Just Business

“It’s easy to wish we had invested that $3 billion more directly into our workforce development, adult basic education, English as a second language, community and technical colleges and our universities.”

– Representative Reuven Carlyle, on the concessions given to Boeing before they split for a low-wage state.

Here at the blog, we often find ourselves keeping company with other people who are concerned about the abysmal funding for our state’s public universities.  When casting about for ideas as to how to better convince legislators that more support for Washington’s universities is crucial for the future of the state, some of these folks inevitably hit on the idea that we need to get business leaders to be advocates for us.  Those people have clout, we say, and surely they understand the value of a college education.  Most of them went to college and they hire lots of people from all over the country with college degrees. 

All we need to do is get the leaders of Boeing (the ones that aren’t packing for Carolina), Microsoft, Intalco, and Nintendo to call up their legislative buddies and explain to them that, if Washington’s residents are going to continue to have any kind of access to a university education, we’re gonna need more money.

Certainly it is not unusual to find individual business leaders who do more than their share to support our universities.  They make individual gifts, they sit on our boards, and they often put the bite on their rich friends to help us raise private money.  The Gates Foundation has lots of dubious ideas, but you can’t say that they haven’t put their money where their mouth is when it comes to education.  

But we should be careful not to confuse the support of individual business people with the support of business.  Those foundations and executives and CEOs write us checks on their own time.  In their day jobs, their primary responsibility is to their shareholders and the bottom line. 

And that’s why business will never be genuine, meaningful advocates for our state universities.  

Washington’s fanciest businesses employ lots of people with fancy degrees.  Our slice of the brain-power economy has helped make us the state with the third highest percentage of people with 4-year college degrees in the country.  With that kind of demand for four year degrees, you would think that business would have a strong interest in a robust system of four-year universities.  But if you thought that you would be wrong.  

Any business executive knows that outsourcing is one of the most important tools for improving the bottom line.  If it’s cheaper to buy widget part A from a subcontractor than it is to make it in-house and the quality of your widgets doesn’t decrease (and sometimes even if it does), you do it in a heartbeat.  If you can fire all your janitors and contract with an exploitative sweatshop for the same service at half the price, you jump on that, and patch up what’s left of your conscience by writing a letter to said sweatshop reminding them of your company’s high standards for employee welfare.

The beautiful things about outsourcing the education for your best jobs are that you don’t even have to pay the subcontractor and the guilt factor is pretty low.  When you go looking for people to fill those jobs that require a four-year degree, there is absolutely no need to get squeamish about crossing the state line (or even mighty oceans).  Those jobs usually come with moving packages and Washington is a beautiful and desirable place to live, so why not let the taxpayers in Michigan, Ohio, and Texas pay to educate the employees who will be more than happy to move here after graduation.

(And while we’ve said this here at the blog before, it bears repeating: this dynamic is surely a lot of the reason for the huge disparity between Washington’s 2-year college participation rate—5th in the nation—and 4-year college participation rate, which vacillates between 48th and 49th.  The labor pool for those jobs that require AA degrees is not nearly as mobile as the bachelor’s pool, so you need a healthier home farm team.) 

So no matter how warm and fuzzy the feelings of individual executives may be toward universities, when they’re talking turkey with legislators and policy-makers, their message will always be clear: Our state universities are great, but don’t even think about raising our B&O taxes or rerouting our tax breaks and subsidies in order to increase state appropriations for universities.  That’s what they say and that’s what we here at the blog would say too if we worked in the executive suite.

It’s just business.

Boeing will bring more jobs and goose the economy in South Carolina, but their arrival will not lead to more South Carolinians having access to better funded state universities.  

So if we’re waiting for business to take the lead in advocating for more state funding for state universities, we’re going to keep getting what we’ve been getting, which is steadily declining state funding which leads to steadily increasing tuition which keeps more and more of the middle class out of college.

If the legislature is going to be convinced to reverse the longstanding trend of declining state funding for state universities, the pressure will have to come from regular people. The children of the people who sit on our boards are all going to college, usually not at our universities.  It’s the children of teachers, firefighters, small business owners, information technology workers, and state employees who are getting less and less access to the education they need to compete for Washington’s best jobs.  If they don’t start letting their representatives know that college education is a voting issue for them, our universities will soon be dramatically smaller and more private.