Schools for Tomorrow Blog

Governor Ritter’s plan to direct funding to higher education is drawing controversy from university presidents, who say they are disappointed that the plan focuses only on scholarships.  The initiative would use money from an increased tax on the oil and gas industry.  The Post reports:

"This proposal does nothing to address (our) general fund," said Steve Jordan, president of Metropolitan State College of Denver, who wants to hire dozens more tenure-track faculty.

The severance tax increase would bring about $200 million a year to the state, enough to aid about 60 percent of the college-age students in Colorado with their tuition, backers of the plan estimate. Eligibility for the program, called Colorado Promise Scholarships, would likely be based on income and grades.

Choosing between scholarships and the schools themselves is difficult, presidents acknowledge. "It’s sort of a Hobson’s choice," Jordan said.

The president of the University of Colorado said he doesn’t plan to campaign on behalf of the measure because he needs to focus on bringing money to the school.   "I’m not opposing him (Ritter), but I’ve got a lot of work to do for this institution," Bruce Benson said. "I told the governor that we’re short operating money. . . . We need to run our schools here; I really wanted operating money."

But David Longanecker, head of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education, thinks the plan is "brilliant.":

[He said] voters would think higher education was "taken care of" if they approved the initiative in November and it went directly to schools.

"I think there would be a danger that if this was for higher education, people would say, ‘ah, good,’ the rest can go to corrections or transportation or whatever," he said. "This is a way of protecting the most needy students from the tuition increases."

The real problem is that Colorado has generally neglected to adequately fund its education systems for students of all ages over the years.  While this has generated a healthy bumper sticker industry (who hasn’t seen the famous ‘Welcome to Colorado – 49^th In School Funding’ bumper stickers), it also means that those in need are elbowing each other for begging rights to the new funding.. 

Are there politics at work here?  While CU might need money for a variety of purposes, a dollar is a dollar, and at least Governor Ritter’s efforts outshine previous attempts to help get more kids through college.  Or is the Guvna to far from the action to have a good sense of what universities really need?

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Higher ed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.