It would be a lot easier to make the case for the dire need to rescue higher education if young people were half as interested in it as they are in spending $600 on a PlayStation 3.
I can just hear the tax-cut fanatics fulminating: Look at them cutting class to wait in line to buy video games. If the slackers don’t care about college, why should taxpayers?
Why indeed.
Trouble is, it’s not about them.
When the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems released its study last week confirming that state support for colleges and universities here is a fraction of what it is at comparable schools, anybody who cares about ever having a job in this state should have dropped his joystick in horror.
Dismantling higher education for tax refunds is like logging the orchard for firewood and then wondering what happened to the peaches.
Nothing compares to higher education as an economic engine to produce high-paying jobs.
“Among large employers, they see the connection between a strong system of higher education and the state’s economy directly,” University of Colorado president Hank Brown said.
Those employers include Level 3, Sun Microsystems, Lockheed Martin, Amgen and a bevy of energy companies working on developing renewables. They all require a highly trained workforce.
“They really get it,” Brown said. “Others don’t make the connection as well.”
It’s why there’s been such puny outcry as the percentage of the state budget devoted to higher education dropped from 27 when Brown was in the state Senate in the 1970s to 9 today.
In plain dollars and cents, the most obvious cost to the state from slashing higher ed has come in research grants we didn’t get. For every $1 in state money spent on higher education in Colorado, $30 is generated for research.
Some of the money that did come here helped produce a vaccine to prevent shingles. Dr. Myron Levin, who came to the CU Health Sciences Center from Harvard in 1982, was on the team that developed Zostavax, recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
But future Myron Levins probably will go to places such as the University of Texas Medical School, where per-student state funding is nearly six times that of Colorado.
And with them will go the research grants, the jobs for research assistants, the spinoff industries and the proceeds from their discoveries.
“Here we’re nurturing Nobel Laureates and then letting them get plucked off by other institutions because we can’t find a little bit of money to give them a lab,” said Rep. Jack Pommer, D-Boulder.
The Colorado Commission on Higher Education last week called for $100 million a year for five years to rebuild state colleges and universities. Given that per student, Colorado spends on average about half as much on higher ed as other states, it would take that long just to get back in the game.
But Pommer found all the sudden concern bewildering. The state’s abandonment of higher education has been well documented for years.
“I guess I’m a little puzzled at CCHE’s apparent astonishment,” he said.
And the suggestion that $100 million a year for five years might be available for colleges and universities is “pure fantasy.” Without new revenue sources, just maintaining the status quo will be a challenge.
Even Gov.-elect Bill Ritter – fresh off a successful campaign based on the “Colorado promise,” which included a commitment to expand access to affordable higher education to all Colorado kids – admits his is an ambitious goal.
“We’re not going to turn that on a dime,” he said.
Ritter declined to reveal his strategy for reaching it. But just as Bill Owens’ administration made transportation its top priority, Ritter said he’d “assign a priority” to higher education.
Fair enough. But as they say around the PlayStation, game over.
It’s time to deliver.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
