James Sulton, the executive director of the Higher Education Coordinating Board raises concerns over what would happen to GET, the state’s prepaid tuition program, if Washington’s universities are permitted to set undergraduate tuition rates themselves.
Sulton worries that higher-education costs could soar if universities set tuition and that, worst case, the GET program would have to bar new participants until its finances recovered.
The state is on the hook to make sure people who’ve already bought prepaid tuition get what they’re promised. The Higher Education Coordinating Board members have not discussed Sulton’s concerns, a spokesperson said.
Sulton notes that Ohio, Texas and Virginia had to close their prepaid tuition programs to new participants after universities were allowed to set tuition and substantially increased their prices.
Hmm. First a disclaimer. We bought our daughter 400 units of GET tuition credit back in 2002 at $42 a unit. So not only have we realized a nearly 10 percent annual return during a time of low interest rates, but we’re entirely immune to local tuition increases. (Indeed, if my daughter decides to go out of state, we actually benefit from local tuition increases. Go figure.)
That said, I have been a longtime supporter (here and here) of letting tuition at state universities rise closer to market rates, while reducing the flat, per student state subsidy and moving towards a financial aid model.
As with K-12 education, the state has been underfunding our colleges and universities for years, and as I see it we now have three choices. We can: A) increase state spending on higher education, thus maintaining quality and access while keeping tuition costs affordable, or B) maintain quality and access by rationing state funds by allowing tuition rates to rise towards the actual cost of education while subsidizing only those students who require financial aid, or C) continue down the road we’re on where we fail to increase the number of slots to meet growing demand, and allow overall quality to decline.
Option C should be downright unacceptable. Personally, I’d prefer a combination of options A and B. We do need to spend more on higher education. But we also need to spend our money more wisely, and it simply does not make any sense to subsidize the tuition of children from families who can afford to pay the full cost.
This is not just an issue of money; it’s an issue of access. Right now, because every student is subsidized, our limited financial resources results in a limited number of slots available to all students, which means many qualified students are being turned away from our four-year universities. But if those who could afford to pay full fare did, it would free up state funds to open more slots, thus increasing access for all.
I know talk about higher tuition rates raises fears about shutting out low and middle income students, but it doesn’t matter how affordable our universities are if you can’t get in… or they suck. Education is our state’s single most important economic investment, and quite simply, we get what we pay for. If we buy ourselves a second-rate university system, our children will inherit a second-rate economy.
Wow Goldy, I agree 100%. Rather than create a broad entitlement to an education subsidy, why not let the market set the price for education and then have targeted financial aid programs to help the poor?
What I don’t understand is, why aren’t you willing to apply this philosophy elsewhere? Rather than set an across-the-board minimum wage, why not let the market set the wage for unskilled labor, then let the earned income credit help those with dependents for whom that wage isn’t enough? Rather than making everyone pay into a (rather regressive) social security system, why dot let people save for their own retirement, and subsidze the retirement savings of those who are just scraping by?
The larger issue here is whether America will remain competitive in an increasingly global economy, and the answer is you don’t get there by refusing to invest in education (including higher education).
There is more here to be lost than merely access to quality public universities by those of less or no means — although maintaining such access is, in its own right, critical to upward mobility and therefore to social justice in our society.
If university education is available only to the shrinking number of families who can pay for it, or worse, is of poor quality — we may not remain an economic superpower. We may not remain affluent. America could become a loser in the competition for the world’s customers, markets, and wealth.
We can’t afford NOT to give our best students the best possible education, regardless of their ability to pay.
2
“why not let the market set the wage for unskilled labor, then let the earned income credit help those with dependents for whom that wage isn’t enough?”
I don’t see a parallel between minimum wage and education. None.
Are you saying we should let employers pay workers less than it costs workers to provide their labor (i.e., minimum subsistence) and make taxpayers pay the difference? How is that not merely welfare for employers?
Are you saying only workers with children deserve the minimum necessities of life? The EIC applies only to families with kids; how do you propose workers support themselves, if we let employers pay less than subsistence for full time work, and government aid is withheld from single or childless workers?
No, we need minimum wage laws for four reasons:
1) To prevent labor exploitation by ruthless employers; and
2) To keep greedy employers from shifting their labor costs to taxpayers; and
3) To keep uneconomic goods and services that can’t be sold for what they cost to produce from being kept on the market by taxpayer subsidies; and
4) To keep low-paying businesses from gaining an unfair competitive advantage over businesses that pay a living wage by allowing them to shift labor costs to taxpayers.
“2” should be “1”
1
“Rather than making everyone pay into a (rather regressive) social security system, why dot let people save for their own retirement, and subsidze the retirement savings of those who are just scraping by?”
First of all, Social Security is not regressive. You get four things for your FICA taxes:
1) Disablity insurance
2) Survivor insurance
3) An indexed pension
4) Medicare
All four of these things are important, but the indexed pension is especially important because many private pensions are not indexed to inflation and no investment portfolios are; it should be noted that Social Security pensions are indexed to average wages, not CPI, and generally rise faster than inflation.
Even the older generation that has defined benefit pensions have seen inflation reduce their pensions to pocket change when they hit their 80s and 90s, and Social Security is what they live on. For example, my human father, who is in his late 90s, now gets 80% of his income from SS and only 20% from the company pension he began receiving over 30 years ago.
Medicare also is very important because the vast majority of senior citizens could not afford private health care even if they could buy it. But the private, for-profit health insurance market is only interested in selling health insurance to healthy young people, because there’s no money to be made in selling health insurance to old people — 90% of your lifetime health care costs will occur in the last three years of your life. The private insurance industry’s refusal to insure oldsters is another example of market failure.
Free markets don’t work as well as you think they do.
The reason I say SS is not regressive is because most people get, for your tax dollars, benefits equal or greater in value to what you paid in. If you believe you’re going to die young, then SS may not be a good deal. If you know you have a medical condition that is certain to kill you before age 50, the thing to do is spend every cent and live it up while you can. But those cases are exceptional, not the norm.
Secondly, the reason we have government-mandated retirement savings is for the same reason we have helmet laws — when you let idiots do harmful things to themselves, the rest of us get stuck with the tab. You, yourself, explicitly acknowledge that without SS some people will have to be “subsidized.” Where do you think subsidies come from, some mysterious ether? Your though process seems strangely disconnected from the fact that subsidies come from taxpayers.
You have positioned yourself as a huge fan of subsidizing wages (instead of making employers pay their own labor costs) and subsidizing retirement (instead of making workers save for their retirement). You appear to be in favor of creating the ultimate welfare system under which taxpayers pay for everything.
And what makes you think investment markets outperform Social Security? The private investment sector has much higher overhead costs than SS, hefty transaction fees, and of course has a profit “cost” that SS doesn’t have. When you apply compounding principles to the accounting, your private investments have to earn a much higher rate of return just to break even with SS. But the investment markets don’t guarantee any return at all, or even preservation of capital.
What is going on here is that wingnuts like Mr. Wright worship an ideology. They believe private markets can do no wrong, and government can do nothing right. A patently absurd notion that flies in the face of all real-world experience.
Most of us are not wealthy enough to indulge in ideological experiments. We need things that work. Social Security works. We’d be damn fools to allow ideologues to destroy it or divert its income stream into Wall Street’s grasping fingers.
We’d also be fools to let businessmen dump their labor costs on the backs of taxpayers. We’re already letting businesses dump the costs of educating their workforce on taxpayers and workers.
Maybe the answer to the education funding question is to make workers pay for their education upfront (with loans, if they don’t have cash), then pass this cost on to employers and, ultimately, customers by demanding higher wages.
You can’t expect an engineer with four degrees to work for $5.15 an hour, can you?
I can hardly wait until Redneck hits 50, gets called in the office and told he’ll get six months severance but only if he trains his 25-year-old replacement, and spends the last 17 years of his working life using his four degrees to bag groceries at Fred Meyer for $8 an hour because it’s the only job he can get.
It’ll be interesting to see what he thinks of the “free market” then.
Americans have never been much for class warfare. The gap between rich and poor, which in some nations triggers revolution, doesn’t seem to be a terribly powerful political force here. Some academics have speculated that the lower classes here do not resent the rich because they believe they will someday reach that status themselves. They buy into the Horatio Alger myth that our nation propounds as our story–anyone in this nation, no matter how humble his or her birth, through hard work and persistence can become financially successful. We continue to buy into that myth even though movement from lower classes to upper classes occurs at a significantly lesser rate here than in most western European nations. Perhaps the greatest reason upward mobility has become more difficult in this nation is because of our failure to support higher education. When a qualified high school graduate in this country cannot attend a state university because there are not enough slots available, something is fundamentally wrong with our values. Perhaps Americans’ traditional disdain for politics of class will dissipate when we see that deserving youth are denied the opportunity to better themselves because our generation fails to recognize the value of education. A growing gap between rich and poor becomes tinder for massive social upheaval when people see their route to betterment blocked through lack of access to higher education. So, you rich Republicans who fail to support more money for higher education, you may be biting yourselves in your overstuffed asses.
Education is our state’s single most important economic investment, and quite simply, we get what we pay for. If we buy ourselves a second-rate university system, our children will inherit a second-rate economy.
Wow, something about this is so very wrong. Maybe it is because i have spent most of my life as a student and employee in university systems; maybe it is because i am, by training, a philosopher of education; maybe it is because i never considered my university students as resources for extracting and generating capital; but university education is not about providing for economies, it is about the pursuit of acquiring and using epistemological skills to broaden the horizons of human understanding of the world in which we all live.
This may or may not be translateable to some later economic investment, and certainly there are departments within the university system that are supported, through grants and funding from economic streams of capital investments, to develop ‘things” by which capital is grown. Yet, for the faculty and students within the universities, the education is about learning, and thinking about that which is learned. To demand of the education system that it must respond as the single most important economic investment ridicules scholarship for the sake of scholarship, the very trademark of a university education. Under such a system we could completely cut out all of the humanities and classics, the social sciences (other than the few classes that provide the meeting of requirements for business and marketing programs), and most of the language departments including literary criticism and cultural studies.
Of course maybe the future is in the state funding only such entities as ITT and all those other business and technical institutions, whose programmed learning systems, while utterly devoid of critical thinking and processes of questioning methodologies, are certainly first and foremost about the bottom line.
Uh Oh, I lied the other day when I said our property taxes were going to be jacked up to 3% in the upcoming legislative session to satisfy Gregoire…….. We could well be looking at 4 or 5% increases a year so that we can pay for UW to expand to other countries.
Hey Roger, I found a picture of your cousin Steve:
http://www.worth1000.com/entri.....joQN_w.jpg
I could get the .jpg to work after removed the “_w”
http://www.worth1000.com/entri.....06joQN.jpg
10
Education is not the whole answer to upward mobility. There’s lots of people with MBAs, PhDs and JDs working as waiters or construction laborers because they can’t get employment in their chosen fields. You have a much better chance of making a living as a lawyer if your father owns a law firm, than if you’re a nobody getting out of law school with a mountain of debt and no family or friends in the business world. Our system favors incumbents.
Nowhere is this more evident than in politics, where name recognition is everything, and ability counts for little or nothing.
13
Hey thanks! That one’s a keeper! You’ll be seeing it again.
11
I’m glad some feel education is a pursuit for the idle rich. That’s surely healthy, in some way or other. But most of us, including most of your students I suspect, have to make a living.
12
1) property tax increases are statutorily lidded
2) Gregoire doesn’t control how much your property tax is
Hey doofus; fix the public high schools first;
gee, bellevue oozes top school while Seattle is a desert
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12.....8;sort=std
15
“Education is not the whole answer to upward mobility.”
I agree with you. Education, however, provides an important means of pursuing upward mobility, to the extent that upward mobility remains possible in this country. In western Europe, access to higher education is easier for the masses. Such access is one important variable in explaining why citizens of many western European nations have an easier time climbing the socioeconomic ladder than Americans do. Obviously, other factors are important as well. Your post points to a sad irony in contemporary American life–we are becoming more of a nation of hereditary privilege, particularly in politics, than the European traditions from which we broke so long ago. Merit appears to be less and less important in predicting who will lead us.
Hey doofus;
Wrongone – stop talking to yourself. You’re getting simple now that Dean Logan is no longer here to add meaning to your life.
#11 “Of course maybe the future is in the state funding only such entities as ITT and all those other business and technical institutions, whose programmed learning systems, while utterly devoid of critical thinking and processes of questioning methodologies, are certainly first and foremost about the bottom line.”
You got it, dude. Remember all the blathering Bush did in 2004 about community colleges? The Cheap-Labor Conservative(tm) concept of educational utopia is to put the masses through taxpayer-funded trade schools to flood the market with mechanics, carpenters, technicians and “health care assistants” so as to smash what’s left of the unions. Only the “right” people will go to places like Yale, get their brains marinated in frat-party booze, learn to masturbate in a coffin, and be placed in positions of high authority, just like Dumbya himself.
comment clueless…
Nice try associating Dean Logan w/ higher education; that famous director of elections who never made it past 12th grade…
“But we also need to spend our money more wisely, and it simply does not make any sense to subsidize the tuition of children from families who can afford to pay the full cost.”
How about the same argument for K-12?
Here’s some inconvenient facts from MTR.
The taxpayers already provide lavish subsidies for university education. Currently, tuition at UW costs only 21% of the tuition across town at Seattle University. Combine that with federal loans at below market rates and gummint scholarships and students end up paying only a tiny fraction of the true cost of education.
So STFU about the cost and ante up at least a token amount.
Roger, they were capped, but a activist judge in Seattle threw out the “law by initiative,” Gregoire held a press conference and she said that the old law 6% was a bit much, but the law by initiative of 1% per year was too little, so she is going to work with the legislature this upcoming session to get it fixed……….
#24 Something related about the old saw about “the quickest way to ruin a good field hand”)?
(Of course, we all know what “field hand” was a euphemism for, don’t we?)
MTR, you and Goldy actually agree.
“Personally, I’d prefer a combination of options A and B. We do need to spend more on higher education. But we also need to spend our money more wisely, and it simply does not make any sense to subsidize the tuition of children from families who can afford to pay the full cost.”
Why taxpayers should subsidize someone capable of paying full freight, I don’t understand.
That being said- the returns from government “subsidies” in terms of income tax revenue from more educated people easily makes it a solid investment. Part of the reason we did so well after WWII? The GI Bill.
So in other words, people who live paycheck to paycheck and piss away a lifetime of earnings should be rewarded with free tuition, while those of us who manage our money responsibly should be penalized because people who can’t handle money think we should pay because we can “afford it”.
28 Agreed. Seems since we started pulling back from giving the common man a fair shake, just about everything’s gotten worse.
Redneck,
Reality could fuck you in the ass and you wouldn’t even feel it. Your statement at 29 reveals so many unsupportable preconceptions that you prove, yet again, that discourse with you is pointless.
29 well, Mark, since right now under our illustrious “conservative” leadership we’re pissing away (a good anology if you’ve ever seen an elephant take a leak) the earnings of millions who haven’t even been born yet, it would seem a better approach is needed. Maybe it would be wise to look back a few years to when we weren’t doing that, and take it from there.
Leftist? Really? Take me on limpdick. Where am I wrong? List them all. Take me down point by point.
Didn’t think so. Sure is “inconvenient” having somebody like me around to unmask the bullshit you guys spew. What you really want is for somebody else to pay all the bills to cover up your bad choices.
The “common man” gets a 79% subsidy at a taxpayer funded university. Is 79% not enough? What is the right number? Do each of you want to pay your fair share? Of course not; you want The Producers to pick up the tab so you can continue with the same fucking bad choices that got you into the pathetic state you’re in now.
Mark,
You think you earned all on your own whatever it is you have. You never acknowledge little things like privileges of birth, luck, societal stability obtained through taxes and community-minded policies of past governments, no disability, public school education, etc. in contributing to whatever it is you have. By the way, I’m confident I paid more in taxes last year than you earned. So, don’t talk to me about my “bad choices.” I just know that I’m the product of more than just my own efforts, and I’m not too arrogant to admit it.
Sure. I benefited from conservative gummint policies just like everyone else. But I’m SAFT of you freeloaders insisting that I do all the heavy lifting and pay all your bills, and then hafta listen to you complain that it’s not enough. Fuck you worthless freeloaders.
C’mon… I wanna hear from you guys. You say a 79% subsidy is not enough. What’s the right number? And where should the money come from? Wait, I know…. you want somebody else to pick up the tab for you. As fucking usual…
Let the students pay for at least 75% of the total cost of their education. This will double the tuition, and many of the “soft” major students will not take 7 years to graduate. hehe, JCH
14 & 16 – my pleasure. Share and enjoy.
Everyone seems to be overlooking the enormous INFLATION at institutions of higher education.
30 years ago, undergraduate tuition at Harvard was approximately $4,000 per year. For 2006-07, undergraduate tuition at Harvard will be $30,275 per year. Other colleges and universities have shown similar inflation.
This is an increase of more than seven-fold in the last 30 years — far outstripping the increase in the consumer price index or the increase in personal or per capita income.
richard;
Harvard/elite school increases come from increased government monies to public schools and also the grants/ etc funded by the government. They can raise tuition at will w/ all the gov’t money out there. Kind of like NBA teams can spend at will knowing gov’ts will subsidize their arenas.