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It might be state budget cuts one day or tuition increases the next. It might include how hard college and university leaders must work to bring private money into the university system.
And it might also show the various plans that public universities and colleges try to overcome funding losses.
But there is one central reality that dominates all of these component issues: And that is the reality that choices made in the political system are leading to the privatization of what had been our public higher education system.
Now a book by two former University of Wisconsin System administrators addresses the issue head on.
Former UW System President Katharine Lyall, an economist, and former UW chief budget officer Kathleen Sell, have written a new book called “The True Genius of America at Risk.”
The subtitle says it all: “Are we losing our public universities to de-facto privatization?”
They point to two factors. One is the shifting of state resources away from public higher education. The other is a change of thinking. Society has gone from viewing education as a public good, to viewing it as a personal good.
Now, instead of funding higher education at levels it received in the past, we’re more interested in tax cuts and letting parents and students bear the inevitable burden of higher tuition and fees.
Anyone with a child in a public college or university knows the impact of tuition increases. But the reasons for the increases — reasons that include economics and changes in the basic philosophy of state government — are not always directly addressed.
In an article February 2006 in the journal “Change,” Lyall and Sell wrote: “Data published by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association show that real state and local support per student declined 12 percent over the period 1991-2004, with an acceleration to 16.8 percent in the last four years. Moreover, three-quarters of all states participated in this decline.
“Similarly, the share of state budgets devoted to maintaining higher education opportunities fell from 9.8 percent in 1980 to 6.9 percent in 2000 ... as other needs claimed an increasing share of state tax revenues. Even as state tax capacity has risen, a declining portion of the resulting revenues has been spent for higher education.”
No amount of budget cuts can make up for this difference. That’s why tuition has gone up as much as it has. But when tuition increases, we limit access to higher education. Students who might have gone to public universities in the past might be priced out of the market today.
But it isn’t just the students who lose out. Society loses out, by not having the benefit of educated people making real contributions. And our economies lose out, by not having the earning power or the brain power of those who were priced out of the market for higher education.
It’s an argument that needs to be heard in state legislatures and governors’ offices throughout the nation.
