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 shots who work on the top floors of buildings within blocks of each other in downtown Seattle. What they know about higher education they probably learned while getting their degrees at such fine institutions as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.

So it’s easy enough to see why they seem hell bent on privatizing our public universities. And why they have no problem making recommendations that are so contradictory they could only make sense in the hallucinogenic air of an Ivy League classroom.

The primary recommendation, the one that surprised no one, is that our universities should have unlimited tuition-setting authority. The report dresses this up in the usual talk about flexibility, benchmarks, and baselines, but the bottom line is a private school model that replaces state funding with ever-increasing tuition. Again, this isn’t news, we’ve been heading in this direction for a while, and, as we’ve pointed out before here at the blog, it’s a pretty simple equation: as state support goes down, tuition goes up. The Task Force implicitly embraces Washington’s ridiculously regressive tax structure and pretty much assumes that state support for universities will continue to evaporate.

In order to ensure that a few people outside the born-on-third-base crowd will continue to go to college, the Task Force recommends establishing the Washington Pledge Scholarship Program, a billion dollar endowment to fund scholarships for the talented tenth of the rabble. The Task Force imagines raising this money in the best baseball stadium tradition, by taking private donations that allow businesses to dodge their taxes.

 

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We could go on here about the pros and cons of taking money that could pay for poor people’s health care and using it to give them scholarships, but that would keep us from moving on to the really surreal part of the report.

 

The Task Force has decreed that by 2018, our universities shall increase bachelor degree production by 27%, increase STEM degrees by 40%, and make sure that 19% of bachelor’s degrees go to people from underrepresented groups. This is straight from the HEC Board fantasy playbook and ignores the fact that all of our universities are currently wildly overenrolled and running on fumes in the wake of years of declining funding. Add in the skyrocketing tuition that the Task Force calls for and you have a scenario that makes trickle down economics look downright plausible.

 

But, just as we are about to lose faith in Washington’s business elite meritocracy, the Task Force steps up to show us how we can achieve these goals with a bunch of recycled bad ideas, telling us we should teach more online classes, give three-year degrees, give credit for “prior experience,” and start handing out college credit for attending high school.

All of these ideas fall under the heading of making our students pay more for degrees that will be worth less (and ultimately worthless). Yeah, we could just throw more stuff online and let students find their own way, we could give credit for having a job or sitting in a high school classroom, and we could give three-year degrees. Hell, we could give one-year degrees. Or better yet we could just have the students give us money and we would hand them diplomas. And we could call them bachelor’s degrees. Or we could call them fire hydrants, but they still wouldn’t help put out a fire.

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This is where the Task Force abandons their private Ivy memories and gets back to their day job of gutting public institutions and reinforcing class boundaries. They aren’t talking about online degrees or credit for tenth grade algebra at Harvard or Princeton.

It would be interesting to ask some of the Task Force members if they would ever consider allowing their Ivy-legacy children to attend the watered-down universities they are trying to create. Or if they would give any of their most important jobs to people with the diluted degrees they are recommending.

High quality, affordable public universities that gave large numbers of people from all points on the socioeconomic compass are what fueled the tremendous American economic growth in the twentieth century. Governor Gregoire and her task force are willing to trade this birthright for a mess of pottage.