As Air Force One roars off into the sunset and the funereal cheers recede, there’s a new sound in the air—the steady snip of giant scissors, floating south from Phoenix.
As Howard Fischer reports, Governor Jan Brewer is proposing a 20 percent cut in state funding for public universities:
Brewer’s plan reduces state aid to the university system by $170 million, to $703.1 million. But [budget director John] Arnold said the cut is not as large as it would seem, with the schools having other sources of revenue, mainly tuition.
Arnold said, though, that Brewer doesn’t believe this will result in an automatic hike in what students have to pay.
“That’s a discussion we have to have,” he said. And he said the governor doesn’t want to do anything to price higher education out of the reach of much of the population.
And like it or not, the argument from administrative bloat is alive and well:
Arnold said the governor believes there are “inefficiencies” in the system that can be corrected.
“I think we can have a strong and healthy university system even with the budget reductions,” he said.
“There’s going to have to be reform on how we provide higher education in this state,” Arnold continued. “But I think we can come out better for it.”
Meanwhile, ASUA is hard at work on its tuition and fee proposal, “trying,” in the words of President Emily Fritze, “to give the students’ voice.” Ideally, that would mean giving students a vote, at least on fees. But if it doesn’t, they ought to have the strongest hand possible in the tuition negotiation game—which brings up another problem with the expansion of incidental fees.
It’s clear that pressure to increase tuition will be high this semester. Pressure to increase fees, which are easier, sneakier, and murkier, will be even higher. Adding extra variables to the tuition tussle in the form of incidental fees makes it much harder to come up with a clear and coherent proposal, and multiplies the number of options available to propose. That taxes the time of student leaders and ends up requiring, in effect, a separate proposal for each fee, plus tuition. Suddenly, a little referendum doesn’t look so bad after all.
Connor Mendenhall blogs for the Arizona Desert Lamp. He is a contributor to the Student Free Press Association.
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