BOUNDLESS: At the University of Arizona, you’re not bound by convention. You see things differently. This isn’t a desert; it’s a canvas.
— From the UA’s new branding strategy, developed in 2014
IN A BIND: “Before the State can ultimately determine its relationship with the University system, the State must find its own fiscal stability and define the resources available to provide higher education support.”
— From Gov. Doug Ducey‘s proposed budget, presented Friday
When Gov. Ducey said last week that he wants to continue cutting state funding of universities and community colleges, it wasn’t a surprise so much as a disappointment.
After all, Ducey promised in his campaign not to raise taxes and has proposed almost no other ways of increasing revenue.
Rumors had circulated that he would even attempt to eliminate altogether or cut by half the state’s current, approximately $768 million in funding for the three state universities. By comparison to that amputation-scale cutting, the proposed $75 million cut seems like just a flesh wound.
Still, it will hurt — disproportionately in a college town like Tucson. And it raises the question: When will the state stop cutting?
“I haven’t heard of a floor on the funding cuts yet,” Board of Regents President Eileen Klein told me Tuesday.
All of this is disappointing in a state where the constitution commands that college instruction for Arizona residents be “as nearly free as possible.”
It’s also disappointing because Arizona has led the nation in cutting spending on higher education since the recession hit. Now, though, many states have turned that trend around — increasing spending, in some cases, to pre-recession levels.
Over the last five fiscal years, Arizona’s spending on higher education has dropped by 15.9 percent, says ongoing research by Illinois State University’s Center for the Study of Educational Policy. Compare that to our neighboring states: New Mexico, up 2.2 percent; Colorado, up 73.7 percent; Utah, up 29.2 percent; Nevada, up 24.3 percent; California, up 16 percent.
Notice a pattern?
Two principal factors go into determining a state’s spending on public colleges, said James Palmer, the Illinois State professor who runs that ongoing study: the economy and state politics. The economy has rebounded unevenly, but is much less significant a factor than it was five years ago, Palmer said.
“Part of what factors into funding decisions are political decisions,” he said. “It’s easier to cut funding for higher education than it is for other parts of the budget.”
The UA’s provost, Andrew Comrie, said Tuesday the broader trend is nothing new: States have been cutting funding for decades. In 1979, the state spent $89 per $10,000 of residents’ personal income on the universities. This year, that spending ratio is about $30. For community colleges, it’s fallen from about $17 per $10,000 of income in 1979 to about $3 this year.
But here’s something new: For the first time, in 2012, states kicked in less nationwide than students paid in tuition and fees. Arizona hit this milestone in 2010.
“It’s a national shift from seeing education as a public good to seeing education as a private good,” Comrie said. It’s not a question of right or wrong, he said, but “policy choices about education and who should pay for it.”
For years, the state’s cutting of education funding has given its answer: The students should pay. State funding per UA student dropped from $13,631 in 2008 to $6,610 in 2013, which led to a near-doubling of tuition to $10,035 per year.
This is how Ducey’s budget summarizes the situation: “For the last several years, the State and its university and community college systems have struggled to define their relationship; that definition will be elusive until the parties reconcile the legitimate needs of the institutions with the General Fund’s capacity to support them.”
The phrase “legitimate needs” says what you need to know about how the governor sees the universities and community colleges: Apparently, even after years of budget-cutting, they are still acting beyond their legitimate roles, in his view.
It’s a view, of course, that is bound by his campaign promise not to raise taxes and his practice so far of not finding other ways of raising revenue.
Ducey’s proposed 50 percent slash in state aid to Pima Community College — a $3 million cut that amounts to about 2 percent of the system’s budget — comes on top of previous painful cuts.
“From a percentage standpoint it doesn’t sound like much, but from a whole number standpoint it’s still painful,” said Lee Lambert, chancellor of Pima Community College since 2013. “As you cut the layers away, sometimes you get to the heart of what you do.”
The temptation for the community colleges and the universities will be to raise tuition to deal with the cuts. But Regents President Klein, who was former Gov. Jan Brewer’s chief of staff, said regents feel they’ve raised it as high as they can.
“We have to stop the trend of budget reductions leading to tuition increases. It’s not a sustainable model,” she said.
Ducey’s budget seems to try to put the universities and community colleges on a more predictable, if lower-spending, path. And yet, looking to the future, it’s hard to see how they’ll ever be boundless when they’re continually put in a bind.
