Ask Candidates About Education

Where would you like your kids to go when they finish high school - college, or prison?

If the long-range trends in Washington state government continue, children of the baby boomers could have an easier time getting into the slammer, or onto welfare rolls, than they will have getting into a public university.

So, when candidates for governor and the Legislature come asking for your vote, ask how they’ll rescue higher education from the chopping block.

During the past two decades, universities took a back seat to other priorities. As a result, they don’t have nearly enough capacity to educate baby boomers’ kids. Nor do they have capacity to educate families moving here from states like California and Oregon, where tax revolts are decimating public universities.

In California, state government now spends more on prisons than universities. Fifteen years ago, that state spent six times as much on colleges as it did on prisons.

In Washington the trends are similar but not as far along. In the 1980s Washington spent 3.5 percent of its budget on prisons; today prisons gobble 4.2 percent, and their costs are rising fast. Higher education got 16 percent of the state budget in 1979 but now - with student demand soaring - it gets 11 percent.

The explanation is largely political. Responding to union and interest group constituents, Democrats back K-12 schools and welfare programs. (Most universities aren’t unionized.) Republicans prefer to cut taxes and fight crime and some are hostile to public education. There has been no interest group, other than a scattering of CEOs who want an educated work force, to agitate for higher education.

But now, parents and students have an urgent, personal incentive to yell. In addition to the lack of enrollment capacity, high tuition and housing costs threaten middle-class families not rich enough to pay $10,000 a year or poor enough to get financial aid.

A governor’s task force has recommended higher education be given a separate fund in the state budget, with guarantees that it will grow in tandem with inflation and enrollment demand. It’s a decent plan, though it faces tough political opposition.

Candidates who dislike that approach should offer alternatives. For example, the state could insist faculty make teaching a higher priority. Universities might welcome performance measures such as graduation rates for their students and job-placement rates for their graduates - if they received direct financial rewards when performance improves.

Voters shouldn’t be satisfied with candidates who give lip service to colleges and money to prisons. They should demand specific plans to correct the state’s budget trends, which threaten our social and economic future.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board