Oscar night had us here at the blog reflecting on our old school movie tastes. We’re suckers for a flick like Casablanca, not just for all the good lines, but also for the way it takes place in the interstices, away from the main action. While World War Two rages outside, beautiful people and character actors alike can find the refuge and time to reminisce, worry about their love lives, and find moral clarity at Rick’s place.

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A similar thing happened last Friday in House Hearing Room D at the State Capitol in Olympia. With the battles over budgets and revenues reaching their peaks outside, the House Higher Education committee rounded up the usual higher ed suspects for a work session to talk about the future. Even as their colleagues were penciling out millions in new university budget cuts, House Higher Ed chair Deb Wallace and some of her fellow committee members introduced yet another study of state universities (this one to be conducted by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee), and led an elegiac discussion of the state of Higher Education.

The long overdue intervention against the House Higher Ed addiction to studies and task forces still hasn’t come, so now we’re all looking forward to the latest from the good folks at JLARC. This will certainly be a fresh perspective and no doubt we’ll all learn some new things about the nooks and crannies of higher ed. But the basic ineluctable and obvious facts will remain: Our state universities are funded at some of the lowest levels in the country; Participation rates at our state universities are among the lowest in the country, forcing the state to import truckloads of people with degrees from other states; Our state universities are some of the most efficient in the country; State funding for our universities has been steadily declining, forcing tuition to rise; and if we keep trying to squeeze even more blood from the stone, the education our students receive will inevitably suffer.

Once the presentation of the JLARC plans was over, Committee Chair Representative Deb Wallace pretty much ceded the floor to ranking Republican Glenn Anderson, who could step into a white tuxedo and time machine and look right at home next to Humphrey Bogart at Rick’s. Representative Anderson warmed up with some boilerplate observations about the bleakness of state budgets for the foreseeable future but then really hit his stride as he announced that college is no longer popular and that we had all better get used to the new world order. He told us that salaries for people with college degrees have been flat for a while (as opposed, presumably, to those skyrocketing salaries for people without college degrees) and thus people were no longer seeing the value of higher education. And then he closed with his signature statement, an argument that he has repeated at HEC Board meetings and in the legislature, telling us that for many of his constituents, college was little more than a “parenting exit strategy.” And higher taxes and six or seven grand a year in tuition seems like a lot just to get the kids out of the house.

Well, O.K., that’s one way of looking at it, but we’re not quite ready to give up on the idea that a college education is both a ticket to a better material life and a broadening of one’s intellectual horizons that is good in and of itself. But whether it’s about economic advancement and personal growth or just about finally turning junior’s room into the study you’ve always wanted, the fact is that our state universities are busting at the seams. All six are over-enrolled and turning away thousands of qualified applicants.

But while the evidence seems to suggest that college remains more popular and valuable than Representative Anderson suggests, none of us should be shocked to discover that his core point is as obvious as gambling in Casablanca. No matter how much people may want their kids to go to college and no matter how much they may perceive college as a good thing, right now the political will does not exist in this state to support four-year higher education. While some members of the House Higher Ed committee met with us in House Hearing Room D, their colleagues were right outside fighting about budgets and taxes. Some were worried that they might lose in November if they cut social services, many were worried about their electoral future if they raised taxes, none were thinking that they would pay a political price if they cut appropriations to state universities.

The time we spent last Friday talking about JLARC studies and the nuances of performance agreements and tuition policy probably would have been better spent talking about how we might organize the thousands of students and alumni in this state to help make state universities a voting issue. Until we do that, everything else is just hanging around Rick’s begging for exit visas.