Officials urge dialogue as state support dwindles

Public universities nationally are caught in a perfect storm of fiscal and political trends that has resulted in declining state support for higher education, according to the authors of an upcoming book on the creeping privatization of state universities.

“By any measure, the state share of public university budgets is shrinking, and shrinking fast,” Kathleen Sell, former UW System chief budget officer, said during a forum sponsored by the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education.

Sell and former UW System President Katharine Lyall authored the book, and they laid out details of a disturbing downward spiral in state support that they say calls for a public debate over the future of higher education and long-term budgetary solutions.

Lyall urged a broad, nonpartisan public policy dialogue over higher education funding. That conversation should include the defining of core public purposes of education and a discussion of how to align resources to support those goals.

“It’s difficult in the very politically divisive environment that we’re in nationally and locally to engineer that. It takes some real courage and a policy horizon that’s beyond the next election cycle, but we have to get there in some fashion if we’re going to save our public universities,” Lyall says.

As state support for universities has shrunk, tuition has grown. UW–Madison Chancellor John D. Wiley says that in 1975, the per-student cost of education here was $2,108 at a time when tuition stood at $315 a year, or about 15 percent of that cost.

Today, the per-student cost of a UW–Madison education is $10,060, and tuition stands at about $6,000, almost 60 percent of costs. State operating support for UW–Madison today stands at about 18 percent, or $370 million.

“All over the country, states are withdrawing public support for higher education,” Wiley says. “This is moving backwards on a trend that took most of the 20th century to develop.”

Sell, a senior lecturer in Integrated Liberal Studies, says the trend toward filling a budget gap with tuition money “means that America is rapidly privatizing its public colleges and universities without the public dialogue.”

Nationally, politicians from both sides of the aisle are pushing a tax-cut agenda at a time when quick budgetary fixes are being exposed and more pressure is being applied to state budgets by rising Medicaid costs, Sell says.

“It’s not so much that legislators are saying, ‘We don’t want our university to have public support,’” she says. “It’s more a de facto decision, given other pressures.”

Universities have experimented with various funding mechanisms.

In Maine, some schools have been constituted as nonprofit public universities. Virginia is trying out the charter university concept. At Miami University, tuition is charged at private-college rates, but part of the charge is set aside for financial aid. And at Cornell University, market rates are charged for in-demand majors such as business and engineering.

Lyall said that although universities have worked to diversify their revenue streams, the consequences of sagging state support for higher education are troubling: deferred maintenance, salary freezes and the aggressive substitution of temporary teachers for full-time faculty. Close to 40 percent of all student credit hours nationally are taught by temporary instructors, she says.

“That deserves some very careful thought about what it’s doing to the quality of education,” Lyall said. “That whole area is below the radar screen, maybe not inside universities, but certainly as far as the public policy dialogue.”