forecast is virtually a lock at this point, even with Doll expecting a second-half slowdown that could hurt some volatility rises, with the VIX average approaching 20. The VIX averaged 18.5 in the first quarter and 24.4 in the second, so this call –and the VIX has only been this high in two of the last 13 calendar years – might have seemed like a longshot but now looks like a sure experience a 10% correction and price/earnings ratios contract. The correction went on the books in April, and P/E ratios are down and appear likely to stay that way. This can be marked in the win portfolios beat cap-weighted portfolios and value beats growth. Both of these conditions are true at the moment; the question is whether that will hold up through energy and consumer staples outperform healthcare, technology and industrials. This looked like a sure thing into June, when the margin of outperformance shrank. If financials weaken, it could put this one in jeopardy; barring that, it looks like another win."Congress passes the Trump tax cut extension, reduces regulation, but tariffs and deportation are less than expected." The tariff forecast here is the one thing where Doll looks like he's wrong and won't recover; by year's end, this one is likely to look half-right, making it the one clear blemish that's efforts make progress but fall far short of $2 trillion in annualized savings. Even Doll acknowledges that this was a softball. In a July 22 interview on Money Life with Chuck Jaffe, Doll acknowledged that he now expects to be right at least 70 percent of the time, "but I wish coming into the year we knew which seven we were going to get right. We could make a lot of money. The problem is you don't know which ones you're going to get right and wrong." As for the rest of 2025, Doll gave three quick assessments for where things stand now: "One, the economy is slowing. We just don't know how much it's going to slow. Two, we're beginning to see tariffs show up in the inflation numbers. We don't know how much. And number three we have this tailwind called [artificial intelligence] which is real and is keeping things moving." Further, Doll said he expects the AI play to broaden out. The tailwind called AI has also been particularly strong at the high end of the market. We all were expecting some measure of breadth this year. Are we going to see the breadth show up at some point? Yeah. Well, it obviously occurred in the first quarter, and then it went away in the second quarter. While Doll noted that tariffs seem to be showing up in slight increases in the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, he did not think they would cause a spike in inflation over the rest of the year. "I don't think [the impact of tariffs on inflation] it's going to be horrible," he said. "It's just going to be there. Remember, only 15% approximately of our GDP is from outside the United States. The other 85 is pretty domestic. So it's limited by how much of the economy it really affects. "Now, having said that, remember the Fed saying 'We've got to get inflation down to 2% and they're struggling at 3% and we're not going to get to 2%. And that means all these people who want the Fed to lower rates are going to have to wait a little bit longer." Related: Top analysts say investors are suckers for bad dividend stocks The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
New York Post
2 hours ago
- New York Post
Trump should consider pardon for Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for telling her secrets, GOP rep says
Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie implored the Trump administration officials to do 'whatever they need to do to compel' testimony from sex predator Jeffrey Epstein's madam Ghislaine Maxwell, even if that means giving her some form of pardon. Massie (R-Ky.), who is leading a bipartisan push in Congress to force the release of the Epstein files, stressed that he wants the public to get as much transparency as possible on the late child sex trafficker. 'That would be up to the president,' Massie told NBC's 'Meet the Press' on Sunday when asked about whether Trump should give Maxwell a pardon. Advertisement 3 Rep. Thomas Massie speaks on Meet the Press. NBC/Meet the Press 3 Trump seen in a photo with Epstein and Maxwell, taken in Feb. 2000. Getty Images 'But if she has information that could help us, then I think she should testify. Let's get that out there. And whatever they need to do to compel that testimony, as long as it's truthful, I would be in favor of.' Last Friday, Trump said that he hadn't thought about pardoning Maxwell, but noted that 'I'm allowed to do it.' Advertisement Todd Blanche, Trump's former defense attorney, who now serves as the US deputy attorney general, met with Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and other crimes, for hours last Thursday and Friday in private. 3 The Post cover on Ghislaine Maxwell's conviction of sex trafficking minors for Jeffrey Epstein. csuarez Massie's partner in the bipartisan push to force the release of the Epstein files, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) split with him on the possibility of Maxwell getting clemency. 'No, I don't,' he said. 'And I'm concerned that the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is meeting with her supposedly one-on-one. Look, I agree with Congressman Massie that she should testify. But she's been indicted twice on perjury. This is why we need the files.' Advertisement 'This is why we need independent evidence.'
