Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Funding for higher education has been hit hard in states struggling with budget shortfalls. Even more troubling than budget cuts, however, is what University of Maryland president C.D. Mote Jr. worries may be the unraveling of a societal consensus on the value of higher education.
"As I see it," he recently wrote, "there is no taste in our present culture for increased taxes to support higher education at the state and federal levels. I see no general alarm about the fate of higher education and no belief in its value sufficient to lift it to a top national priority."
Mote is right to worry about what he calls the "graceful decline" of higher education. The message from governors and legislatures across the country is that it's better to cut higher education funding than to raise taxes.
In California, for example, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is being hailed for a string of dazzling legislative victories in his first year in office. However, the Republican governor's deficit-reduction plan is anything but a victory for higher education. It would turn away 11,000 of his state's brightest young people from the state's four-year universities this fall.
Strangely, university officials have accepted the governor's proposal, claiming it would help them cope with a four-year slide in state funding. The plan would hand down nearly $700-million in cuts and decrease enrollment this year in the state's university systems. In exchange, the universities would get steady annual increases beginning in the fall of 2005.
The university leaders may have felt they had no other political options, especially given Schwarzenegger's refusal to consider any tax increases. But thousands of qualified high school seniors who received deferment letters feel cheated, and so should those who value higher education and the role it plays in the nation's economic success.
This same shortsighted philosophy prevails in Florida, where legislators over the past decade have refused to provide for the growing needs of higher education. Just last year, Florida squeezed out some 35,000 community college students by refusing to allot extra money for the incoming class.
The reliability of the Schwarzenegger deal is uncertain. California's budget writers are in dire straits this year, and they project a $6-billion shortfall for 2005-06. Neither Schwarzenegger nor university leaders can credibly claim that money will be available to support the promised increases in future years. "Where the governor will get the money for this increase I do not know," said Jack Scott, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education.
Students deferred from four-year universities were given the option to attend community colleges and transfer to universities in two years. But the community colleges might not have the spaces to accommodate a flood of new students. As Scott, a former community college president, puts it: "It's one thing to be admitted to a community college, and it's another thing not to be able to find classes."
As California legislators debate the higher education budget deal, more than 80 percent of the students given the community college deferment option declined it in favor of private universities, out-of-state colleges or skipping college altogether.
Let's hope California, Florida and other states realize that higher education, expensive as it is, is worth the investment.