Breakfast With the Regionals

President James Gaudino of Central Washington University

President Rodolfo Arevalo of Eastern Washington University

President Thomas (Les) Purce of The Evergreen State College

President Bruce Shepard of Western Washington University

President Bob Hickey of The United Faculty of Central

President Gary Krug of The United Faculty of Eastern

President Laurie Meeker of The United Faculty of Evergreen

President Steven Garfinkle of The United Faculty of Western

President Bill Lyne of the United Faculty of Washington State

President Mary Lindquist of The Washington Education Association

President Larry Otos of the Western Washington University Alumni Association

Mike Bogatay, the Executive Director of The Washington Student Association, along with several other student leaders were also there.   

This coalition of administration, faculty, students, and alumni came together to speak with a single voice about the value of Washington’s Regional Comprehensive Universities.  The legislators who joined us were thoughtful and more than willing to engage in frank conversation about difficult problems.  Our thanks to everyone who was there: 

Rep. Bill Hinkle

Rep. Larry Haler

Rep. Scott White

Rep. Judy Warnick

Rep. Kathy Haigh (who came out on her birthday—Happy Birthday, Kathy!)

Rep. Phyllis Kenney

Rep. Deb Wallace

Rep. Susan Fagan

Rep. Doug Erickson

Rep. Sam Hunt

Rep. Reuven Carlyle

Senator Jim Kastama

Senator Paull Shin

Senator Karen Fraser

Senator Derek Kilmer 

Leslie Goldstein, the Governor’s expert on all things Higher Ed

Once everyone had some coffee and the introductions had been made, the Regional Comprehensive University Coalition made this statement: 

Where Will Your Constituents’ Children Go To College?

We’ve come together today as the leaders of constituencies that you usually hear from separately.  We are the students, faculty, and administration from Central Washington University, Eastern Washington University, the Evergreen State College, and Western Washington University.  And we are here with a single, unified message.

On the invitation to this meeting, we asked the question, Where Will Your Constituents’ Children Go to College?  If things continue in the direction they’re going, the answer to that question will be, Not in This State.

We are here to urge you in the strongest possible terms to reinvest in Washington’s four-year universities before it is too late.     

It has been our experience that when legislators and other state policy makers think of higher education, the first thing they think of is the University of Washington and the second thing they think of is community and technical colleges.  This makes sense, as UW is a world-class research institution with big-time division one sports programs, and we have a fine community college system and everyone has one in their district.  This bi-polar attention has often left our outstanding regional comprehensive universities out of focus and in the higher ed background.   

We’re here today to try to change that a little bit—to put our outstanding regional comprehensive universities in the spotlight. 

Washington has one of the finest sets of regional comprehensive universities in the country.  We educate 32,000 students from all over the state.  Over ninety percent of our students come from within the state and thus our students are much more likely to stay here once they earn their degrees.  Businesses and employers in Washington and across the country recognize our graduates as extremely well prepared, both in their general education and in their specialties.  Many of our graduates are your colleagues and staff.  Our institutions are major contributors to the economy in Cheney, Spokane, Olympia, Ellensburg, and Bellingham.  We also have programs in Bellevue, Bremerton, Des Moines, Everett, Kent, Lynnwood, Moses Lake, Port Angeles, Seattle, Shoreline, Spokane, Tacoma, Vancouver, Wenatchee, and Yakima.

Our universities are among the best educational investments in the country, for both the state and our students.  We rank very high in our retention rates and our six year graduation rates, while at the same time ranking very low in per student and per degree funding.  At the same time we all rank very high in all of the quality surveys and idexes. 

At the heart of this success is our faculty. All of the professors you see here today, along with most of our colleagues, had opportunities at liberal arts colleges and research universities, often at higher salaries, but we chose Central, Eastern, Evergreen, or Western because of the unique opportunities our institutions offered for both committed, excellent teaching and high quality research.  Tenured professors teach at every level of our curriculum—from freshman general education surveys to senior major courses and graduate seminars.  Many of our colleagues at research institutions send their children to our universities because they know they will receive more attention from outstanding faculty in our classes. 

And while we are providing the highest quality learning experiences for our students, we are also producing world-class research. We bring millions of dollars each year in research grants to the state.  We provide economic and policy advice and information to a variety of businesses and state agencies.  We bring new understandings of state and world ecosystems.  Our faculty regularly contribute to the arts at the community, state and national level. 

All of these projects not only contribute to the advancement of knowledge and the economy of our state, they also nourish our teaching and provide our students excellent hands-on research and learning opportunities.   

And our students are by far the best testament to the value of our universities.  Our students regularly attend and thrive in the best graduate programs in the country.  And they also go on to be leaders in business, science and the arts. 

For your constituents, an opportunity to attend one of our regional comprehensive universities is an opportunity to change their socioeconomic circumstances, to contribute to the community and the state, and to perhaps lead a more fulfilling and useful life.        

All of this is now in Great Danger.

In the last legislative session, four-year universities bore the brunt of the cuts to higher education and Washington’s cuts to its four-year universities were among the highest in the nation.  Our four institutions saw their state appropriations reduced between 25% and 30%.  For all of our institutions, the state contribution to our budgets is now at or below 50%. 

This would have been very bad under any circumstances.  But even before the collapse of the last legislative session, our comprehensive universities were underfunded. 

Even before the last legislative session, Washington’s four-year college participation rate ranked 48th in the nation. 

Even before the bottom fell out, our faculty salaries were in the 30th to 40th percentiles of peers. 

Even before we were cut more than almost any other state university system in the country, our per student and per degree funding rates were in the bottom five in the country. 

Even before this recession, Washington ranked third in the nation as an importer of bachelors degrees and above.    

The outstanding administration, faculty, and staff at our universities have worked incredibly hard to absorb the latest round of cuts.  You have received reports from us showing that our enrollments are up and that our students are, so far, getting the classes they need to graduate.  

Please do not let these reports fool you into thinking that things are O.K.   Please do not let the heroic efforts of our faculty and staff lull you into thinking that this situation is sustainable. 

Continued lack of funding will inevitably have a profoundly detrimental effect on the quality of the education our students receive. 

As our classes become fewer and bigger, the attention from faculty and hands-on opportunities our students receive will decline.

As we continue to cut advising, day care, and student health and counseling services, our current excellent retention and graduation rates will precipitously decline.

As greater and greater tuition increases partially replace reduced state funding, many of your constituents will have fewer opportunities to attend college. 

In the next five to seven years, at least a quarter of our tenured faculty will retire.  Faculty across the country will be retiring in the same proportion.  Those states that have not cut their universities as badly as Washington has and those states who have had the foresight to invest in higher education will have a tremendous advantage in hiring new faculty.

The big losers in the current arrangements are your constituents and their children. This will be especially devastating for those in the middle classes and below.  Washington is a beautiful and desirable place to live, and businesses in this state will continue to be able to recruit the smart, prepared, and educated colleagues they need from the states that have invested in higher education.  Our continued malnourishment of our universities is putting Washington’s citizens and their children at a tremendous disadvantage in the competition for Washington’s best jobs.   

We understand that to a great extent we are preaching to the choir here.  We know that you know the value of 4-year higher education and that none of you wanted the cuts to our universities to be as devastating as they were.  And we know that, in a situation where the budget deficit gets bigger with each new revenue forecast, that we are just one of your many problems.  We know that you have incredibly difficult choices to make.

But while we cannot possibly solve all of the problems that face us, we will certainly not solve any of them unless we face them.  And here together today, we would like to suggest a couple of ways to have the conversation about higher education that will let us face our problems more honestly. 

It is extremely important that our students are with us here today.  Too often people speak of the universities and our students as though we are separable.  Too often we have been pitted against each other on the issue of tuition.  As our state support continues to decrease, the university leaderships have seen no alternative to higher tuition to keep their institutions from falling off a cliff.  And our students of course see higher tuition as a barrier to their education.  We’re here together today to say that the best and only way to keep public four-year education affordable is to dramatically increase state support. 

In the same way, too often our universities have been pitted against other sectors of public education.  Too often when we are making the case for our universities we are asked if we think the money should be taken from K-12.  Pitting us against our other education colleagues is false and unproductive.  Mary and Sandra are here today to support us, just as we support them.  All public education in this state is desperately underfunded, and simply cutting one sector to partially fund another does nothing to help any of our students. 

We all understand that the problems you face are monumental and that no immediate, genuine solution is presenting itself.  But pretending that we are not on the same side as our students or our other education colleagues is not helpful and does not get us any closer to a real solution.

Obviously public education in this state cannot be adequately funded without serious and sustained attention to increasing state revenues.  We are happy to join those conversations and offer our advice about what impacts any revenue options will have on higher education.  Those of us here today not encumbered with those pesky regulations about state agencies are happy to join you even more vigorously in those conversations.

The other way that we would like to try to redirect the higher education conversation is around questions of innovation, accountability, and reform.  We are all for these things, but they cannot be understood as substitutes for the funding that we need.  Too often in bad times we imagine that we can cut funding and just do things differently and everything will be O.K.  If we just eliminate waste or if we teach more courses online, or if we offer 4-year degrees at 2-year colleges, we can cut a hundred million dollars from our regional universities and produce even more high quality degrees.  That kind of thinking won’t work. 

The stubborn fact is that our high retention and graduation rates, our high quality ratings, and our low costs make it clear that we are among the most efficient and cost effective universities in the country.  Our faculty were using technology to improve our teaching and providing online learning opportunities long before corporate education companies began to explore these things as sources of profit. 

During the upcoming legislative session you will be receiving two studies along with recommendations from the HEC Board—a system design study and a tuition study.  Both of these studies are competent, thorough, and contain some interesting recommendations.  But these studies should not distract us from the major concern of excellent universities that are on the brink of destruction.  These studies should be understood as footnotes to the problem of inadequate funding. 

We are of course always looking for new efficiencies and things we can do better.  What we are not looking for are ways to simply do things more cheaply at the expense of the quality of the education of our students. 

At Central, Eastern, Evergreen, and Western we continue to be committed to the mission of public universities.  Our job is to provide world-class education to all of the public who want it, not just those who can afford it.  We don’t just train people for jobs, we educate them for careers and community leadership.  We don’t just train the workforce, we educate the citizenry.  Reinvesting in our state universities is reinvesting in the state at a time when we most need it.

If four-year higher education in Washington is to survive, all of us—students, faculty, staff, administration, and alumni need to come together and make our voices heard in Olympia.  Join us now in the effort…