insight

Presidents need to go to school on C&D issues

Tom Keller
tkell12@mscd.edu

Higher education purports to improve students' critical-thinking abilities. Sadly, higher education administrators seem to have a hard time employing such abilities when they try to solicit voters' support for a $4 billion tax increase this fall.

Ever since the state's colleges and universities were implored to spread the pro-Referendums C and D message, the presidents of those institutions have been openly pimping the idea that the referendums' passage is necessary to save students from massive tuition increases. Never mind that those schools have the freedom to jack up their prices as much as they want because they now enjoy enterprise status. They want voters to believe higher education has suffered massive budget cuts, and the entire system is in danger of being completely defunded by the state if the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, known as TABOR, isn't placed in timeout for the next five years.

As is often the case, these asinine academics don't know what they're lecturing about. While such things as cash for capital-construction projects may not be what those institutions had hoped for or received in years past, a trip to any one of them reveals the outlandishness of claims that campuses are crumbling. At Colorado State University, buildings are being torn down in favor of newly minted structures. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, a new law school is being erected, as is a state-of-the-art hospital. At Mesa State College, the campus is expanding faster than city planners can plan. At the University of Northern Colorado, the dorms are newer and nicer than some LoDo lofts. In other words, higher-ed higher-ups might want to do some of that scholarly research they love to boast about before begging voters for a bigger allowance.

If these incompetent intellectuals were the least bit familiar with their fiscal situations, they'd know the higher-education budget in Colorado cannot be deciphered. No one knows what the funding levels for higher education were, are or will be. A two-year, $250,000 study commissioned by the Legislature says as much. The Northwest Educational Research Center, known as NORED, performed the study and reported that it was impossible to determine how much money was being allocated to the institutions and what the money was being used for.

Expensive research by an outside group isn't necessary to discover that. The high degree of unaccountability and disorganization in higher-education allocations can be gleaned from the legislature's Long Bill, which shows that institutions receive funding, but does not show what the funding is for or how it's to be spent. Generating a believable argument for additional dollars for higher education is extremely difficult when the past and present dough-flows cannot be nailed down.

Pandering college and university presidents will no doubt continue to tell voters they should each give up more than $1,000 in tax refunds over the next five years, but voters should remember three things when they go to the polls this fall: There is no demonstrable need for more money for higher education, no guarantee tuition increases will be abated and nothing to hold legislators to promises that funding from the referendums will be devoted to higher education.