Posts by Bill Lyne

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)…

Last summer Governor Gregoire appointed a Higher Education Funding Task Force to develop a “realistic and viable long-range funding strategy” for our state universities and come up with ways to improve our “accountability and performance.” Last Monday the Task Force released its recommendations. The task force was composed primarily of well-dressed and articulate business big…

Three percent. That’s the number you’ve heard. The reality is something more like ten to fourteen percent. When Governor Gregoire released her budget proposal last week, her staff sent a spreadsheet to higher education stakeholders describing the net cut to state universities as about 3%. They arrived at this number by cutting state appropriations to…