Some of the biggest losers in yesterday’s state House budget proposal are our state’s public colleges and universities… or I guess, more accurately, their current and future students.
The House would slash another $482 million from higher education spending, $100 million more than the governor’s already brutal proposal, amounting to a more than 50 percent cut over two biennia. Even after tuition hikes of between 11.5 and 13 percent, our two-year and four-year institutions would still have to cut as much as 5.4 percent from their budgets. Students will be paying more and getting less.
As a percentage of our state economy, higher education spending had already dropped 63.7 percent from a high of $15.53 per $1,000 of personal income in 1974 to $5.48 per $1,000 in 2010. And falling. Dollars speak louder than words, and clearly, as a state, we obviously no longer believe that providing affordable access to a quality college education is all that important anymore.
So why not just make it official? Let’s just privatize, sell off, or shut down our state colleges and universities and watch the market work its magic.
The best deal for taxpayers would be to auction off the assets to the highest bidders, but that might even strike some Republicans as too radical. So the more pragmatic, yet still fiscally conservative approach would be to just phase out state funding over say, a ten year period, and let the individual institutions sink or swim on their own.
Sounds crazy, I know. Yet we’re already halfway there, and with zero indication that this bipartisan program of disinvestment will turn around anytime soon. So wouldn’t everybody be better served if we were just honest about our state higher education policy, and gave administrators, faculty, and students a little time to prepare?
Maintaining an affordable and excellent public college and university system is simply not a priority in Washington state anymore. It just isn’t. And it hasn’t been for years. The sooner we admit it and move on, the sooner we as a state can lower our economic expectations to meet this new reality.
Maintaining an affordable and excellent public education system is simply not a priority in the United States anymore.
Fixed that for you.
The best deal would be for the State Constitution and voter’s 80 percent votes to be followed and not paid lip service to by the corporation-exempting Powers That Be.
The high quality of UW is why I moved to Washington State; this gutting will be why I’ll have to leave.
This is going to be an interesting issue across the country. It used to be in a State’s interest to have a highly educated labor force. But increasingly, some places find that their highest educated graduates leave the state.
One solution might be to do away with the “in-state tuition” concept. Force students to take on massive debt, then forgive a portion of the debt for every year the graduate is employed in the state. That way somebody who relocates for college then stays local gets the “in-state” tuition break, instead of a local who moves away after college.
Out-of-state employers could include repayment as part of a relocation package. If Google wanted to relocate a worker to silicon valley, they could offer to pay off the in-state tuition difference.
Eclexia, best idea I’ve ever seen in a blog comment, best ever!!! Finally, somebody with their thinking cap on, instead of just itchy typing fingers
agreed, goldy. let’s stop beating around the bush. all the democrats do is pursue the same policies as republicans but at a slow enough pace that people don’t realize what is happening. this is somehow better? sounds likely to put us in a worse place over time. let’s go shock doctrine on people & take these policies to their necessary endpoint as quickly as possible. don’t see how we can change course until this stuff plays itself out. people must suffer & see the effects of their choices on their children.
I hate to agree, but you’re absolutely right. Instead of handcuffing the higher ed schools, particularly the 4 year colleges, with the crap that the legislature and the HECB pass down to them, let them go their own way. It might be better for everyone.
@4 Google already gets a subsidy from San Francisco employee taxes.
This exempting of taxes is part of the Race To The Bottom that is crushing the Middle Class.
The plan proposed by the commission led by Microsoft’s General Counsel would crate an independent non-profit foundation that would fund higher education. It’s independent specifically so the legislature couldn’t touch the money.
Businesses would receive a $0.50 reduction in the state tax bill for every dollar the contributed to the foundation. In other words, they could direct their taxes to higher-education.
So far the legislature hasn’t acted on the plan.
This is a very interesting idea and I’m very surprised to see so many progressives here entertaining it. I’m even more surprised to see Eclexia’s very innovative alternative plan for encouraging the highly educated to live here by paying them. It would certainly work, and I would certainly benefit (do I get to collect for each of my multiple degrees?), but it’s very un-progressive, since the more highly educated tend to be richer. On the other hand, it does nicely illustate the regressivity of the even current system of subsidizing higher ed, which also benefits the upper middle class kids who tend to attend college more than the lower class kids who don’t.
One nice side effect of this plan might be to decrease the fraction of the population that we try to college-educate back to more realistic levels. You can make a reasonable argument that it benefits the general society to subsidize the advanced educations of the very best and brightest. But sorry, 60% of the population does not qualify as “the very best and brightest”.
The expansion of the fraction of the population that we attempt to college-educate is arguably the main explanation for the decreasing per-student state subsidy anyway. In constant dollar terms, the state is spending about as much to subsidize higher education as it ever did; that amount is just be spread among a lot more students (and proportionately more star faculty members and nice infrastructure).
Just close all the public schools period–starting with the communist indoctrination centers known as so-called “pre-schools.” Kids need to grow up ignorant, mean and stupid, just like their parents.
For far too long, soon-to-be formerly middle class AmeriKKKans haven’t had to pay the horrific costs of their votes against actually funding our society. They should know what they’re getting–let it all collapse already.
A professor at a prominent state university once said that the university had gone from a state university to a state-supported university to a state-located university. True words.
(sorry, it’s twitter, not google @8 – my bad)
So much for your daughters GET hope she has fun at Devry
The whole reason nobody in the legislature is going to “come right out and admit” that this is where things are going is because doing this would go against the management-by-crisis model.
We have created and nurtured a powerful disincentive to planning and competence in our leadership; those who simply allow the chips to fall where they may are rewarded with enhanced power when the panic of the moment dictates decisive action against a backdrop of severely circumscribed choices. They can claim they have “no choice” but to give the middle class and poor a good hard rogering, because hey, it’s an emergency and we’ve all got to make sacrifices.
There really isn’t anywhere else they can cut. As a UW student I would love to see it come out of anywhere else, but isn’t K-12 funding protected, and we still need a fire department etc, right? As you’ve posted before, we need to get more revenue if we want to support what we want.
When do our students start rioting?
Seriously, that seems to be about all anyone listens to. No one is listening to rational discourse, so I guess it’s time to fill up some bottles full of gasoline or other flamable liquids, start digging bricks up, and fuck shit up.
Sorry, I just feel our society is that hopeless.
So sad. Because of diminishing support from the state over the years, UW has shifted its focus to putting more money into programs that can bring in outside money (for example, the medical school, and engineering and others who can bring in outside grant money — (and the pentagon actually funds a lot of research at UW!)). So now the money from the state is actually a relatively small percentage (my memory is that it might be around 20% — but don’t quote me on that) of the UW’s overall budget. Some people think that this makes the core educational mission of the UW less important than doing research that brings in the cash. — Makes it feel more like a corporation than a university. But you gotta do what you gotta do to survive. Ugh.
http://www.athabascau.ca/
I’ve been exploring returning to school in pursuit of a Masters degree. After looking under rocks, I figured out the best way to build (buy) more skills at the UW was through the Engineering school. Never mind that the step forward would require 2 steps backward to brush up core skills, I was prepared to don time and money’s yoke to come away with that MS. That was until I found out that significant tuition hikes were expected for the program in the next annum, such that the post-grad work would be on par with an MBA or other “professional” degrees.
What I find ironic is recent changes to State licensing requirements in my field were a big factor that lead me to consider further education. So even though the State may have set regulatory requirements, and the employers need to somehow satisfy those terms, those of us in the between, we’re really on our own.
In the end, I’d say how much one values education is directly related to how much one will spend to get there…present party included.
Careful when you go around holding up mirrors like that. It messes people up badly to be confronted with what they’ve become. They’re happier thinking of themselves as benevolent.
SAVAGE!
I don’t get how “letting the market decide” is supposed to be a threat here, given that there are so many examples of “the market” handling tertiary education just fine. Heck, there’s even one located just a few blocks away from The Stranger.
State-run public universities were a great idea when the state was just starting out and there was no other way to convince the best and brightest to stay here, but there is really no reason for Olympia to continue to run UW, WSU, etc now that they are established, well-respected institutions. The state can and should be able to provide funding for specific programs it wants to see established here, but there’s no good reason for overall funding decisions to be controlled by the legislature (and don’t say “but tuition will go up!”, because the sticker price is more or less irrelevant for most students as it is).
After all, why should this generation be able to get an excellent cheap education without debt? My generation got ours, no reason we should have to pay for the next one.
Better to have a bidding war by CEC and University of Phoenix for the UW, so we can get one year of budget balanced.
Hope is over folks, it’s done.