Higher Education Funding under Attack?

This past week, President Obama outlined his thoughts on how to make college more affordable. As a father of college sophomore and another one coming up in 2013, I watched and read with interest President Obama's plan for making college more affordable. Unfortunately, I was disappointed at the President's rhetoric to contain college costs. See the attached link from the Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-outlines-incentive-plan-to-reduce-college-tuition-costs/2012/01/27/gIQAc92fVQ_story.html. 

My biggest concern is President Obama, like most politicians on both sides of the aisle do not understand higher education funding. For the past decade, public higher education institutions have suffered from dwindling financial support from their state legislatures. In some cases like Texas, they de-regulated tuition and allowed each institution to set their own tuition and fees with the approval of the Board of Regents. As the legislature de-regulated tuition and fees, they also drastically cut state support for higher education. As a result, all public institutions in TX and elsewhere like California have had to raise their tuition or cut programs and faculty to stay afloat. When institutions raised tuition, the same legislatures that cut higher education funding criticized severely the increases. Talk about hypocrites! I wish legislators were required to take the same hippocratic oath that M.D.s do, i.e., "do no harm." In any case, while educational leadership programs are a small subunit of the university, we have an obligation and responsibility to use our expertise and inform public policymakers, so that they may become enlightened. If we fail to take this challenge, we do it at the risk of our own peril.

Comments

[Catherine Lugg]

Alan,

Thanks for this post. It seems that higher education has seen a "race to the bottom" when it comes to state and federal funding for higher education. And this de-funding has been going on since at least FY 1983, if not earlier. Meanwhile, business leaders grouse about not being able to higher in so-and-such fields, failing to see the connections between public investment in higher education and the need for highly skill labor.

I know this is a highly unfashionable thing to say, but I could pay more in state and federal income taxes. There's no reason that I get a mortgage deduction (for example), and I do pay more in federal taxes because of DOMA. But as a nation, infrastructure is our future. We can either build now, or we will surely pay, pay, pay dearly for our lack of foresight in the future.

[Scott McLeod]

There definitely is something hypocritical about state legislatures defunding state universities and then complaining about tuition increases. That said, higher ed has legacy infrastructures and other costs that are causing serious structural issues. For example:

"Higher education prices increased 440% over the last 25 years – four times the rate of inflation, and twice as bad as health care. Elementary and secondary ed prices have skyrocketed, too, with not even adequate outcomes. On the other side of the ledger is the Moore’s law ecosystem, the most ruthless force in technology and the world economy. Last quarter Netflix streamed two billion hours worth of video – or 228,000 years worth in three months. In just the last week of December, smartphone and tablet owners gobbled up 1.2 billion apps – 43% by Americans. Twenty years ago, a terabyte hard drive, if such a thing had existed, might have cost $5 million. Today, you can pick one up for $69.
The price of information plummets. Yet the price of education soars. These two trends cannot both continue. Guess which will crack first." See the accompanying diagram: http://onforb.es/AoqtXC

Also see http://onforb.es/Aa3MPx

Big disruptions are ahead. We need to be talking more about these as faculty and as institutions.