News & Updates

Both Senate and House Democrats have confirmed they will be unveiling operating and capital budget proposals next week.  The Senate has scheduled a press conference for Monday; the House is set to follow suit on Tuesday.  While there have been extensive efforts to reach agreement on many parts of the budget, expect there still to be significant differences between the chambers.

The Seattle Times has an item reporting that Senate cuts to higher education are expected to be much larger than those contained in the Governor’s budget proposal.  It also reports that a decision on whether to allow tuition increases greater than 7 percent per year is still under discussion.  For it’s part, the House is looking at a much smaller capital spending plan, using some of the savings to shore up the operating budget.  This may have an effect on campus construction projects.  We will be posting budget details here as soon as they are available.

Monday also marks the cutoff for policy committees to act on bills from the opposite house (fiscal committees have until April 6).  Action will shift from the committee rooms to the floor.

So put your helmet on and strap in — it will be a fast and furious ride from here until the end of session April 26.

The Higher Education Coordinating Board has issued the newest edition of its annual report comparing undergraduate tuition levels for Washington schools with national and “peer state” averages.

For community colleges the tuition levels are roughly comparable ($2,730 for Washington versus a national average of $2,793).  For four-year schools similar to the UW, the disparity is greater ($6,697 for Washington versus a national average of $7,481).  That difference is ever larger when the UW is compared to “peer state” schools where tuition averages $8,681.

You can find the complete report here.

This morning’s Seattle Times has an opinion piece by Lynne Varner on the need to preserve educational opportunity, especially during difficult economic times.  In part, Varner says —

According to a University of Washington study, 40,000 more children will slide into poverty next year if food-stamp programs, child-care subsidies and public-education budgets aren’t protected.

This places us in a seminal moment. The recession will either be the reason we blame for losing ground in our battle to protect children or the moment we rise to the occasion.

Young people helped by TAF and Mount Baker’s residents are part of the “squeeze generation,” a term emanating from Washington, D.C., where scholars and economists just finished up the Color of Wealth Summit, examining income disparities among race. The squeeze generation are the first in their families to attend college. They battle the racial disparities that kept their parents from achieving financial security, while at the same time laying the groundwork for their own children’s security.

You can read the entire opinion piece here.

Congratulations to Rep. Dawn Morrell of Puyallup, who has been elected Caucus Chair for the House Democrats — the number three leadership position after Speaker and Majority Leader.  She succeeds the late Rep. Bill Grant, who died earlier this year.

Rep. Morrell is a graduate of UW Tacoma and we look forward to continuing to work with her as she takes on her new leadership role.

UW Vice-Provost for Technology Transfer Linden Rhoads has prepared a thoughful analysis of why federal stimulus grants will not make up for existing and likely future cuts in state funding.  It is a clear example of how the UW’s success in attracting research dollars is build on a foundation of solid state support.  Here is the analysis —

Federal stimulus grants from NIH and NSF do not compensate for cuts in allocations to the University of Washington or to other colleges and universities.  In fact, state budget cuts have limited the state’s premier research university’s ability to pursue these considerable additional research funds.

Headlines such as “Obama Stimulus Plan May Generate $300M Research Windfall, UW Says” (Xconomy, 3/23/09) may mislead some into thinking that these research monies can directly offset cuts in state support.  To understand the difference, pretend the UW is a research factory.  State funds improve the factory, while federal grants are the raw material for products.  When an opportunity like the federal stimulus program comes along, we reap benefits from all the capacity we have available. Federal law requires that the funds in question be used only for research. The money cannot be used to put more professors and teaching assistants into classrooms.   None of this money will help alleviate the pain of students who cannot get the classes they need or of students denied admission for lack of room.

State budget cuts have prevented the UW from pursuing an even greater share of these federal grants. Current and anticipated state budget cuts forced many UW departments to postpone hiring research faculty.  The UW has let temporary appointments lapse and has left research positions unfilled.  Every one of these researchers would now be positioned to bring in grants that far exceed the salaries saved by not hiring.  These cuts weren’t good overall economic development strategy for our state.

The federal stimulus research money must be spent within two years, putting pressure on researchers to produce results within that time.  Our researchers cannot manufacture graduate students to carry out experiments in this time frame, nor does the UW have time to recruit new faculty members.  This shortfall will be lead to “competition for any loose postdocs and scientists out there,” as I was quoted as saying in the Xconomy article.

The University’s need for research scientists could not come at a better time. The economic downturn is causing private industry to cut R&D budgets and lay off researchers. At the same time, the University of Washington’s world-class researchers are bringing significant federal funding to our state and creating jobs.  Bringing researchers to the universities and other nonprofit research centers retains our state’s professional workforce.  Each of these professional jobs contributes to the state’s economic base and has an additional impact in the goods and services researchers consume as part of our community.

As part of a comprehensive strategy to weather this economic downturn and to revitalize the state economy, we need to sustain our investments in the institutions and programs that will create more jobs, especially for a highly skilled workforce.  Investing in the UW now will pay off in the near term, with additional federal funding and additional jobs.

You can find out more about UW TechTransfer here.

It is looking increasingly likely that budget proposals will not be unveiled until early next week.  House and Senate budget writers have been negotiating on key points, trying to reach agreements before the Senate unveils its plan. (By tradition, the Senate and House alternate which side acts first).  Both the Seattle Times and The News Tribune have interesting takes on some of the big issues still under discussion.

This time of session schedules are always very fluid and this year, given the difficult situation budget writers are facing, expect more churning than usual.  We will post details of any budget agreements here as soon as they are available.

This week is likely to bring the release of the first complete budget proposal by Senate Democrats.  Details are not yet known, but speculation is that cuts may be substantially deeper than the 13% proposed in the Governor’s budget proposal.

As we noted in a post back on January 12, the first day of session —

four year colleges received a substantially greater budget cut than community colleges, with the research universities the most affected of all.   The cuts proposed in the Governor’s budget will mean real and substantial cuts in the core services of the University.  Those services — things like enrollment levels, course offerings, and class sizes — are directly linked to the amount of budget support the UW receives through our state appropriation and tuition.

Also, the Puget Sound Business Journal has picked up the story that UW endowment income has been declining — causing a reduction in disbursements to campus recipients and putting more pressure on overall UW funding.
These are difficult times and we continue to make the case that adequate funding for higher education, through a combination of state appropriations and tuition, is an investment the state needs to make, both for students and for the health of the economy.  We will post budget developments here as they become available this week.

The end of this week was a preview of the storyline for the remainder of the 2009 session — all budget, all the time.  With the revenue forecast in, Senate Democrats are making final adjustments to their spending proposal before rolling it out, possibly late next week.

It will also be the last full week for policy committee hearings.  Our request legislation (tuition setting authority for graduate and out-of-state students, streamlining the public works contracting process, and protecting sensitive information given to our endowment) all is progressing, having been heard or scheduled for hearing.

Last week, the Governor proposed a tuition surcharge for the next two years.  Today’s Seattle Times has a story making it clear that Guaranteed Education Tuition (GET) units would cover any surcharge. The effect of tuition increases on the GET program, which is dealing with reduced returns on investment, is a key part of overall higher education budget discussions.

Finally, mark this time — Saturday at 2:40.  (No — it’s not a legislative cutoff.)  That’s when the Dawgs tip it off against the Purdue Boilermakers on the way to the Sweet 16.  OK — we know we have to take it one game at a time, but thanks to Coach Romar and the Husky team for providing some much needed celebration and excitement.

The state Economic and Revenue Forecast council met this morning and the news was not good.  The forecast shows another revenue reduction of over $550 million for the remainder of this biennium and the next — that makes the total budget shortfall around $9 billion.  Some of that gap will be filled by federal stimulus help and other steps that have been taken to reduce spending, but lawmakers are still looking at a budget hole of around $4 billion.  Here is a link to the Seattle Times coverage, and the press release issued by the council.  More on this as it develops.

36th District Rep. Reuven Carlyle has penned a thoughtful opinion piece for the Seattle Times on his proposal to increase tuition at four-year colleges, paired with a substantial increase in financial aid.  According to Rep. Carlyle:

As we write the most difficult state budget in generations, I’m pushing hard for comprehensive tuition-policy reform. I’m strongly advocating a proposal to grant our state’s public four-year universities the authority to raise resident undergraduate tuition by up to 12 percent annually, elevating the existing 7-percent cap. The schools would be required to designate a substantial portion of the new revenue toward new grants targeted at middle-class students.

As the situation exists today, these students and their families are caught in a horrible Catch 22: too wealthy to receive financial aid and too poor to comfortably afford college.

In Washington, a mere 20 percent of lower-income students successfully attend universities — making us a shocking 39th in the nation in this category — yet our state’s entire tuition model pretends to be designed around their interests. The “low tuition” model in Washington is an emperor with no clothes.

In Pennsylvania, by contrast, tuition is double that of ours, yet it is first in the nation in the percentage of lower-income students accessing higher education. The “high financial aid, high tuition” model is good policy but tough to digest politically.

Under the tuition model I’m proposing, middle-class families of four with annual incomes of between $52,500 and $73,250 would qualify for meaningful, need-based, state financial assistance for the first time. We can create the largest expansion of financial aid to the middle class in decades.

You can read the entire column by Rep. Carlyle here.