Et Tu Reuven and Marko?

The good news is that everybody’s talking about our state universities. The bad news is that all they want to do is rearrange the deck chairs.

Governor Gregoire’s Department of Education proposal (which won’t solve anything but must be grudgingly admired as an attempt to both grab power and shift cost away from the state) was completely predictable, but it seems to have spawned some dubious responses from people who should know better.

Even as the noise from the Governor’s ill-advised higher ed task force was still reverberating, Representative Reuven Carlyle took to his blog to ponder the big idea “of merging our state’s three regional universities–Western, Central and Eastern Washington universities–and our one unaffiliated institution in Evergreen State College, into the two primary research institutions.” Here at the blog, we think very highly of Rep. Carlyle, consider him to be a great friend, respect his intelligence and passion, and greatly admire the grace with which he rises above the thinly veiled anti-Semitism that often comes his way.

But this latest thing is the dumbest idea we’ve heard in a while.

Turning Western into UW-Bellingham or Eastern into Wazzu-Cheney would do nothing to improve the education of our students and it would cost the state a lot more money.

Representative Carlyle has long been a champion of centralizing “back end utility infrastructure such as HR, finance, admissions, technology, transportation, janitorial services, construction contracts.” That’s a good idea in limited doses, it is a small-to-medium reform (not the sea-change that Reuven thinks it is) that would save the state some money (not nearly enough to save our universities), and it could easily be accomplished within our existing governance structure. Representative Carlyle also thinks that his consolidation idea would help bring “a focus on student success metrics in such a manner that we as legislators can link money to outcomes.” As we have repeatedly pointed out here at the blog, those metrics are readily available and they clearly show that Washington’s universities are the best bang for the buck in the country.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Washington’s universities are among the worst funded in the country and yet among the most highly rated, with the best graduation rates per 100 students enrolled of any state in the country.

The only real effect that Rep. Carlyle’s consolidation idea would have would be to spawn platoons of new upper-level administrators at UW and WSU. And that would cost a lot more money. Presidents, vice presidents, provosts, and deans at UW or WSU cost about three times what they do at Western or Central.

Representative Carlyle regularly calls for systemic change, radical reform, and big ideas, and he regularly challenges others to jump outside the box with him. So the blog would like to take up that challenge and offer one right back at you Reuven: quit trying to sell mild bureaucratic reforms as systemic shifts and start advocating for genuine radical change. Don’t let one election move you away from a really progressive position. Continue to try to do something real to stop the dismantling of public infrastructure, the demonization of public employees, the continuing consolidation of wealth at the tippy top, and the denial of real education to anyone but the most fortunate. Work to reform the most regressive tax structure in the country and tell your business buddies to stop tacitly supporting the massive importation of college degrees funded by other states.
Those would be genuinely systemic changes.

At about the same time Representative Carlyle was blogging, Representative Marko Liias took to the virtual pages of Publicola to sing a very tired old song.

The blog is also a great admirer of Representative Liias, who is generally on the right side of most things and who genuinely cares about Washington’s citizens, but we would encourage him to do a little more homework before he next writes about our universities.

Representative Liias’s op-ed is in response to the governor’s task force recommendation that state universities be granted unlimited tuition-setting authority. He rightly sees rising tuition as a huge burden and barrier to access for our students and his commitment to not “balancing our state budget on the backs of students” is admirable. But his suggestion that we just need to “rein in costs and improve accountability” to keep tuition from going up is just plain wrong.

As we’ve pointed out here before, unlike almost everything else in the world, the cost of our universities has remained relatively constant over the last twenty years:

 

The cost of a university education has not been spiraling out of control—it costs about as much now as it did in 1991. Tuition has been going steadily up because state support has been going dramatically down.

Like Representative Carlyle, Representative Liias falls to the temptation to try to solve a funding problem with policy changes. He calls on his colleagues to “demand accountability” from our universities, thinking, like so many others, that if we just root out all our greed, corruption, and waste, we won’t need any more money. He points to the $10 million a year we spend on the Higher Education Coordinating Board and “layers of middle management and administration” as his examples of how we could reform our evil ways. No one here at the blog (or much of anywhere else in the universities) would shed any tears if the HEC Board disappeared and certainly we could probably do without a few vice provosts and associate deans. But if you completely eliminated the HEC Board and just fired the first twenty mid-level university administrators you saw, you would save maybe 12 or 13 million bucks. That seems like a lot of money, until you remember that our state universities have been cut over 500 million dollars in the last two years.

We would sing to Representative Liias the same song we sang to Representative Carlyle. Now, everybody, follow the bouncing ball: Washington’s universities are among the worst funded in the country and yet among the most highly rated, with the best graduation rates per 100 students enrolled of any state in the country.

These are serious times that require serious people looking for serious answers. When even people like Reuven Carlyle and Marko Liias don’t get it, we’re really in trouble.