Professor Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences [email protected] Dr. Burgett offers a senior seminar, “Intersections of Sex and Race,” in which students pursue and refine research questions related to the course rubric. Beyond this course, he is developing learning and research-based partnerships with regional organizations working at the intersections of sex and race, which will be integrated into his undergraduate teaching in American Studies as well as the MACS and MAPS graduate programs.
” “from each according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs” is not a bad motto for public higher education.” “
(from AAUP Magazine, Academe)
By Bruce Burgett (redacted and edited)
In spring 2010, a group of University of Washington administrators and faculty members convened a daylong symposium on “new universities.” …. A year and a half later, this broad set of concerns seems almost quaint and the state of Washington and its public universities were involved in extended divorce proceedings.
The (legislature’s created) new revenue (tuition) and cost controls… also had the unintended consequence of dissociating state funding from student enrollment targets. …. Tuition became the more significant of the two revenue streams. All three UW campuses exploited this policy vacuum by bridging the funding crisis through the addition of more in-state students without any additional state funding (the primary strategy at UW Bothell and Tacoma) and more out-of-state students who would pay higher annual tuition of $25,329 (the primary strategy at UW Seattle).
…Some observers argued in 2010 that the decline in state funding was a temporary setback for public higher education occasioned by the economic downturn. The events of 2011 revealed the naiveté of this argument. The legislature reduced its contribution to the UW by another 35 percent, while also dramatically shifting how higher education is funded in the state of Washington. For the first time, the state ceded control over tuition rates to the governing bodies of its public universities and allowed tuition to increase differentially across four-year institutions, with authorized increases of up to 16 percent at the UW, Washington State University, and Western Washington University; 14 percent at Central Washington University and Evergreen State College; and 11 percent at Eastern Washington University. ….
The UW regents clearly understood the significance of this reconfiguration of relations among the state, public higher education, and in-state students. …. Assuming that in-state tuition will continue to increase at an average of 9 percent annually over the next five years, an undergraduate student with no financial aid offset will pay more than $16,000 to attend the UW in 2017–18. While financial aid for low-income in-state students will help to mitigate the effects of this increase, students with moderate means or those who are unable to access federal or in-state financial aid will be increasingly unable to afford the UW. Student loan debt—and, some argue, loan defaults—will rise. … every UW budget-modeling exercise in which I have been involved over the past several years has assumed multiple annual tuition increases ranging between 4 and 16 percent. What was new in 2011 was the UW regents’ decision to exceed the authorized tuition increase by 4 percent, thus triggering the state’s financial aid requirements. The result is that approximately 50 percent of the additional revenue generated by the difference between a 16 percent and a 20 percent increase will be devoted to need-based financial aid for in-state students. The UW was the only institution in Washington that made this choice, though it is important to note that other institutions used alternative mechanisms such as student fees to increase revenue.
The … UW made a choice to pursue as aggressively as possible the high-tuition, high-aid model that can be found at other prestigious, internationally competitive public and private universities in the United States. (The) UW is confident in its ability to attract a sufficient number of in-state (or out-of-state) students who can pay higher tuition, thus financing high aid for other students.
When it delegated tuition-setting authority, the legislature also authorized the online Western Governors University to operate as WGU Washington. The Western Governors University, founded in 2002 by governors of nineteen western states, is an entirely online, competency-based university that provides degrees in business, information technology, teaching, and health professions. In this way, the legislature signaled to the state’s public universities its intention of seeking public-private partnerships as a means of providing additional baccalaureate spaces without making any permanent investment in the infrastructure or personnel needed to provide those opportunities. It is likely that the future will similarly reposition the UW, along with other public institutions, not as a “supplicant” seeking funding from the state, to use current UW president Michael Young’s phrasing, but as one of its many “partners.”
(Another) interpretation is that the UW succumbed to an ideology of privatization by beginning to charge “what the market will bear” for its degrees. This understanding is supported by an increased interest at the UW in establishing differential tuition rates across degrees based on their marketability and an increased reliance across the state’s public institutions on fees to cover instructional costs in resource-intensive fields. It also resonates with the tendency of university spokespersons to cite the relative “affordability” of the UW compared to other public institutions that have moved farther down the high-tuition, high-aid road, most notably institutions such as the University of Michigan and Pennsylvania State University, where tuition is approaching $20,000 a year. This reasoning extends the budgetary logic of high tuition, high aid: Why not charge students who will make more money in their future careers more for their education? . Students are repositioned as risk-managing, policy-making consumers, able to reward some institutions (and not others) through the use of their financial aid, student loans, or personal wealth as they seek value in the educational marketplace.
Possible Future: “Activity Based Budgets”
… value will be determined at least in part by a unit’s ability to create revenue, either through external grants and gifts or through instructional load…..Over the next several years, however, (activity based budgets) will likely prioritize research agendas that are externally funded and curricula that are attractive to large numbers of students. The new budget model will secure the transition from a command economy in which the state determines educational policy to a market economy in which funders and students set policy through the choices they make as consumers.
At smaller and newer institutions like the Bothell campus … the market-based model … meas success will be constrained by an increasingly competitive educational environment, by the lack of public funding for building and capital costs, and by the precarious political economy of financial aid and student debt. …
The same major corporations that had lobbied successfully in 2010 against the ballot referendum that would have initiated a state income tax providing several billion dollars of funding for educational access and infrastructure garnered positive, front-page publicity by pledging to work with the state to create a $100 million fund to provide $1,000 scholarships for ten thousand students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. … This public-private alliance signals a future in which such self-serving agreements could become the coin of the realm. … (The) economic stress public institutions are experiencing will lead them to jump at any partnership or initiative that promises new revenue, treating their mission to provide broad access to higher education as a luxury that is unaffordable in the current crisis.
Bruce Burgett is professor and director of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. His e-mail address is [email protected].