Charles Ambrose knew the situation was dire within days of arriving on the campus of Henderson State University at Arkadelphia in 2021.

Ambrose, who was president of Pfeiffer University in North Carolina from 1998-2010 and the University of Central Missouri from 2010-18, realized that he would have to use a rare tool known as financial exigency. Among other things, exigency allows a school to terminate the contracts of tenured faculty members.

Ambrose, who left the chancellor’s job at Henderson after two years, recently joined forces with Michael Nietzel, a former president of Missouri State University, to write a book titled “Colleges on the Brink: The Case for Financial Exigency.”

“After just two meetings and a few noteworthy conversations with Henderson’s senior administrative staff, I knew that a financial exigency process would be unavoidable,” Ambrose says. “A couple of those conversations still stand out in my mind. I remember my CFO telling me we were squirreling away cash just to make debt service payments. I also recall staff admitting to me that we were slow in paying our bills, a fact confirmed when I began receiving regular calls from vendors about their invoices not being paid.

“And then there was this warning: ‘Oh, by the way, it looks like we may be having a hard time making payroll in the summer.’ The realization was all too obvious. HSU was out of cash. I had a sudden flashback to the summer of 1998 and my first few months at Pfeiffer, where we were not paying our bills, facilities were literally falling down and students owed us far more money than we were collecting.”

Ambrose had never seen a public institution in such a depleted cash position as Henderson.

“I wondered at the time how a public institution could work itself through all the structural deficits we had identified, with essentially no alternative sources of revenue, to extend our work beyond the academic year,” Ambrose writes. “I knew that the case for exigency at HSU was indisputable. It was now time to use data to change the narrative, roll up our sleeves and begin the process of educating the campus about its dire condition and the actions we were going to have to take to pull it out of the hole.

“Once I realized that Henderson’s finances were so bad that the survival of the institution was at risk, I knew it was time to use every mechanism at our disposal to try to rectify the situation. At this point, financial exigency felt like a liberating tool that would refocus us on solutions instead of being consumed with our overwhelming problems. It provided the hope we could make the fundamental changes necessary to sustain the university.”

It took someone like Ambrose—someone from outside Arkansas—to make the painful cuts. Once the situation had stabilized, Trey Berry, the visionary president of Southern Arkansas University at Magnolia, was convinced to return to his hometown of Arkadelphia to take the Henderson chancellor’s job.

I’ve addressed the Henderson situation in numerous columns because the institution, which dates back to 1890, is so important to the southern half of our state. I mention the Henderson story again to make the point that the extravagant spending you often hear about in higher education isn’t happening in Arkansas. In a state where the Legislature has starved higher education for decades, most colleges and universities are barely getting by.

The sad thing for an under-educated state like Arkansas is that increasing the number of college graduates has never been more important than it is now. It’s why I wrote two weeks ago that the Legislature should put more state revenue into higher education while also setting up a trust fund that will utilize tax revenue from the coming lithium boom to benefit public colleges and universities.

This endowment could be transformative for our state if the lithium boom plays out like I think it will. If our Legislature won’t do it, let’s pass a constitutional amendment. Despite what some legislators loudly proclaim, college degrees still matter a great deal.

The Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School released a report that noted that despite many companies making a big deal out of dropping college degree requirements, college graduates were still getting the jobs.

“Simply dropping stated requirements seldom opens jobs to those who don’t have a college degree,” the report said. “For all its fanfare, the increased opportunity promised by skillsbased hiring was borne out in not even one in 700 hires last year.”

“The new data isn’t a outlier,” Derek Newton writes for Forbes. “Many research efforts and journalism inquiries over the past several months have reached similar conclusions. Even so, this report is remarkable in that it came from Burning Glass—an agenda-driven organization that has been advocating for the abolition of college degrees in hiring for some time, praising and promoting the short-term credentials often provided by for-profit companies.

“That Burning Glass has found so-called skills-based hiring to be a dud, at least as far as results go, is big. Speaking of, it’s important to point out that even the name for the phenomenon—skills-based hiring—is deceptive. It presumes that people with college degrees don’t have skills—that you cannot hire someone with a degree and skills, that’s it one or the other.”

Newton, who writes frequently about higher education, goes on: “Maybe these companies tried it, and it didn’t work. Maybe they realized that skills and experiences learned in college matter. Maybe, as employers themselves have told us for years, the socializing and broad-based learning that goes on in college are valuable. Maybe companies know this. Maybe that’s why the idea of dropping college education requirements has not taken hold—because it’s a bad idea.

“To believe otherwise, you must believe that business leaders and hiring managers don’t know what they’re doing—that they’re blindly following tradition or just lazy. Even when hiring efficiency and worker productivity make a real difference in the marketplace, you would need to believe that businesses have simply overlooked a better way to hire. That seems naive. If removing degree requirements from jobs was really better, you should wonder why so many companies aren’t doing it, even after they say they will.”

When Arkansas legislators rail against higher education, the chances are that they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.

“Wages grow faster for more-educated workers because college is a gateway to professional occupations, such as business and engineering, in which workers learn new skills, get promoted and gain managerial experience,” economist David Deming writes for The Atlantic. “Most non-college workers, in contrast, end up in personal services and blue-collar occupations, for which wages tend to stagnate over time.”

In 1976, Harvard economist Richard Freeman published a book titled “The Overeducated American.” His timing was bad.

“Shortly after the book’s publication, the college wage premium rose rapidly, increasing by more than 20 percentage points from 1976-88,” Deming writes. “At age 50, college graduates who entered the labor market in the 1970s were earning about 70 percent more than their less-educated contemporaries. College had been worth it after all. It just felt riskier and took longer to pay off.

“We appear to be in a similar moment today. Despite the bad vibes around higher education, the fastest-growing occupations that do not require a college degree are mostly low-wage service jobs that offer little opportunity for advancement.”

It’s time for the Legislature to adequately fund higher education. If legislators won’t, Arkansans will have to take matters into their own hands.