So the 2010 Washington State legislative session is a week old and already the writing is on the wall for our state universities.  Governor Gregoire summed it up in her state of the state address:

“Our higher education system is a major economic engine for our recovery.



We need to keep the doors to higher education open to students of all income levels by restoring funding for the State Need Grant Program. 

We owe it to all those, like Janel, who couldn’t attend college without our help.



I’m asking you to provide funding to our community and technical colleges to retrain 2,500 of our workers for the jobs of tomorrow.


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And I’m requesting you provide our four-year institutions with competitive tuition flexibility so we can continue to be ranked among the best in the nation in producing the most innovative workers and employers.”


To translate and sum up, the governor wants to restore the cuts to financial aid that she made in her “Book 1” budget, she wants to further shift the balance of higher education funding to the community and technical colleges, and she wants to give tuition setting authority (“flexibility” isn’t fooling anyone) to the universities and call it good.  You’ll notice that there’s money there for everything except the state universities.  

The restoration of the State Need Grant was a no-brainer.  That $146 million gives those below the middle of the middle class some access to higher education and is the foundation of programs like Husky Promise and other university-based financial aid.  There was talk that the governor’s choice to cut the Need Grant in her Book 1 budget was a shock and awe tactic designed to drum up support for new revenues.  That talk was loud enough that Governor Gregoire felt compelled to vigorously refute it in her various public comments this week, saying that she was simply meeting her obligation to present an all-cuts budget and not trying to scare people into new taxes.  

Certainly there is a lot of evidence to suggest that she was absolutely sincere in saying that.  The guv’s Book 2 budget calls for almost $800 million in new revenue, but it’s very coy about where that money will come from.  In her remarks in various legislative hearings, Governor Gregoire spoke confidently about conversations with her new pal Vice President Biden and the promise of up to a billion dollars in new federal stimulus money.  It’s hard to imagine that a careful politician like Governor Gregoire would raise our hopes like that if she wasn’t pretty damn sure she could deliver.   

And that’s good news and bad news.  

These days any money is good money, even the kind with the treasury printing press ink still drying. But, as our Republican friends are fond of pointing out, getting hooked on fed cash in 2010 can make the withdrawal that much harder in 2012.  

So the bad news is that the VP’s stimulus promises have led our Eymann/Rossi haunted governor to back way off from the taxes she was talking about just a few weeks ago.  And in an election year when Democrats are poised to take a backlash beating, no one’s stepping up to take her place.  So right now it looks like the best we’re going to do is a couple of closed loopholes and maybe a bite on gum.

And that’s too bad, because at a time when everyone’s running around talking about the opportunities in this crisis and the need for fundamental reform, it seems like the least we could do is overhaul the most antiquated and regressive tax structure in the country.  Even if it didn’t net the state one more dime of new revenue, it’s way past time for the legislature to change a system that taxes poor people at a rate of about 17% and rich people at a rate of about 3%.

But we digress . . .

Back at the state o’ the state, right after restoring financial aid, the governor called for more money for worker retraining in community and technical colleges.  This is not a change from the Book 1 budget.  On its face, worker retraining is a laudable goal, but let’s be clear—the governor’s proposal does not add money to the community and technical colleges, it just makes the cut to the universities deeper in order to mitigate the cut to the CTCs.  Keep your eye on the shell with the pea under it: Federal rules for the first stimulus check limit the higher education budget cut to $78 million.  But if you “add” $11.5 million to the CTCs, you can then cut higher ed by $89.5 million.  Divide that evenly between the CTCs and the universities and you can give the false impression that the two sectors were cut equally.  If you wanted to avoid all the unnecessary arithmetic, you could get to the same place by simply cutting the universities $46 million and the CTCs $32 million.  Of course, then you wouldn’t be able to claim that the cuts are equal.  

Funding community colleges is, of course not a bad thing.  But here at the blog, we feel compelled to continue to look at higher ed funding decisions and ask whether anyone in this state gives a shit about having a legitimate 4-year university system.  As always, the numbers make it hard to answer that question with anything but a resounding No:

–Washington ranks 5th in Community College participation and 48th in 4-year college participation

–Washington ranks second in the country in percentage of the higher education budget devoted to community colleges

–Washington is in the bottom five in the country in total per student and total per degree funding for 4-year colleges

–In the last 10 years, state funding for higher education overall has grown by 17%, state funding for community and technical colleges has grown by 28%, and state funding for public 4-year colleges has declined by 7.3%.

–Last year, state funding for public four-year universities was cut by 23%, while state funding for community and technical colleges was cut by 5%.

Public four-year higher education has fallen so far down the budget ladder that the governor and legislators can make tuition-setting authority the big prize for universities and act like they’re really doing something.  Tuition authority will give the universities a little bit better ability to plan and manage, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter who sets tuition.  The university boards of regents and trustees aren’t going to raise tuition any higher or more rapidly than the legislature has over the last 20 years.  Tuition authority coupled with more cuts to state appropriations will only continue the current downward spiral.  

From the day she released her Book 1 budget, the governor made it clear that she had no intention of using any new revenues to buy back the cuts to university state appropriations.  Politically, she’s on pretty safe ground, as no one other than representatives of the universities has really complained.  A pretty safe bet right now is that at the end of this legislative session, our state universities will be cut another $46 million (on top of the over $400 million we were cut last year) and their boards of regents and trustees will have tuition setting authority.  

This result will only keep Washington’s universities on the road to becoming smaller and more private.