By Greg Bishop/Illinois Radio Network
SPRINGFIELD – Illinois’ governor thinks the state’s public universities have been spending too much of their state funding on overhead costs, and they need to be more independent.
Gov. Bruce Rauner said higher education in Illinois needs more resources, but he said those resources need to be spent in the classroom — not on administrative overhead.
“We have a lot of redundancy. We have a lot of overlap. We have a lot of inefficiency and we have a lot of bureaucratic bloat in our university system,” Rauner said.
Meanwhile, the governor said the state’s public university system should be more independent.
“Other states have done a better job,” he said. “They’ve broken their university system away from the state and let them run themselves and let them be a little bit more independent.”
The governor said Illinois’ public universities are de facto state agencies, and that’s not efficient.
“The pensions are broken,” Rauner said. “The work rules, the structure, the bureaucratic inertia is unaffordable and unsustainable, and we’ve got to change that while bringing more resources to the university system. It’s going to take a lot of work.”
A spokesman for the University of Illinois said bureaucracies tend to grow as regulations expand — and there needs to be procurement and regulatory reform to help control costs.
The governor will propose his budget, along with proposed levels of funding for higher education, during his budget address next month.
Compromise in Illinois Senate may go nowhere
Is the grand compromise dead? The combined effort of the Illinois Senate Democrats and Republicans was cooled off Wednesday by the Rauner administration. His office of Management and Budget estimated that the Senate spending plan and tax hike would leave the state $4.3 billion short. Rauner was quick to sidestep any direct comment on the findings, preferring to take the stance that he’s staying out of the negations.
“I think it’s premature for me to comment on any specific types of proposals yet,” Rauner said. “I think things are very fluid there are evolving. Some ideas are going somewhere, some aren’t. I’m going to let the process organically grow on its own.”
The Senate still has to have their compromise bills to that need to be heard in committee. They say that will take all the analysis and review it to see if changes need to be made.
