After state government higher education funding has dropped about 8 percent and tuition has jumped to more than $5,000 for the first time in school history, Oregon’s lawmakers have told the state’s seven public universities that they need to return some $14 million.
This, of course, is bad news in a state that’s already cash-strapped to the point of being forced to cut weeks of K-12 classes last May and June. But the problem swells from unfortunate to diabolical when you see the devil in the details: The state has told the university system to take the sum from a fund fueled mostly by students’ tuition and fees.
As Oregon Student Association Director John Wycoff observed in an Oregonian article last week (“Colleges told to draw on funds,” Oct. 8), until now, only the university system itself has used student funds to balance its internal budget. But now, the details of planning aside, the state is working to balance part of its own budget shortfall by taking funds effectively paid for by students.
Here’s the bureaucratese underlying what seems to be an — intentional or otherwise — usurpation of student funds. In the waning days of this year’s record-setting legislative session, the state House and Senate passed two relevant bills. Through House Bill 5077, “the authorized appropriations and expenditure limitations … (were) changed by the amounts specified to reflect the reduction in employer contribution rates for the Public Employees Retirement System.” The change in limitations mandated recalling $14 million from the Department of Higher Education’s “Other funds,” as well as $15.8 million from general funds. House Bill 2148 defined how to calculate how much in PERS-related reductions each of the state’s programs would suffer, and mandated that “the amount … be transferred to the General Fund to be available for general government expenses” by the beginning of 2005.
Now the University is slated to lose up to $5 million in these “Other funds” — in the neighborhood of $250 per student — to state misappropriations.
Should the University’s number-crunching fiscal wonks have anticipated this development when planning the 2003-04 and 2004-05 budgets (that is, those affected by this biennium’s Legislative budget)? Possibly.
But that point is moot: The state is now taking money paid by students — who, like members of the Editorial Board, no doubt justifiably assumed it would be spent on University student academic and other programs — and funneling it into the state’s drained general service coffers.
Certainly this is unfair to students, and moreover, the means don’t justify the ends.