Nevada’s Education Budget Cuts

Nevada Speaker Barbara Buckley will hold a press conference Monday at 11:00am asking Governor Gibbons to “reconsider his proposed education budget cuts.” It’ll be interesting to hear what alternatives Speaker Buckley and the state Democrats are proposing in place of Gibbons’ proposed 4.5% cuts and whether their plans include both k-12 and higher education.

Anjeanette Damon posted the proposed budget cuts for all of the higher education institutions in a blog post last Thursday and Lenita Powers wrote a more detailed article on the budget proposals on Friday. The Board of Regents are scheduled to meet on Monday to figure out how to cover $60 million. All of the institutions save UNLV and Nevada State College are proposing to add per credit surcharges–basically a temporary tuition increase–to cover a portion of their proposed cuts. In most cases, the remainder of the cuts will be covered by hiring freezes, delays in merit pay, and the delay of major projects not related to daily operations.

As I’ve stated before, state budget shortfalls happen and everyone understands that. However, per credit surcharges and funding formulas must be reversed once the budget shortfall is covered. Unfortunately, history has shown that the chance of that happening are slim. Once a cut or an increase is made that benefits the state budget, it is seldom reversed. From a previous post on this subject:

Nevada’s Governor Gibbons and Chancellor Rogers are proposing to increase tuition in a state that received an F grade on its affordability rating in the 2006 National Report Card on Higher Education as a part of the governor’s plan to mitigate the state budget crises. From the report:

Nevada’s under performance in educating its young population could limit the state’s access to a competitive workforce and weaken its economy over time. As the well-educated baby boomer generation begins to retire, the diverse young population that will replace it does not appear prepared educationally to maintain or enhance the state’s position in a global economy….Since the early 1990s, colleges and universities in Nevada have become less affordable for students and their families. If Nevada’s trends are not addressed, they could undermine the state’s ability to develop an educated workforce.

Its not a surprise that the state is trying to balance the budget on higher education’s back. The country and the state have a history of cutting education budgets during bad budget years. but not reinstating the lost funds during years of economic recovery according to a study released in 2006, sponsored by the Lumina Foundation for Education:

Given that state budgets — even if relatively healthy now — are bound to experience recessions again, the news is not good for higher education. Among the researchers’ findings:

• Between 1979 and 2004, state appropriations for higher education did not keep up with growth in state economies (measured as Gross State Product) in any state.
• When recessions hit the United States, each one seems to hurt higher education more intensely than the one before — with longer recovery times. Appropriations per FTE declined in 26 states following the 1980 recession, in 38 states following the 1990-91 recession, and in 44 states following the 2001 recession.
• In three of the last four recessions, tuition increased faster than the availability of state student aid, and faster than the growth in family income and student aid.
• The impact of the 2001 recession (which was followed by 9/11) was particularly destructive even though, in duration, that recession was relatively short. Shifts in state support for students from need- to merit-based aid have made it more difficult for needy students to deal with tuition increases.

As if raising tuition isn’t a tax. Regressive though it may be, a tax is a tax and raising tuition in state in which students and their families already pay a disproportionate percentage of their net income for college is not very smart. Do you think the next governor will propose a tuition cut once the state budget is back in order? Of course not. We’ve seen how states use higher education to balance their budgets. In a state that has one of the poorest college attendance and graduation rates in the country, raising tuition seems to be about the worst thing they could possibly do.

While we are on the topic of efficiency in higher education, I came across this news item about Western Nevada College’s efforts to offer more online courses. I’ve never thought of it this way, but online courses are not only cheaper for institutions to offer and more convenient for many students (who are self-directed enough), taking courses online is better for the environment:

Online education is one of the most effective ways an institution can reduce its carbon footprint. Little research has been done on this topic in the U.S., but the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI) and the UK’s Open University Design Innovation Group (DIG) have released some relevant studies. Their work quantifies the environmental impact of the higher education sector and lauds the “potential of the Internet and other elearning methods to radically reduce energy consumption and emissions.” The key finding of the UK study: distance learning courses consumed nearly 90% less energy and produced 85% fewer CO2 emissions than conventional campus university courses. This has the potential to make a huge impact in the United States, where online enrollments grew 10% last year, bringing the total of online students to about 3.5 million.

In Nevada, online and distance education courses are necessary because of the state’s unique geography population patterns, but its interesting to think about how a traditional college education has been changing over the years all over the country–3.5 million students are taking courses online. I remember when you couldn’t even register for classes online, but I shouldn’t date myself like that.

Similar Posts:

• Raising College Tuition Is A Tax Increase
• Tuition Goinnnng Up!
• What’s So Funny about Online Education?

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