WSU, Eastern faring well in Olympia

OLYMPIA – Lawmakers are getting ready to send some big dollars to Washington’s colleges and universities.

Depending on which proposal you cite, roughly $100 million is slated to increase enrollments, and about $80 million is budgeted to expand various financial aid programs. Budget proposals include money for faculty raises and research programs.

All told, proposed operating funding for Washington State University and Eastern Washington University – which doesn’t include construction money – is up 13 percent in the main budget proposals for the next two years, calculated for inflation.

That would amount to more than $525 million at WSU, and more than $100 million at Eastern, give or take a few million.

“It’s probably the best budget the universities have ever had, in history,” said Larry Ganders, who lobbies for WSU.

But Gov. Chris Gregoire and the Democratic majority in the Legislature seem intent on doing more than increasing spending for one biennium. Legislation moving toward the governor’s desk would establish a new framework for college education in Washington – limiting tuition increases, committing the state to provide significant support and expanding financial aid programs for needy students.

“The governor is really saying that the future of the state, economically speaking and culturally speaking, is linked to the investment we make in higher education,” said Jeff Gombosky, EWU’s representative at the Capitol and a former state representative from Spokane.

The final picture is still being formed, as lawmakers work to match up the separate budget proposals from Gregoire, the House and Senate. But the budgets have a lot in common, and this year’s $1.9 billion surplus has made a lot of extra money available.

Even Sen. Mark Schoesler, a Ritzville Republican who represents both Pullman and Cheney, said he’s pleased with efforts to boost higher education spending and limit tuition increases. But, like other minority Republican lawmakers, he said that this year’s spending plans are too free with the surplus, and that might imperil efforts to establish long-term support for colleges and universities.

“My fear is that as we overspend and the economy performs as predicted, we’ll be back here and higher education immediately goes on the chopping block again, because of an overall lack of fiscal discipline,” Schoesler said.

‘Integral connection’

College officials have complained for years that state funding hasn’t kept pace with expenses. Meanwhile, students and families have seen tuition rise rapidly at state schools – more than 70 percent between 1994-95 and 2004-05.

The governor has proposed capping university tuition increases at 7 percent a year for WSU and the University of Washington and 5 percent for regional schools like EWU, while freezing community college rates for now. The House and Senate budgets have similar proposals.

Schoesler proposed tying tuition to the rate of inflation, a proposal that’s “resting comfortably” in committee, he said. Still, he thinks the various approaches to limiting tuition are a good idea.

“We simply can’t sustain tuition rates that run double, triple inflation,” he said.

Gregoire’s proposal also attempts to establish a framework for setting a minimum state contribution to higher education. Her plan would set a funding goal that would require the state to be in the 60th percentile of funding for comparable states, known as Global Challenge States. While no Legislature can commit future lawmakers to spending, the policy change would help establish a statewide framework and commitment to funding levels, said Debora Merle, Gregoire’s higher education policy adviser.

“I think there’s a growing recognition about the integral connection between higher education and the economy,” Merle said.

Representatives from institutions all over the state have worked together to try and come up with a long-term strategy, she said.

“It’s no small feat to have the entire higher ed community pulling in the same direction on something,” she said. “The Balkanization of higher ed is on hold.”

There’s been a growing interest in higher education, and particularly work force training, from the business community. Washington tends to be a net importer of college grads – the state doesn’t produce enough graduates to fill all the jobs. In particular, business leaders have pressed colleges to produce more graduates in certain fields like medicine, engineering and construction management.

So, while lawmakers are proposing increasing overall enrollments, they’re also targeting spending on those “high-demand” enrollments. The Senate budget, for example, proposes spending $31 million on 2,300 enrollments in high-demand fields, and another $17 million on enrollments specifically in math and sciences.

Spokane would see several such positions in the creation of new dental and medical programs. The programs are cooperative efforts between WSU, the University of Washington and EWU. Budget proposals would direct more than $11 million to establish the programs and enroll 20 students in medical and dental schools during the first year.

‘Rhetoric is easy’

Another example of the expanded funding for universities is the research spending proposed by the Legislature. Most university research is funded by the federal government, but lawmakers this year are proposing spending millions – the final amount is in flux – on biofuels research to be done in part by WSU.

WSU also coordinated a unified request for a wide range of agricultural funding into crop research – a proposal that has Ganders, the WSU lobbyist, hopeful.

“All through the ‘90s, they didn’t fund anything like that,” he said.

The budget proposals would send $58 million or so to WSU’s largest capital request; the construction of a life sciences building that’s already under way across from Martin Stadium on the Pullman campus. There aren’t similar big-ticket new projects at EWU or the Community Colleges of Spokane, though lots of money is headed there for renovations and maintenance.

EWU is expecting to get funding for ongoing renovations at Hargreaves Hall, as well as money to begin planning a remodel of its main classroom building at Cheney, Patterson Hall.

Eastern’s new president, Rodolfo Arevalo, said he’s also pleased with some of the new projects being funded that target EWU’s student population – especially money directed toward “retention and completion” programs to help poor, first-generation college students stay in school.

“That’s really good for us because we have a large population of first-generation college students,” he said.

Arevalo came to Eastern from a long career in higher education in Texas, and he said he’s been satisfied with this year’s Legislature.

“Rhetoric is easy,” he said. “Action is a little harder, and I see a lot more positive action in Washington than I did in Texas.”

Rep. Deb Wallace, the first-year chairwoman of the House Higher Education Committee, said this session’s proposals are laying the groundwork for future changes. In particular, she said, she’s interested in investigating how colleges and universities can be more transparent and accountable. One possibility being discussed for the future is the idea of performance agreements between the state and schools, in which colleges would agree to meet certain goals in exchange for funding.

“Right now, higher education investment is kind of a black hole,” she said. “What happens between the allocation and the degrees coming out?”

Wallace said addressing that problem would be just one more way the state can focus sharply on making a college education available to more people.

“The idea is let’s provide greater access because we have thousands of people not even thinking of going to school, in part because of the expense,” she said.