Time to check in on the joy or misery being experienced by our fellow higher education colleagues in other states around the nation.
California
A few weeks ago, I wrote a short piece about Proposition 92, a ballot measure in California which would would have established a funding guarantee for the state’s community colleges as well as capping student fees and making other governance changes. The measure was opposed by the University of California and California State University systems because they feared that Proposition 92 could endanger their own budgets because the measure would have required an increase of $300 million in funding for the state’s two year colleges.
On Tuesday, California voters rejected Proposition 92 by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent. The powerful California Teachers Association also opposed the measure and helped finance the campaign against it.
Kentucky
All is not well in the “Bluegrass State.” Faced with an almost $600 million budget shortfall, Governor Steve Beshear has proposed a 12 percent cut for state universities and community colleges. Michael McCall, president of the Kentucky Community and Technical College system was recently quoted as saying “I think the bomb’s been dropped on higher education.”
The proposed 12 percent cut would come on top of a 3 percent reduction the Governor has ordered already for the current academic year. Higher education officials have said that the cuts would jeopardize the state’s ability to achieve its ambitious “2020 reform goals” which were established in 1997. Among other things, those goals call for the University of Kentucky (UK) to become a top 20 research university. Kentucky president Lee T. Todd Jr. has already suspended 90 individual faculty searches pending the outcome of the budget reduction discussions.
Some Kentucky state legislators are urging university and college presidents to support an increase in cigarette taxes and legalization of casino gambling if they want the Governor’s proposed cuts to be restored. “It’s a three-letter word and it starts with a T,” said Rep. Mary Lou Marzian (D-Louisville) according to a story in today’s Louisville Courier-Journal.
Michigan
Governor Jennifer Granholm has taken an interesting approach to how she proposes funding Michigan colleges and universities in her budget which was unveiled this week in Lansing. While higher education in general receives an average annual budget increase of 3 percent, the amounts provided to individual institutions varies based on how well they are performing on a number of performance metrics.
For example, Lake Superior State University gets an increase of 6.2 percent, in part, because it has a fairly large proportion of low income students and graduates a substantial number of students in high demand fields such as technology. Wayne State University and the University of Michigan (UM) would each get funding increases of 3.2 percent, but Michigan State University would only get an increase of 2.7 percent because it has commercialized a smaller proportion of its research than Wayne State or UM.
Overall, higher education funding would rise by $51 million above last year’s budget, a big improvement from prior years. The Governor’s funding proposals, however, are meant to reward those schools which are making progress on achieving her priorities of graduating more students in high demand fields and commercializing university research.
Arizona
Like Kentucky, Arizona is facing a significant budget shortfall but unlike Governor David Beshear, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano has pledged to spare K-12 and higher education from budget reductions in both the current and future fiscal years. The shortfall for fiscal year 2008 is almost $1 billion and the projected gap for fiscal year 2009 could be as much as $1.7 billion. Napolitano’s budget would make cuts to other state agencies, use monies from the state’s Rainy Day Fund and use lease purchase mechanisms for K-12 school facilities.
The Arizona Legislature, however, might have different ideas. The chairman of the House and Senate appropriations committees have developed proposals that would reduce higher education funding. For the University of Arizona, for example, the cut to state support would be 10 percent or $44 million. Budget deliberations will continue for the next several weeks.