UCSU forum seeks to solve education funding woes
Several members of the Colorado state legislature made it clear Tuesday night that they are taking the problem of rising tuition costs seriously.
At an open forum organized by UCSU, university administrators, state legislators, and various members of higher education governing boards met to discuss the lack of funding for higher education in Colorado. While solutions to the problem varied from panelist to panelist, they all agreed that students would be ones to drive any future changes.
“We do need to hear from you all more during the legislative session,” said State Sen. Ron Tupa (D-Boulder), vice chair of the Senate Education Committee. “I don’t get enough e-mail from students on this issue. I don’t even get enough e-mails from your parents on this issue. Let me hear from you.”
Most of the discussion centered on the bureaucratic problems involved with the way funding is handled in Colorado. Sen. Tupa and Sen. Joshua Penry (R-Grand Junction) both said the main problem with raising funds for any major issue, such as higher education, is the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights amendment, passed in 1992.
“TABOR is the strictest government spending limit in the country,” Tupa said. “It’s been the bane of higher education funding.”
TABOR places strict limits on government spending and budgeting for Colorado, only allowing the annual budget to increase a maximum of 6 percent from the previous year. The panelists agreed that TABOR has limited the abilities of legislators to use state money for higher education.
Chad Marturano of Gov. Ritter’s Office of Planning and Budgeting said that of that 6 percent, about 5 to 5.5 percent is devoted to mandatory spending on prisons, Medicaid, and primary education as a direct result of Amendment 23, which passed in 2000.
This leaves the remaining 0.5 to 1 percent to be divided up among the rest of the areas the state wishes to fund.
The panelists did agree that some progress has been made in recent years toward reforming higher education funding.
Relief for higher education came in the form of Referendum C, which was approved by Colorado voters in 2005. Referendum C suspends certain portions of TABOR in order to get rid of some spending limits mandated by the act.
While all of the panelists agreed that Referendum C has worked relatively well as a temporary band-aid, they acknowledged that there was still a great deal of work to be done.
“We are about $750 million short compared to what our peer institutions spend…around the country,” said former Congressman David Skaggs, director of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education.
The panelists said they admired the fact that CU has managed to maintain its status as a flagship university despite cuts in state funding.
“Our schools have done a heroic job over these years in being productive with less and less each year,” Skaggs said.
Sen. Penry, also a member of the Senate Education Committee, emphasized the need for institutions of higher education to pursue funds from non-traditional sources.
“What higher education needs to do is to figure out other ways to get funding outside of the general fund,” Penry said.
CU Regent Cindy Carlisle said she hopes students will continue to make their concerns heard, encouraging them to bring the issue of rising tuition to the regents.
“I’m very interested to see what [the students] bring to us,” Carlisle said.
Carlisle also said she voted in favor of the tuition hikes in recent years, but that it was a necessary measure to ensure a high quality education for CU students.
“It’s not an easy vote,” she said. “Unless we raise tuition, the institution doesn’t go forward.”
UCSU leaders said they plan to continue pushing the initiative with a new campaign dubbed “Show Me the Money.” Upcoming events include a lobby day at the state capitol sometime in March.
Jesse Jensen, a junior political science major and co-director of legislative affairs for UCSU, said the organization will be working hard to get the message out.
“With students, traditional methods of communication are changing,” Jensen said. “We’re reaching out in creative ways.”
Jensen also said that the forum was a good first step in the right direction.
“It’s a complex situation…if anybody was able to pick something up, we were successful,” he said.
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer Rob Ryan at rryan@colorado.edu.
