The UW’s state funding has been cut 50 percent in the past three years. The UW External Affairs staff has prepared a series of documents to help people understand what the cuts mean and why higher education funding needs to be a real priority in the next state budget.
On Dec. 6, UW President Michael Young named Ana Mari Cauce the UW’s new provost, effective Jan.2. She is dean of our College of Arts & Sciences. Read President Young’s message to the UW community here.
Did you know, the state of Washington had 3,640,468 registered voters as of Oct. 5, 2011? That’s according to the Secretary of State’s Office, which reports that there are a number of statewide and local issues on ballots across the state for the Nov. 8 General Election.
A number of resources are available to help voters learn about issues and cast their ballots. One such resource is the non-partisan and non-profit Living Voters Guide, which bills itself as the state’s “citizen-powered voters guide.” You can read, write and discuss issues, and build your own pro and con list using the LVG.
Other election resources include:
Please visit the Secretary of State’s Election Page for more info and resources.
The state’s five public universities and The Evergreen State College will set their own undergraduate tuition under a bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday and is expected to be signed by the governor. Read the Seattle Times story.
Legislators appear to have reached agreement on allowing the state’s public universities to set undergraduate resident tuition for the next four years. The bill, House Bill 1795, also would permit institutions to charge more for higher-cost degree programs.
With the legislative houses several hundred million dollars apart on a final biennial budget, and the official end of the session coming this week, a special session is all but certain. Dozens of important fiscal and policy bills also await action. Read an update from Olympia here.
House Bill 1795, which is before the House Ways & Means Committee, “attempts to help our state’s two and four year institutions of higher education manage their way through this Great Recession,” according to its sponsor, Rep. Reuven Carlyle.
The bill gives institutions of higher education four years of tuition setting authority to help offset the dramatic cuts to their base state budget. Also according to Carlyle, “it moves from an input to an output based system of funding with genuine accountability for degree production and not merely student enrollments.” The bill also would provide financial aid for the middle class, what he calls “largest expansion of financial aid for the middle class in state history.”
Read more about the bill on Rep. Carlyle’s blog.
“It is discouraging to see half of the state’s appropriation for the UW disappear in the space of two biennia. On the one hand, we are grateful that the House budget writers recognize the links among tuition, state funds, and financial aid. When the state does not have the funds to support higher education, raising tuition and preserving the state need grant are mechanisms by which we can try to maintain excellence and access. However, it is disappointing that the dramatic shift in who pays for higher education in our state continues and that students will bear an even greater proportion of the costs for education. While it may enable us to weather this storm, it is certainly not a viable long-term strategy. We need a different model for funding the university.”
House Democrats are releasing their 2011-2013 biennial budget proposal today. There will be a press conference at 12:15PM, and a Ways and Means Committee hearing on the proposal at 3:30PM.
You can access the budget proposal online. You can also watch the press conference and Ways and Means hearing live on TVW.
The Office of State Relations and the Office of Planning and Budgeting will have a UW budget overview available as soon as possible. Check back to this blog or the OPBlog for more information.
A Senate budget proposal is not expected until early next week.
The recent decline in the state’s tax revenue projections leaves higher education especially vulnerable, according to the editorial page of the Tacoma News Tribune. “… destroying college opportunity is like selling the children to pay the groceries.”