The state Senate released their budget proposal for the coming biennium, following the Governor and House proposals. This one is both bleak and arrogantly and naively prescriptive for higher education. It chastises the two previous proposals: "Both of these proposals overestimate tuition revenues due to the assumption that all categories of students will experience the same percentage increase." While that's true, the Senate proposal attempts to "fix" this by cutting higher education deeper and transferring even more of the cost to students and families by raising tuition rates even higher than has already been proposed. They also don't "show their work" and I can't see any evidence that their math is any better. Rather worse, in fact, when they estimate how many dollars the tuition increase will actually off-set.
Ignorantly assuming all colleges are cookie-cutter institutions, it prescribes a series of specific actions and measures that will further fundamentally reshape the community and technical college network across our state, and with complete disregard for our mission or the needs of our many communities. These are, mostly, bureaucratic solutions with all the metaphoric subtly of using a fully loaded four-drawer vertical file cabinet to tap a picture hook into the wall. The most efficient piece of our state's education system, already generating (for many of our campuses) over 50% of our revenue from sources other than state funding, is now being told exactly how we will manage the new cuts coming our way in exchange for the fraction of funding they still want to provide.
It is a micromanager's budget proposal, with politicians attempting to run the colleges. Of course, they won't actually be running our colleges, so they won't be living with the day to day consequences of their misguided directives. We will. More importantly, our students (or those still able to afford and get into a college of any sort in this state) will.
If our state's elected politicians must decide that the only way to balance our state budget is to gut our education systems, if this is the best they can come up with, then they should at least give us the flexibility to try and make ends meet the best way we can. Our history shows we are particularly good at this, better than almost any other state agency, in fact, at feeding a family on a penny a day. By prescribing how we will do this, by giving us the wrong tools to work with and mandatory "solutions" that don't fit, they are eliminating our ability to apply our mission and values to the decisions we face.
Maybe our senators haven't looked closely at what they are offering us relative to what we are already doing. They no longer provide the majority of our revenue, we are now far from state-funded organizations. They can certainly elect to withhold even more of the partial state funding we do receive, but as minority stakeholders in our budgets these days, they do not have the right to prescribe how we spend the rest of our creatively cobbled-together revenue sources.
On more musical notes, even this morning's music was feeling clowny. Take the following list of songs and tell me my iPod wasn't playing along:
- The Beatles: Piggies
- Diana Krall: Popsicle Toes
- Billy Bragg & Wilco: Black Wind Blowing
- Robert Walter: Hillary Street
- The Bill Evans Trio: The Peacocks
Just a reminder, should it be necessary, that the opinions expressed in this blog are personal, not official.
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