Higher Ed Suffers From Low Priority
For more than a decade, the Democrats who dominated Washington state government siphoned money from higher education and poured it down the social-handout drain.
Now Republicans rule, but a new breed of blue-collar conservative is picking up where the liberals left off: attacking public education.
This should alarm the state’s businesses and parents. It couldn’t be happening at a worse time.
A huge generation, the children of the baby boomers, begins pouring out of high schools this year. Legislators have known this day would come but they didn’t adequately prepare; Washington’s universities don’t have nearly enough funded capacity.
Already, consequences are dramatic. Years of forced university cost-cutting means students can’t get into classes they need. So they take longer to graduate, wasting the state’s money and their own, and occupying scarce enrollment capacity. Limited capacity also means very elite admission requirements; at the University of Washington the average freshman comes from a family with a $70,000 income. (There’s a correlation between family income, and the very high grades and SAT scores required for admission. Wealthy families, for example, can afford SAT tutors.)
The inadequacies of our education system cripple the whole state, as well as its young. A 1989 study found Washington’s top employers must import trained professionals from out-of-state because Washington’s universities aren’t training enough residents to win these desirable jobs. Washington ranks worst in the nation in access to higher education and would have to double the size of its university system to match that of top-ranking states. The study noted a direct correlation, nationwide, between higher education access and a state’s economic strength. This might seem obvious but it has not been obvious to Washington’s politicians.
The new Republican leaders propose with one hand to increase tuition and with the other to cut state appropriations by the amount the tuition would raise - leaving universities unhelped.
True, there’s some justification for tuition increases. Some of Washington’s rates are low compared to tuitions elsewhere. Higher tuition also creates an incentive to demand, and provide, quality education services. But higher tuition must be retained by the universities who receive it, to benefit students who pay it.
Because tuition doesn’t cover the full cost of education and because enrollment capacity is grossly inadequate, the state also must raise its own investment in the universities’ operating costs. The alternative is economic decline, deteriorating campuses and increasing elitism.
It will only aggravate these woes if rising tuition is accompanied by stagnant state funding for financial aid - as Republicans also propose. Middle-income families are being priced out of the educational opportunities the last generation enjoyed. What’s more, private colleges could meet more of the coming demand, at a bargain cost to the taxpayers, if the state would boost its financial aid for private-school students. The average freshman at private colleges in Washington comes from a family with a $44,000 income. Access to those schools hasn’t been choked off. Still, they serve only a quarter of the state’s higher education students; the focus must remain on public universities.
Residents who care about Washington’s children and its economy should rise up and demand that legislators give higher education its rightful place, atop the state’s priorities. Most of us recognize social handouts as a black hole, and prisons as a hellhole. Education’s cheaper, it’s constructive, and it works.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board