Here’s the basic equation of why your tuition is as high as it is: States that are putting less money into public universities equals public universities that are making up that loss by raising tuition.
But when and why did the state stop investing in higher education? It turns out the seeds of disinvestment were being laid around the time most students at University of Oregon were being born.
Mainly, two pieces of legislation messed with higher education funding: Measure 5 and Measure 11, according to Joe Stone, professor of economics at UO who specializes in labor and education. Both of them required the state to put more money in places other than education.
Measure 5 had to do with property taxes.
Property taxes are tied to the value of property—if the value goes up, taxes go up. Many voters were mad about this because their taxes were going up and they didn’t have any say, according to Robert Parker, an instructor in Policy, Planning and Public Management at UO. So they lowered taxes from $15 to $5 per thousand.
But that took a lot of money away from counties, so Measure 5 required the state to make up that difference.
Four years later, another piece of legislation took yet more money away from the state — Measure 11, which put in mandatory minimum sentences and ended up putting more people in state prisons.
Mandatory minimum sentencing requires courts of law to standardize how long they put someone in jail for — it takes away the possibility of any reduction in sentence by getting out on good behavior or any other reason, under a certain time period.
So, Oregon was putting more money into counties and, at the same time, more money into prisons. That money had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was education.
And, according to Stone, higher education paid more in the long run.
“The state is sitting there with new obligations, so they needed to come up with revenue to make up for these losses to K-12,” Stone said. “One place they went to get it is higher ed.”
There were ballot measures that protected K-12 education, but nothing protecting college education. So between 1980 and 2011, funding for higher education decreased in Oregon by 61.5 percent, according to the American Council on Education.
Something like this happened nationwide, according to Stone, but it’s worse here in Oregon than it is nationwide because of Measure 5 and Measure 11. That’s not to say our tuition is higher — it’s only a little above average compared to other Associated of American Universities schools.
More recently, there have been calls for reform not only in funding for higher education, but in these measures that took money away from higher education. House Bill 3194, which passed in July 2013, changed sentences for marijuana offenses and suspended driving, among others.
Senator Arnie Roblan, D-Coos Bay was in the committee on public safety that pushed this bill through. He said the law was trying to “bend the curve.”
“The law has made (corrections) a higher priority than education,” Roblan said.
