Americans face growing international economic competition. Washington, poised on the Pacific Rim, expects to be one of the beneficiaries or victims of the emergence of powerful economies on the other side of the ocean. It is common sense today that education, and higher education in particular, will determine which economy will emerge victorious in this new global age.

To many Washington policymakers and citizens, economic competition requires technical training—focusing on those specific jobs that are expected to grow. At both the community college and the four-year college level, there is an effort to direct money and students to “high demand” fields that will help Washingtonians develop a vibrant economy for the twenty-first century.

Certainly, we should offer vocational and technical training to our citizens, especially in two-year colleges. But is this enough? Are the more broad, more general, liberal arts and sciences programs that have long defined baccalaureate education a waste of money and time? Are they a luxury we can no longer afford? Are they likely to encourage the kind of economic innovation we need? To answer these questions, perhaps we should look abroad, to the very economies from which we now face competition.

There has been much discussion of Asian tiger economies and the importance of technical higher education in China and elsewhere. For a long time, the Chinese government invested heavily in developing technical experts, hoping that their well-trained workers would compete successfully against Americans and Europeans for jobs. But now, as China emerges as an important economic power in its own right, it is rethinking this strategy. No longer willing to be just technicians, the Chinese wish to be leaders. And, they have discovered, to lead requires investing in the liberal arts and sciences.

China, for example, has recently opened a new liberal arts university to encourage students to be more creative. It is encouraging its students to think outside the box. It is investing in small student-centered classrooms and embracing a more flexible curriculum. In doing so China is moving beyond its traditional vocational focus in its bid to become the world’s economic leader. The Chinese know that the leaders of tomorrow will require a broad education in the arts and sciences.

This is the same conclusion reached by Michigan State University professor Yong Zhao in his book Catching Up or Leading the Way. Zhao, who was born and raised in China but is now living in the United States and raising his family here, argues that Americans are being short-sighted in emphasizing technical education and easily quantifiable results. Observing his young children’s education, Zhao notes that what makes American education distinctive is not its obsessive focus on standardized tests, but the unquantifiable value of programs that promote creativity—the arts, music, theater, and extra-curricular activities. He concludes that even as Americans fall behind on international standardized tests—something, no doubt, we hope to change—they continue to have the most competitive and creative economy precisely because of the broad education their children receive, an education that is overlooked by most international comparisons.

In short, the broad education provided by Washington’s four-year institutions creates the kind of people that our economy and our society needs.

Perhaps no experiment speaks more of this effort to go from being the world’s technicians to its creative leaders than the opening of the new New York University campus in Abu Dhabi. Funded by the Abu Dhabi government, the campus hopes to become the “world’s honors college.” But Abu Dhabi’s government, like China’s, knows that the most creative students would be ill served by a narrow, technical education. The world needs technicians, but Abu Dhabi also wants to educate the next generation of innovators. The core curriculum is oriented around four major areas:Pathways of World Literature; Structures of Thought and Society; Art, Technology, and Invention; and Ideas and Methods of Science. In short, NYU-Abu Dhabi seeks to replicate the American liberal arts and sciences model for the world.

There are places in the United States, too, that are refocusing on liberal education. Business schools are increasingly arguing that their students need to receive more humanistic education in order to be better leaders and thinkers. Medical schools seek students who have a strong liberal arts background because they know that these doctors have not just the creative capacities but also the empathy that future doctors will need. In short, both business and medical schools believe that it is not enough to have technical knowledge; one needs the broad foundation that only a liberal arts and sciences education provides.

The liberal arts and sciences matter for more than just economic reasons. Baccalaureate education prepares people for life. We hope that a democratic society offers its citizens the education necessary to lead fulfilling lives. Moreover, in a tradition reaching back to the Founding Fathers, liberal education is intended to prepare students to be responsible and effective citizens. The nice thing, however, is that the four-year colleges’ curriculum of liberal arts and sciences can do all these things. In helping students prepare for their personal lives and their roles as citizens, it also develops their creative, analytic, and thinking skills—the skills that other countries recognize have been the basis for Americans’ economic global dominance.

Of course, Washingtonians need and deserve more than one kind of higher education. There is an important place in Washington for technical, vocational training. But, as our economic competitors know, we also need the broader, creative education that will inspire new ideas and new solutions to current and future problems. We have tended to focus our resources on the former and forget about the latter. In a competitive global world, however, China, Abu Dhabi, and other countries will claim the ground that we abandon. It’s time for us to reclaim it—both to improve our society and to retain our competitiveness.  

One of the big claims being thrown against Washington’s elected leaders is that they have been profligate during good times and now, because of their spending binge, must cut back during hard times. Behind this rhetoric is an assumption that Washingtonians are being heavily taxed, much more so than their counterparts in other parts of this country. A recent study by the conservative Tax Foundation suggests otherwise. In fact, Washingtonians are taxed well below the national rate.

According to the Tax Foundation, Washington’s state and local tax burden was 40th in the nation (one being the highest) in 2000, and had risen only to 35th in the nation in 2008. This includes state taxes, local taxes, and taxes paid by Washington citizens to other states. In 2008, Washingtonians were taxed about 8% below the national average for citizens of other states. In short, Washingtonians’ tax burden remains significantly lower than that of citizens in most states. Click on chart...

There are two implications to take from this study. While overall taxation did go up during the early 1990s, it dropped dangerously below the national average in the latter half of the decade. By the early 2000s, Washingtonians were taxed at a rate 10% below the national average. The result is that Washington leaders had to correct for under-taxation. Nonetheless, Washingtonians’ tax burden remains lower than the national average today.

Second, and more important, the study helps explain why an income tax, even a revenue-neutral income tax, is so important. Washington citizens believe that they bear a much more heavy tax burden than other states because Washington is one of the most regressive tax regimes in the country. The result is that the burden of taxation falls disproportionately and unfairly on lower and middle income citizens, while the richest taxpayers do not pay their share, especially in contrast to citizens in other states.

So long as the tax burden is so unevenly distributed, support for public institutions and public programs will be weak. But if we can distribute Washington’s lighter than average tax burden more fairly, citizens will also be relieved of the illusion that we are over-taxed. In turn, the public institutions that serve lower and middle income Washingtonians—schools and universities, fire and police protection, basic health care—will gain the popular support they deserve.

Here at the blog, we still remember that ad in the back of 1970s issues of Rolling Stone (when it was still on newsprint and still about music) that invited readers to send five dollars to the Universal Life Church and become an ordained minister, fully empowered to perform weddings, funerals, etc.

So we weren’t surprised to read in the Seattle Times (6-4-10) that an internet company in West Virginia called American Public University is offering Walmart employees “college credit for performing their jobs, including such tasks as loading trucks and ringing up purchases.” (Really, we’re not making this up.) Apparently, workers can “earn up to 45 percent of the credits needed for an associate or bachelor’s degree while on the job.”

Is this a great country, or what? Now, if you get a job that requires absolutely no college coursework, to say nothing of a degree, you can soon find yourself almost halfway to a degree simply by doing that job. No wonder we’re cutting funding to universities. Why pay for chemistry labs or history professors when people can get paid minimum wage, stock shelves, and earn college credits all at the same time?

The Walmart slimeballs are, of course, pitching themselves as working class heroes. “We want to provide you with more ways and faster ways to succeed with us,” the head of Walmart’s U.S. division told employees at the company’s annual meeting. The chief administrative officer, reaching for ever higher levels of condescension, said, “People will surprise you if you give them opportunities.”

This would be funnier if it weren’t so much like what’s happening in real higher education policy. Washington’s Higher Education Coordinating Board has a mandate to produce tens of thousands more baccalaureate degrees in the next twenty years. And judging from the HEC Board’s “System Design” discussions last year, they don’t really care how they get them. Applied baccalaureate degrees, online degrees, degrees from for-profit companies, and credit for “life experience” are all on the table. The HEC Board and the legislature are hell-bent on getting people more credentials, but they’re not interested in paying for genuine education.

And all of this gets trotted out with the same sort of populist rhetoric that flows from Walmart execs. “Educating more people to higher levels” was the battle cry of the HEC Board last year. It should have been “Rushing as fast as we can toward mediocre and worse 4 year public education.”

Kittens born in an oven aren’t biscuits, teenagers with five dollars and a Universal Life card aren’t ordained ministers, and diplomas from places like American Public University aren’t legitimate baccalaureate degrees. The education marketplace is booming while real education is rapidly disappearing.

As community and technical colleges and for-profit “universities” continue to grow, public, four-year universities are starving and becoming increasingly more private. This will have a devastating effect on all of American society and culture. The space program, cancer research, American social mobility, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, and the free speech movement all have deep roots in American public universities. Their disappearance and transformation into institutions available only to the privileged will dramatically change the United States. At a time when emerging economies like India and China are investing in genuine liberal arts and sciences education, the United States generally and Washington in particular are turning more and more toward narrow technical and vocational training.

The cure for cancer isn’t going to be found at a community college, and the Vietnam war would have ended a lot later if college students had all been working at Walmart.

Here at the blog, our political education has come fast and furious. We still have a lot to learn, but there are two things we know for sure:

1. Stuff that is pure bullshit if it’s said enough in enough of the right places takes on the obduracy of sacred writ, and becomes very hard to challenge, no matter how dumb it might be.

2. Budget problems are really political problems.

In category 1 we have the widening divide between Washington’s public universities and its community colleges. A brief glance at the facts makes it clear that this state’s government places far more value on two-year higher education than it does on four-year higher ed. Washington ranks in the top five in community college participation rates and in the bottom five in four-year college participation rates. Washington is now first in the nation in the percentage of its higher education budget that is devoted to community and technical colleges. In the last twenty years, Washington has invested four times more in two-year colleges than in four-year colleges.

When we go trolling among legislators and their staff looking for explanations for this disparity, we inevitably encounter a series of myths:

Myth # 1: Only community college students get, need, or want jobs. In the 2010 supplemental state budget, the universities were once again cut more than the community colleges. This was done in the name of “Workforce Training.” The governor, legislators, business leaders, and staff from the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges all told us that the best way to turn the economy around is by training people for the sorts of lower middle class jobs that they would never consider for themselves or their children. Listen to the “workforce training” rhetoric for too long and you come away thinking that only people with Associates degrees get jobs and that those who get four-year degrees are only looking for navel-gazing self-fulfillment, with no intention or probability of ever joining the workforce.

But the facts, of course, are that people with 4-year degrees stand about a four times better chance of getting a job—a better job that pays more:

“Workforce training” might be better described as “policy enforcement of class barriers within the workforce.”

Myth # 2: Community and Technical Colleges are a more efficient, better bang for the buck. This is probably the most sacred of the CTC sacred cows. The reasoning is that since the community colleges are running faculty sweatshops, with mostly part-time, badly paid, no-benefits instructors, they must be generating education on the cheap. But in fact, administrative costs at the community colleges are higher than they are at the state universities and the gap between university-level instruction costs and community college instruction costs is rapidly shrinking. For every full time student who enrolls for the 2010-11 school year, Western Washington University will receive $4,485 from the State General Fund. For every full time student who enrolls for the 2010-11 school year, a Washington state community college will receive $4,614 from the State General Fund. Soon students will be paying the same tuition for an “applied baccalaureate” degree from a community college that they would pay for a real baccalaureate degree from a state university. So you can get a bachelor of applied arts degree in interior design from Bellevue Community College (sorry, Bellvue College) for the same price as a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Western.

It gets worse when we start looking at output. Washington’s state universities, despite being chronically underfunded, have the best graduation rates in the country. About 19% of all the people who enter community colleges actually finish. A qualified high school senior who goes directly to a four-year university is four times more likely to get a bachelors degree than the same student who goes to community college with the intent of transferring to a four-year college.

Myth # 3: Washington’s public universities are elitist and arrogant. This rolls myths 1 and 2 into a one-liner seasoned with lots of easy shots at Mark Emmert’s salary. It depends heavily on traditional anti-intellectual suspicion of the book-learnin’ that alienates students from the “real world.”

State-supported public universities are actually the opposite of elitist, designed to give regular people the same educational opportunities available to the elites who can pay very high prices to attend private universities.

What is in fact elitist is a bunch of comfortable politicians and policy-makers creating budgets that deny higher education to people below the middle of the middle class while at the same time spouting clichés about the common people. It’s pretty ironically elitist to call the universities elitist as you are cutting their state appropriations and driving their tuition up, making them more and more the playgrounds of the privileged.

Beneath these myths lie some pretty straightforward political realities. Businesses don’t want to pay taxes to support state universities when they can recruit people with college degrees from around the country. State universities are in six legislative districts, while community colleges are in thirty-four. The State Board for Community and Technical Colleges is as organized and politically influential as the Higher Education Coordinating Board is dysfunctional and politically hopeless.

All of which brings us to the second truth we’ve learned here at the blog: budget problems are really political problems.

Yes, the state economy’s bad and times are tough. Yes, everyone needs to tighten their belt and do their share. But state universities have been asked to do far more than their share:

Cutting our state universities more than almost any other universities in the country has been a political, not a budgetary, choice. And it is clear that we need to come up with political solutions.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

And in politics, nothing communicates better than money and votes:

Help support the revival of public university education in Washington:

Help us show our representatives that university education is a voting issue:

Just as surely as spring melts into summer, just as caterpillars inevitably emerge as butterflies, the 2010 legislative session has ended (a little late) and the election season has begun. Our elected representatives and those who aspire to be our elected representatives have transformed from stately and distinguished leaders and policy makers into hustlers haunting union halls, front porches, living rooms, and coffee shops, handing out their resumes and pictures like auditioning actors, looking for money and votes. It’s poignant and oddly reassuring.

Our public universities have always been deeply involved in the legislative part of the process, not so much the election part. And that’s a big part of the reason we’re still the state’s rainy day fund and the stepchildren to the community and technical colleges. We haven’t been bringing any money or any votes, so we’re not on the top of any legislator’s list.

So now we want in.

FYI PAC is an independent, unaffiliated political action committee, launched to support candidates who understand the value of Washington’s public universities. We welcome contributions from anyone who supports affordable, accessible, quality four-year public education in Washington.

For years, university students, faculty, and administrators have been going to Olympia making excellent arguments for the state to better support its public universities. Here at the blog, we’re mostly teachers, and every teacher knows that even arguments most excellent don’t make a dent until somebody’s listening. And nothing makes legislators listen more than money and votes. So check out FYI PAC and help make the voices of our universities heard in Olympia.

A Big UFWS thanks to everyone in the state legislature who had the courage to raise the revenue to keep vital state services available in Washington.

For Washington’s public state universities, the news in the 2010 supplemental state budget was bad, but it could have been worse. After months of concern and threat, funding for the State Need Grant and much of the funding for student Work Study was preserved. This funding will help to make sure that public university education remains available to qualified students from all income groups.

Each university must accommodate a 6.3% cut to its state appropriations, on top of the 25% to 30% reductions to state appropriations that were imposed in last year’s biennial budget. This will of course mean fewer and larger classes and more time and money spent earning degrees.

On each of our campuses, the United Faculty of Washington State is working hard to make sure these cuts have the least possible impact on our students.

The 2010 legislative session was a difficult one for everybody, but there were some signs that our continuing effort to help the legislature understand the precarious position of Washington’s public universities had some effect.

UFWS is committed to continuing to work with our administrations, students, alumni and elected representatives to make sure that our outstanding universities survive these tough times. 

A tip of the blog hat to TVW and Inside Olympia for giving us college folks a chance to explain ourselves.  Mike Bay, TVW Director of Programming, and Austin Jenkins, Inside Olympia host and consensus lead dog of Olympia reporters, are both gents of the highest caliber. 

Link to TVW.

So if you’d called your bookie a month ago and said, I’ve got a thousand bucks that says the United States Congress will pass sweeping health care reform before the Washington State Legislature will pass a supplemental state budget, you probably could have gotten pretty good odds.

Unlike their big brothers and sisters in D.C., the Republicans in Olympia aren’t doing parliamentary somersaults or calling anyone baby killers, they’re mostly just waiting to go home. This is all about Democrats in all their diversity—the blue-greens, the road kills, the legislators in swing districts, and most of all leadership. The official story is that this standoff is about sales tax, but those in the know seem to think it boils down to a staring match between the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader.

Here at the blog, we’re feeling a little bit like Republicans, relegated to the sidelines and living the life of a bargaining chip. The proposed cuts to state university operating budgets in the house, senate, and governor’s proposals are bad, badder, and worse, respectively, but the worst could be yet to come. That’s what happened to us last year, when the 11:59 deal-making of the reconciliation budget ended up cutting us more than either the house or the senate proposals.

In Monday’s paper, we got a roundabout reminder of why that possibility means a dimmer future. The Seattle Times took a break from its daily blaming of state employees for everything wrong in the state of Washington and ran an Op-Ed piece from Department of Commerce Director Rogers Weed. Mr. Weed set out to smack down Idaho Governor Butch Otter and set him straight on how much better our state is for business than his. He cites our “skilled work force” as one of the primary reasons why businesses should choose Washington, and then goes on to give the misleading impression that we grow that work force at home:

We invest in our people because companies need great talent to innovate and grow. Washington has more adults with at least 12 years of education (over 30 percent with bachelor’s degrees) than any Western state and ranks sixth among all states.

Mr. Weed should count himself lucky that he didn’t get struck by lightning for using the words “invest,” “Washington,” and “education” in the same paragraph. We have a lot of educated people in this state, but most of them were educated somewhere else. Washington ranks 48th in four-year college participation rates and 3rd in the importation of people with college degrees. Washington ranks 45th in the nation in K-12 funding and 48th in higher ed funding. We yap a lot in this state about the value of education, paramount duty, blah, blah, but when we look up at the reality of the funding scoreboard, it’s painfully clear that we don’t even come close to walking that talk.

What separates Washington from Idaho is what Mr. Weed calls an “enviable quality of life,” which boils down to a beautiful and temperate west side and the Pacific Ocean. If Washington were where Idaho is and we invested as little in “our people” as we do now, we’d make Idaho look like this side of paradise.

The $18,000 dollars that the state is spending each day to fund the special legislative session would pay for three plus years of tuition at Western Washington University. And the most depressing thing is that we’re spending that tuition money on the short strokes. We’re paying for pissing matches and arguments over tenths of percents instead of discussions of how to permanently right the ship. As wrong-headed as much of the “reform” and “footprint of government” talk can be, at least it’s trying to take on something big.

Washington ranks 35th in the nation in total taxes as a percentage of personal income and at the same time we have the most regressive tax structure in the country, taxing poor people at more than 5 times the rate of rich people. We’re a low tax state that dumps most of the burden on low-income people. Neither of those problems will be fixed in this special legislative session.

But imagine what we could do if we just started taxing the right people and just bumped our tax base up to say, 30th in the nation. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to invest in so many people educated in other states.

Dear Speaker Chopp,

We are the leaders of the United Faculty of Washington State. We represent 2200 faculty and educate 31,000 students at Washington’s Regional Comprehensive Universities.

We write to you knowing that you are working hard to find the right balance of new revenues and spending cuts in order to balance the 2010 supplemental state budget. We know that you are facing many difficult problems and facing hundreds of competing interests, and we are confident that you will ultimately do what is best for our state.

As you continue your deliberations and negotiations, we would like to take this opportunity to remind you of the importance of our state’s four-year higher education institutions. Our state universities and college are key to Washington’s economic recovery and future.

Each of the proposed supplemental budgets includes significant cuts to state appropriations to four-year higher education, ranging from a low of 3 percent to a high of 6.4 percent. We recognize that cuts are inevitable, but we hope, for the sake of our students, that when the final budget is written, the cuts to our universities and college are as low as possible. The proposed cuts are certain to have a tremendously negative impact on our students. Cuts beyond what have already been proposed will be utterly devastating, and will dramatically reduce college access and affordability.

As you know, this year’s cuts will come on top of 23 percent cuts to our state appropriations in last year’s biennial budget. These cuts were some of the deepest in the state and the nation.

These cuts were partially offset by tuition increases that will approach 30 percent in this biennium. These steep tuition increases make it imperative that you do everything you can in your current negotiations to retain funding for the Student Need Grand and Student Work Study Program. Public four-year higher education must remain public and available to all qualified students in Washington.

Again, we understand that you have a lot of tough choices to make. We stand ready to help you in any way we can.

Sincerely,

The United Faculty of Washington State

Bob Hickey, President, United Faculty of Central

Gary Krug, President, United Faculty of Eastern

Laurie Meeker, President, United Faculty of Evergreen

Steven Garfinkle, President, United Faculty of Western Washington

Bill Lyne, President, United Faculty of Washington State

Sandra Schroeder, President, American Federation of Teachers—Washington

Mary Lindquist, President, Washington Education Association

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.

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.