Perhaps in an effort to show the limits of thinking in 140 or fewer characters, the Senate Republicans and the Senate Republicans plus Rodney Tom and the other guy tweeted the same thing at the same time yesterday:
Answer: Well, no, it’s long past time for a BIG tuition cut. Which is just another way of saying that it is long past time for a big reinvestment of state funds in higher education. To cut tuition without adding state support would be like turning the heat off while it’s still twenty below.
The Senate Republicans, led by the dashing and ambitious young Senator Michael Baumgartner, have been trying to make political hay out of tuition since way back at the beginning of the regular legislative session. This makes sense, as tuition has increased about 60 percent in the last four years, and students and their families have gone from paying 30 percent of the total cost of their educations to paying 70 percent in the last ten years. This steep increase in the price of college has fired up pundits and bloggers and ambitious legislators across the country.
Unfortunately the 140 character pace of our discourse often leaves out the stark reality that tuition increases are the product of one thing only: cuts in state support. Here, in 363 characters, are the facts about higher education in Washington state that have led to tuition increases:
–Washington’s state universities have had more than 50% of their state support cut in the last four years.
–Washington ranks 49th in the country, two dollars per student ahead of Florida, in total per student support for higher education.
–Adjusted for inflation, the cost of instruction at our state universities has remained flat for the last twenty years.
#Running on Fumes
With a pretty blithe disregard for these facts, Senator Baumgartner introduced a bill way back in the regular session that would cut tuition by 3%. Aiming squarely at the cheap seats, he and two other Republicans held a press conference and announced that their plan added a bunch of money to higher, which would allow them to cut tuition.
Would that it were so.
In less than a day, the budget officers at our state universities had read the fine print and crunched the numbers and discovered that much of what Baumgartner was calling “new” money was really just maintenance funding built on a wildly eroded base. The end result would be a further 3.5 percent cut to our already criminally low per student funding.
But the idea of a tuition decrease is politically exciting enough to leave the senate still tweeting about it at this late date. None of the budgets currently on the table do anything real to increase investment in higher ed. That’s why the much more sober and realistic House Democrat budget calls for a modest 3% tuition increase.
At the end of the day, that increase will end up costing students and their families less. When budgets get cut, classes become more scarce and it takes longer to get a degree. So the extra $255 a small tuition increase would cost becomes an extra $8500 to stay another year in school.
So when the state senate ruling caucuses tweet in stereo about cutting tuition, it’s grounded in one of two things: either an ideological commitment to destroying public higher education that’s needs more than 140 characters to explain or a cheap political ploy that’s not worth the bits its made of.