Higher education leaders and their lobbyists spent recent years at the Colorado statehouse battling over the scraps in bare-bones budgets. But with last fall’s passage of Referendum C, freeing up millions, a debate is now raging over its allocation among colleges and universities.
It’s a necessary debate. Colorado’s current situation is clearly not sustainable.
Colorado last fall became the first state in the nation to give students a voucher to cover the state’s share of their education, rather than give block grants to the schools.
The move flattened state support among colleges, large and small, with every Colorado undergraduate getting the same amount, regardless of the costs associated with their majors. The state also hands out an extra pot of cash to help offset high-cost programs. The state spent $319.5 million this year on vouchers and then divvied up an extra $258.6 million among the colleges.
There’s no easy formula – or even a complex one – to specify what percentage of program costs the state will cover, which has left colleges scrambling for cash.
Now the state’s two behemoths, the University of Colorado and Colorado State University, have joined forces to pitch for a greater share of state funding, noting that many programs at the state’s premier universities are more expensive to provide.
Colorado deserves top-flight research universities, but it’s important that they’re not built at the expense of smaller schools. CU and CSU leaders say they don’t want that either, but if lawmakers looked at the data, they would see research universities are being shortchanged. However, there’s only so much money to go around, and smaller schools can’t afford to raise tuition too much or they’ll lose students.
The Colorado Commission on Higher Education is completing a study that should identify the gaps in Colorado’s system and any funding disparities.
CU president Hank Brown and CSU’s Larry Penley want the state tuition voucher, now set at $2,580, extended to graduate students. They’d also like to see bigger vouchers for juniors and seniors taking upper-division courses. They’re reasonable requests, and CCHE director Jenna Langer is hopeful.
Ultimately, Colorado should return to a framework from earlier decades when lawmakers took into account program costs.
Besides a fair formula, lawmakers need to decide how much they value higher education and increase the amount of money the state spends overall. Colorado currently spends about $3,360 per student, third from last in the nation. For a state with a high-tech economy and global ambitions, how pathetic is that?
