I’ve been admittedly obsessed over the past couple weeks with making the argument for a high-earner’s income tax, but the other policy issue I’ve been advocating this session also appears to be gaining a little traction: a move toward a high tuition/high financial aid model that could raise additional funds for higher education, while increasing access and decreasing costs to students from lower and middle income families.
A few weeks ago Rep. Reuven Carlyle (D-36) staked his own credibility to the concept in a guest column in the Seattle Times, and just last week, the even the Times editorial board wrote in favor of raising tuition and financial aid. And today, coming on the heels of Gov. Gregoire’s proposal to let tuition rise 28% over two years, none other than University of Washington President Mark Emmert, writing in his own guest column in the Times, argues that if we are going to keep the “higher” in higher education, colleges and universities need more “flexibility on tuition.”
The leaders of our four-year colleges and universities understand that our schools must take cuts. But we also know that we can keep students coming to school and graduating on time if we are simply given more flexibility on tuition. We can help our students and our state without new state money. Moreover, we can fix much of this problem without denying access to students because of their income or family background.
The UW has the lowest tuition of any of its peers and is one of the best bargains in the country. With increased financial aid and the expanded federal tax credit, we can remain an excellent value for our families, maintain our world-class quality, and not slash the number of students we admit.
To give higher education the opportunity to resolve this crisis without requiring more state money is the only responsible thing to do. To do otherwise is to deny thousands of our citizens a chance to succeed in the knowledge economy.
Huh. Guess the idea doesn’t sound so wing-nutty after all, when it’s coming from the mouth of Emmert.
So how does it work? How can we possibly raise tuition while maintaining access and affordability to lower and middle income students? Well, as I’ve explained before, it’s simple math:
Let’s say you’re a low to middle income student currently receiving financial aid in the form of $3,000 in grants, and the UW suddenly jacks up its $6,800/year in tuition and fees to $17,800. Now let’s say the UW (ie, the state) increases your grant by another $11,000 to offset the hike. How much extra money did this cost the state? Zilch. You were paying $3,800/year and you’re still paying $3,800. It’s a zero sum game.
But if you’re a student from a wealthy family, who does not need financial aid, and thus does not qualify for it, you’re suddenly paying an extra $11,000 into the system… money that can be spent to increase the quality of education at the UW, or expand the number of seats, or even lower the costs for truly needy students.
The key of course is to increase financial aid commensurate to the needs of the students, both the dollar amount, and the upper range of incomes that qualify for aid. The goal should be to accept students based solely on merit, and to charge them for their education according to their ability to pay. That, in my opinion, is the best way to extend opportunity to all of our state’s young people.
Or, you know, we could continue with what we do now, where wealthy families who have easily afforded years of $23,420 annual tuition at Seattle’s exclusive Bush School, send their kids on to the UW at the same $6,800 bargain rate as everybody else, at the same time the university is being forced to slash classes and slots. Does that really make sense?
This should appeal to the wingnuts, because it’s fee-for-service with a vengeance. That’s what you trolls want, isn’t it? The run government on a business model under which those who receive public services pay for them? Any troll who opposes this is contradicting himself.
In other words, residents of the state will have to pay more so that illegal aliens can be subsidized and pay less.
The big question of course is whether financial aid does keep pace with tuition increases. And you are also leaving out of the equation room and board costs for students who are living on campus or nearby. The cost of going to college for most students is more than just tuition.
The cost of going to a private public high school does not usually include room and board since they cater to the local population. Most private school students wind up going to private colleges where the cost of tuition and room and board is now $40,000 to $50,000 per year, at least twice that of attending the UW.
The UW is a bargain for students and even with an increase in tuition will be a bargain. But it still can and will be a major expense to families with low or median incomes. Strong financial aid is vital to its maintaining accessibilty for students of all income levels.
There is a hidden danger in Goldy’s proposal. This could easily turn into a nightmare for some needy students.
Back in the sixties, when I was in college, to apply for financial aid you had to get your parents to sign and submit an application form disclosing their income and other personal information. My parents objected to this. They felt their circumstances were none of the college’s business.
By the time I was 19 years old, I had left home, lived in another state, had almost nothing to do with my family. I was dirt poor but never qualified for Pell grants, and received only limited student loan aid, because of my parents income. It made no difference that I was legally an adult, self-supporting, and received no financial support at all from them. On paper, I was too affluent to qualify for aid being given to students who were, in fact, better off than I was, because of their income to which I had no access.
That was for financial aid. Now let’s apply the same pigheaded, judgmental, stubborn, bureaucratic decision-making to tuition. Let’s say the college decides your parents should help you financially, even though you can’t make them, and you’re a full-fledged adult who is living independently of your birth family and are entirely dependent on whatever resources you can scrape together yourself. That decision will effectively end your hopes of getting a college education. We’re not talking anymore whether you qualify for financial aid, we’re now talking about whether a student is required to pay tuition he can’t afford because of a bureaucratic presumption that he can afford it.
Sure, you can say things like there should be an appeal process and there should be guidelines. But trust me, if you establish this as a principle in legislation, it’s guaranteed to go awry in implementation once stubborn, judgmental, pig-headed college bureaucrats get their hands on it.
I think that danger is very, very, real and can’t be brushed off or ignored. Nearly all college students are at least 18 years old. An 18-year-old is legally an adult. By law, parents aren’t obligated to support their children after age 18. By law, parents aren’t obligated to put their children through college. They may have different financial priorities, or simply be unwilling to do it, or maybe the child doesn’t want to depend on his parents anymore and wants to make it on his own. Unless you write this law so that it is the student’s income and financial resources that are considered, not the parents’, it won’t work for everyone and it will result in a significant number of young people being unfairly excluded from our public colleges.
Unless this problem is adequately addressed, this scheme shouldn’t be adopted.
@2 Bullshit.
One thing ignored thus far is that UW and WSU havethe lowest tuition of any of its peer institutions. Frankly, the undergraduate cap has actually harmed the ability of the University to operate at the level we all want it to while the State continues the trend of providing less and less of the school’s operation budget. This fact is the case at many other schools as well. The reality is that in state undergraduates (even with the shrinking subsidy of state funding) are not paying the real cost of their education.
This situation in untenable. Something will have to give: either the number of Washington students who can attend these schools will have to drop or we’ll have to provide them with a substandard education to keep the operation costs within the shrinking limit.
We could easily solve the tuition problem by closing that turdhole- Evergreen State College. Everybody knows it’s a farce. Sell the land and facilities, transfer the students into a real school like UW or WWU. Hell, even WSU! Sale of the property would be a fantastic assist to the higher-ed budget!
I continue to oppose this plan until I see what the financial aid package will look like.
You’re accepting as a matter of faith that the financial aid will be there, Goldy, and that it will be distributed equitably. I am older and more jaded, and a lot less gullible than you are.
You keep putting in disclaimers such as “IF implemented properly,” but in reality assuming that it will be, when there is no factual basis for your belief. You would do well to adopt the cautions raised by Steve Zemke @ 3, and to quit being such a fucking pimp for a program till you know what details the Legislature enacts.
Anyone who seeks to keep college costs down in any meaningful manner would put some serious, stringent, draconian caps on the textbook racket, and would force departments, and individual instructors, to adopt low-cost alternatives to $200 textbooks that become useless once a particular course has ended.
If instructors were forced to develop their own instructional materials, college would become more affordable for students and their families, taxpayers would be getting more bang for their buck, slackers would be weeded out of the system, and the level of instruction would rise for all. It also would make creative, innovative, and dedicated teaching professionals more marketable. Win, win, win, win.
Maybe Rep. Carlyle’s time would be better spent toward that end, instead of taking money out of my pocket, with no guarantee of any relief.
So the net effect is to raise the cost of tuition for “wealthy kids”??
The devil in all these types of schemes is in the detail.
What is wealthy?
What is need?
etc., etc.
Frankly, many of the higher paying jobs now are not coming out of Universities…but rather trade-type schools.
I am all for helping kids that want to go to school….on a work for tuition basis.
I am not for handouts to kids who do not want to work outside school.
This needs some refining.
@7 “We could easily solve the tuition problem by closing that turdhole- Evergreen State College.”
Bullshit.
@9 “The devil in all these types of schemes is in the detail.”
For once I agree with you. You must have learned something from your pillow talk with goats.
@9 “Frankly, many of the higher paying jobs now are not coming out of Universities…but rather trade-type schools.”
Yes and no. There are good paying jobs in the trades. You don’t have to go to college to make a good living. A college degree doesn’t guarantee a good job. All of these things are true. But it’s also true that college are more than vocational schools, going to college is about more than qualifying for a high-paying job, and there are non-monetary values in a college education that aren’t replicated elsewhere.
ivan @8,
“No we can’t!” Nice twist on Obama’s motto.
Evergreen needs to be a Privately Funded school. It’s agenda is way too far out there.
I agree…in this Budget crisis it needs to be the first to go.
PS–
At least at the Evergreen KLOWN factory you have all the KLOWNS in one place…rather than distributing them throughout the entire system to poison the well. But, it still needs to be privatized due to Budget reasons.
Troll and anyone else,
I see the argument that we pay for illegals to go to college all the time. Can you, or anyone, actually point to some facts about this? how much do we spend? On how many?
Obviously if we pay for illegals to go to college, we should stop.
Or is this just another unsubstantiated talking point?
I doubt they can come up with an actual illegal who is going to college at their expense.
Maybe not Pelletizer@16 but Puddy remembers this lead balloon from a Donkey:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....on12m.html
“But those concerned about the impact of illegal immigration in this country say it’s also not fair to ask families struggling to educate their own children to subsidize the education of those whose parents broke the law in bringing them here.”
The federal Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 prohibits public colleges from favoring undocumented students by offering them in-state tuition rates and not extending that offer to U.S. citizens.
Puddy suggests a special Donkey tax. You voted Donkey you pay de tax for illegals, plain and simple…
Puddy–
The problem is most Democrats don’t pay taxes..
they spend their entire miserable lives looking for ways to get others to pay for their wetdreams.
Starting in 2002, Washington and eight other states passed a law which illegal alien students who graduate from a WA state high school with two to three years of residency can apply and receive in-state tuition at a public college or university. Yet my nephews apply from the east coast would pay out-of-state tuition costs.
Pubbybud,
Thanks for the link. But this is a proposal, not current law. I hear and see comments like Troll’s above, that we are ALREADY paying for illegals. The link you sent details our support for low income legal students, not illegals.
This proposal failed in the legislature.
So, do we spend ANYTHING on illegals to go to college? Proof? anyone?
Frank, this is the closest I’ve found. http://www.amren.com/mtnews/ar.....uition.php
“Washington State found that after passing a state law to help illegal immigrant children of migrant workers to afford college, the subsidy was used mostly by foreign students with visas (an unintended consequence that indicates the opportunity for fraud).”
Thanks for the effort Puddybud!
You’re welcome Frank! Puddy doubts WA State would want to “advertize” their assistance too much becuz it would rile up everyone except the whack-job progressives. Puddy believes if the Donkey want to subsidize illegals going to college then they should pay an illegals to college fund tax. It’s not fair my nephews want to experience the great NorthWest and they have to pay out-of-state tuition costs.
Frank: Here is a Spokesman article discussing some scholarships to WSU and EWU gotten…
http://www.spokesmanreview.com.....p?ID=12120
“Last year Ramón received a full ride from the College Success Foundation’s Leadership 1,000, which provides four-year college scholarships to 1,000 economically disadvantaged students Passage of the DREAM Act would have allowed him to apply for the federally-funded McNair Scholars Program, which helps underprivileged students go to graduate school.”
Puddy – you just destroyed Roger Rabbit.
Crusader,
“Puddy – you just destroyed Roger Rabbit.”
What the fuck? All Puddy showed is that kids who were brought to America as infants, who were raised in Washington their entire lives, and participated fully in primary education, and who, by any measure, are indistinguishable from any other productive young resident of our state, are being denied taxpayer subsidized fellowships and financial aid for going to college.
That seems to argue against Puddy’s point, not Roger Rabbit’s point.
http://www.leg.wa.gov/pub/bill.....s/1079.pdf
I’ve heard (on KUOW, I think) that only 10-15 students are admitted to the UW each year as HB1079 students.
cat @ 27
Even that doesn’t really support the concept of taxpayers supporting illegal residents. The bill says that if you completed at least three years of high school and graduated from high school (or equivalent), you are considered a resident…
In other words, even if you were brought (illegally) into Washington state as an infant, spent your entire life here, graduated from high school, and you and your parents have paid state taxes the entire time, you are NOT considered a state resident for tuition purposes, unless you take positive action to become a naturalized citizen or permanent resident. (And, as the other articles suggest, you will not be eligible for taxpayer subsidized financial aid until you are, in fact, a naturalized U.S. Citizen or, maybe, a permanent resident).
Goldy @ 13:
I’m not saying “No we can’t.” I’m saying “Show me how.” You haven’t come close to doing it, and neither has the Legislature. You’re just spouting a lot of faith-based crap, and getting pissed at me for stating the obvious.
Show me a financial aid program, and the funding for it, and if I like it, I’ll say so.
Darryl–
Do you really think that all illegal’s identify themselves as such when they apply for admittance to the UW.
In Darryl’s naive world…if someone checks the box and says they are a US citizen, then by God, that’s good enough for Darryl!!
Answer me this Darryl…
Explain the detailed vetting process our PUBLICLY FUNDED schools go thru to make certain all students are US citizens?
Have you ever heard of fake ID’s Darryl??
God you are naive man.
Grow up and Wise up!