Colorado political leaders have been scratching their heads for years over how a state with such a highly educated work force could do such a poor job of educating seeing its own young people through the halls of higher education.
They’ve given it a name: the Colorado Paradox.
It’s a mystery no more.
A principal ingredient of the paradox was set out in alarming detail this past week: Colorado’s public colleges and universities suffer from a shocking lack of funding and have fallen far behind competing institutions.
Our institutions would need $832 million in extra funding just to meet average funding levels of their national peers.
Average – that’s hardly an adequate goal in a growing state with such a highly skilled work force. Yet it will take a decade or longer to mount a significant recovery.
Statistics provided by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems indicate that most Colorado schools receive about half as much state funding per student as peer schools across the country.
For example, Metro State College receives $2,495 per student in state funding, while its peer schools average $5,695. The University of Colorado at Boulder receives $4,554 per student from the state against an average $9,523 at its peer schools (which include the likes of the University of Nebraska and the University of Texas).
The report was commissioned by Gov. Bill Owens, and we hope its findings will persuade the state legislature to start Colorado on a road to recovery.
We say recovery because Colorado hasn’t always been in such straits. Higher-education funding suffered greatly this decade, the result of declining revenues and a dysfunctional state budget. Lawmakers, forced by law to make horrific cuts, did so in the largest area of the budget not afforded a specific constitutional protection: higher ed.
Schools make cutbacks of their own and were forced to seek double-digit tuition increases. (Though a tangle of state laws even prohibited some schools from moderate tuition hikes in certain years.) Of course, tuition increases only deepen the paradox, squeezing out students who can’t pay the rising rates.
The state can’t afford to go into a tailspin that further erodes Coloradans’ education opportunities. The state has one of the most highly educated populaces in the country, yet only one in five Colorado ninth-graders will graduate from college, which ranks the state in the bottom quarter of states.
“We didn’t fund our colleges very well, then we butchered them in the budget downturn and we haven’t had a whole lot of money to restore them,” state Rep. Jack Pommer, a member of the Joint Budget Committee, told The Post.
The stranglehold applied by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights prompted conservatives like Hank Brown, now CU president, and Bruce Benson, trustee chairman for Metropolitan State College, to tour the state last year stumping for fiscal reform.
Colorado is now left with a system that can barely meet the requirements of 21st century education.
Oh, how we long to be at least average!
EDITOR’S NOTE: On Tuesday, we’ll begin to look at the challenge this funding shortfall holds for state lawmakers – and Colorado families.
