A sub-committee for the Performance Funding Steering Committee recommended performance-based funding be supported with additional state money, rather than taken out of budgets for higher education institutions.

Members of the steering committee met Monday at the Student Center to discuss unresolved state funding issues and resolutions for those issues. The meeting was the fourth for the committee, which includes college and university presidents, chancellors and also Illinois Board of Higher Education members.

Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation into law Aug. 12 to give universities money based on enrollment, retention and graduation rates. Chancellor Rita Cheng and Allan Karnes, associate dean and professor in accounting, are both on the steering committee, which  determines the metrics of the law that will be effective Jan. 1, 2013.

She said Illinois universities are trying to encourage students to continue their education, cut down the time it takes to get a degree and to get a certificate or an associate’s degree along the way to a bachelor’s degree.

According to the sub-committee’s Response to Performance Funding Unresolved Issues document, as Illinois colleges and universities begin to determine their budgets for fiscal year 2013, and the state still owes many higher education institutions money from previous years, it is not logical to take more money away.

“The spirit of the legislation for performance-based funding was to provide positive incentives to all institutions to graduate more students,” the response stated. “In keeping with this spirit, performance-based funding should be financed with additional money, and our recommendation is that we continue to go to the general assembly and ask for increased funding for this effort.”

The state owes SIU more than $76 million from FY11 and FY12.

Cheng said chancellors and presidents on the committee have been clear that funding for this needs to be additional. She said if funding is not additional, it could be difficult for universities to graduate more students because programs that lead to student success would have to be cut due to lack of money.

“We hope that through our participation we can convey that institutions are different from each other, so we are all starting in a different place in our approach to student learning and success, but we all want the same thing, which is to have more students graduate and have college degrees,” she said.

The law is part of a plan to increase the state and national college completion rate to 60 percent by 2025. According to the 2005-2009 U.S. Census data set, 41.9 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds have a bachelors degree or higher and 17.4 percent of people 25 years or older have a bachelors degree. According to the Lumina Foundation — a private foundation committed to enrolling and graduating more students from college — nearly 41 percent of Illinois working-age adults (25 to 64 years old) hold at least a two-year degree.

In August, Cheng said the goal may be difficult to reach, but said the issue is important to address.

The Illinois Public Agenda for College and Career Success reported to Quinn in December that they project by 2020, 60 percent of Illinois jobs will require postsecondary education and Illinois will need to fill about 2 million vacancies by then.

Of those vacancies, 1.3 million will require postsecondary education. This means in order to meet the demands of the economy, Illinois will need to graduate 600,000 more students with degrees than is currently predicted.

The response document also proposes the purpose of performance-based funding institutions should be differentiated by the institutions mission, the institutions demographic profile or if it holds a Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education — a classification system that began in 1970 to support university and college programs of research and policy analysis.

Underrepresented and underserved students would be defined as students who receive needs-based financial aid, as well as students who take remedial classes.

“We feel these criteria are simple and reliable ways of ensuring that populations that have been historically underrepresented in college completion, i.e., ethnic/racial minorities, first generation, disabled, veterans, urban/rural, and non-traditional students, will be included,” the response document stated.

Karnes said this was done in order to be consistent.

“If you are a university and you have a high achieving Hispanic person from a wealthy family, that student is generally not very hard to graduate. What we are trying to do is graduate more students in total,” he said. “So, if I am an administrator at a university, I can go steal that student to make my numbers look better, and we are just going to be recirculating some of the same kids by being overinclusive in our definition of under-represented.”

The committee will meet again Nov. 30 at Richland Community College in Decatur.