Peter A. Spina, Ph.D Executive Director The Institute for Community College Development at Cornell University
Presentation:                           Biography:	"Biting the bullet: Finding innovative ways to finance technology in tight college budgets." It�s painfully accurate to observe that community colleges are facing hard choices in funding technology. Colleges are developing technology plans; indeed a new job category of technology planner has entered our lexicon. College executive teams laboriously develop scenarios for extending/deferring technology purchases and leases while eking out savings in every possible line item. Some colleges seek technology partnerships and other shared initiatives to spread out the financial impact of developing a full-blown technology agenda. These exercises are worth doing, but they probably won�t yield enough to keep us competitive and give our students the access to technology they want and need. The community colleges most successful in financing robust technology initiatives will be those which have taken a sea change approach to how they find revenues and deliver services, and which have adapted contemporary industrial technology practices. These colleges will simultaneously develop aggressive and sophisticated resource development mechanisms as they will drive the enrollment side of their budgets. As to expenditures, successful colleges will decide which services and business lines might be eliminated or channeled to outsourcers as they seek to find enough savings to finance an extensive (and expensive) technology agenda. It is this latter quest that will cause the most commotion internally and run against the grain of community college stakeholders, including presidents. Yet unless public support of community colleges reverses its downward pattern and/or we collectively decide to charge high tuitions, paying the high technology bill will require us to either to stop delivering some services or to contract them out to experts who can do them as well as we do, but less expensively. Peter A. Spina, Ph.D is Executive Director of the Institute for Community College Development at Cornell University.  He is president emeritus of Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY and served for many years as a director/officer of the League for Innovation in the Community College.  His professional service included stints as director of CASE, NCJAA, the College Board and the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.  He sits on several corporate boards and recently completed service as president of High Technology of Rochester, a public/private economic development agency.  Among his service awards include recognition in the University of Texas study as one of fifty national community college transformational leaders, designation by the ACCT as Outstanding CEO and recipient of the Thomas R. Peters award for leadership.
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