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A perfect storm is brewing in the Oregon public policy environment. When that storm makes landfall, Oregon’s higher education system will be devastated beyond recognition.
For years, it has been a struggle to fully fund the state’s public universities. But, it wasn’t always like this. Back in the early 1960s pictured in the movie “Animal House,” for instance, the government typically picked up two-thirds of the in-state tuition expenses, and non-tuition fees were minimal. There was no undue financial burden on students, who could easily manage to pay their share through part-time jobs during the school year and by working full-time in the summers.
That model has been flipped. Now, taxpayer dollars pay for less than 10 percent of the research universities’ operations, and the regional universities—like Western Oregon University, where I teach—manage with a quarter of the operating expenses paid for by the state. Most of the rest comes from student tuition and fees, for which many students I know work full-time even when attending classes.
This financing model will worsen when the next recession hits.
While any recession is difficult to predict, it will arrive sooner than later. Economies go through a period of growth, followed by stagnation. Currently, the entire world is experiencing economic growth, after the disastrous Great Recession of 2008 that hit us particularly hard. Since the end of that recession in June 2009, we have had steady growth in the economy over the past nearly nine years. The average unemployment rate in the US is now at a low 4.1 percent, with 16 states having rates even lower than the average.
However, growth rates cannot be sustained forever. The nature of business cycles makes investors jittery as we near the peak. This is what we are beginning to see expressed through the volatility in the stock market, when the Dow Jones Index dropped by more than thousand points, not once but twice in the same week.
The coming recession will make state dollars scarce. When that happens, public higher educational institutions cannot even dream of balancing their books on the shoulders of students. Even now, it is not uncommon for students to graduate from Oregon’s public universities with more than $27,000 in debt—a financial burden that the partying students in “Animal House” did not have to worry about. To subject our students to even higher debt levels will be outright robbery.
Further, because Oregonians, like all Americans, are having fewer kids, the current K-12 student population in Oregon will not translate to increasing numbers of native students at higher educational institutions. The potential decrease in student population will mean lower revenue from tuition and fees. All these will further complicate the coming budgetary battles at Salem, when the next recession comes.
One way to bring in additional revenue is by admitting students from other countries. Foreign students pay much higher fees than our residents do, and they are eager to come to the United States for their undergraduate and graduate education. Recent estimates are that there are more than a million foreign students studying in the US, and they brought in more than $39 billion in revenue to colleges and universities.
Even locally, it was a healthy decade of increasing numbers of international students enrolled at the University of Oregon. But, as this paper reported on January 13th, “international student enrollment at the University of Oregon dropped for the second year in a row — representing a more than $6 million decrease in annual revenue.”
But, the Trump administration is increasingly making it difficult for international students to come to the US. His xenophobic rhetoric, and the government’s denial of student visas, mean that we can expect numbers to further decline in the coming year. To put up blocks against international students does not make any economic sense when they help balance the higher education budget, leave alone the benefits of greater understanding across cultures.
The final piece that makes for the perfect storm is this—over the past couple of years, the political rhetoric in the country has turned intensely anti-intellectual. “We need more welders and less philosophers” has become a mantra. Politicians have been virulently attacking various fields of inquiry that they deem wasteful.
Tragically, we seem to be in denial even as the storm is gathering force. This means that when the recession hits, it will result in a destruction of public universities, for which there will be no disaster relief. I hope educators and political leaders will begin to prepare for the coming storm, keeping in mind the best interests of the state’s children and youth who are our collective future.
2 comments:
Beautifully written Op Ed. I hope they publish it in toto. Nicely argued, balanced and excellently articulated.
The problem with admitting more foreign students is that they all want to stay - very few go back. In the charged atmosphere on immigration, that will polarise lots of people. Nevertheless its the right thing to do.
It takes quality leaders to do the right thing ... and quality leadership is not what we now have :(
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