During a time of international financial troubles, students at CU Boulder are coming together in an effort to understand and implement change on the burgeoning issue of funding for higher education in the state of Colorado.
Hailee Koehler, a 22-year-old senior political science major and co-director of legislative affairs within UCSU, said Colorado is 48th in the nation when it comes to state funding.
Koehler said she started a coalition of students and community leaders as a way to focus on issues pertaining to higher education advocacy.
“On CU’s campus for a long time, there has been a serious lack of a kind of coalition or group that works for higher education,” Koehler said. “We wanted to have this work as a preliminary event so we can start having more events in the future around higher education so students can finally have a strong voice in Colorado.”
Hoping to inform the community on what they said were the impending consequences of budget cuts for higher education, Koehler and her colleague, Brittany Havey, a senior media studies major and co-director of legislative affairs within UCSU, brought together three different voices on civic activity.
Danny Katz, state director for the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, Mark Neuman-Lee, a policy fellow at the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute and Alexis Smith, a senior news-editorial and psychology major and current diversity director at UCSU, sat down in the Dennis Small Cultural Center on Thursday.
Around 20 people, consisting of students, current UCSU students and faculty alike listened and asked questions at the panel’s conclusion.
Together the panel iterated the different constituents who would bear the most weight of the fiscal burden if they don’t come together to make a difference.
In keeping with CoPIRG’s goal of engaging students in the political process, Katz spelled out the financial situation in Colorado and how strategizing and organizing could make a difference on these issues.
“There is definitely a consensus in the state that there is a problem,” Katz said. “[But] higher education is really easy to cut for the state of Colorado. It doesn’t seem to have the immediate visual impact on decision makers, like closing a prison down does. You do that, people freak out. When you cut higher education, it doesn’t visually have as much of an impact, especially because there’s always tuition to make up for it.”
Katz said the reason funding for higher education in Colorado is facing dire straights is because of the citizens of Colorado themselves and the matters they voted on.
“When you listen to some of the reasons why we’re in this situation, my immediate reaction is, that’s ridiculous. It’s important to know that we’re in this situation because voter’s approved of it,” Katz said. “But how do you talk about it so that the majority of Coloradans, who generally distrust the government, engage?”
So how can civic engagement be encouraged among voters? Katz said students have an incredible amount of untapped power, and it is through them that connections to every part of the state can be made, given their strategic placement and potential to impact anything.
Neuman-Lee reiterated the monetary mess Colorado faces and the possible solutions that could focus on sustainable solutions for students seeking higher education.
There are five programs the General Fund goes toward. K-12 education takes up 45 percent of the general fund; 21 percent goes to Medicaid; 9 percent to correctional facilities; 8 percent to higher education and finally, 7 percent to unemployment and judicial services, Neuman-Lee said.
Of all these programs, the one that isn’t mandated, that the legislature isn’t compelled to spend more on, is higher education, Neuman-Lee said.
“Politically, they don’t want to [cut higher education],” Neuman-Lee said. “But they look at the fiscal landscape and there are really no other options.”
The lack of public investment, however, isn’t due solely to the economic downturn, Neuman-Lee said. There are three factors contributing to the insignificant funding higher education institutions in Colorado receive.
The first, Neuman-Lee said, is the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR, a Colorado constitutional amendment adopted in 1992 intended to limit the size of government to its relative size the year it was enacted.
The amendment, according to the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute Web site , has four major provisions: voter approval of tax increases, limits on government collection of revenue (which includes general fund revenue), spending limits on how the general fund can be spent and limits on revenue options, such as no state real property taxes or no local-district income taxes, among others.
These stipulations mean that voter approval is necessary for any and all tax increases, Neuman-Lee said.
“Any increase on taxes at any level has to be voted on by voters,” Neuman-Lee said on TABOR. “So it takes fiscal flex away from the government. We need the money now, but we don’t have the flexibility.”
The second factor, Neuman-Lee said, is the Gallagher Amendment, a constitutional residential property tax relief initiative.
According to the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute Web site, this amendment establishes that 55 percent of total property tax collections statewide must come from non-residential sources and the remaining 45 percent from residential sources.
Consequently, because of the differing rates at which commercial and personal property values fluctuate, what is left is a deficit in the support for public K-12 education, Koehler said.
“In short, Gallagher is an amendment that regulates the collection of property tax here in Colorado,” Koehler said. “Because of the fact that by nature, residential property value tends to go up and commercial property tends to go down, we end up collecting less property tax revenue relative to the value of property. K-12 education in the state is funded through property tax and so because we are collecting less and less property tax revenue, we are less and less able to fully fund K-12 education.”
And finally, the third voter approved amendment comes into play.
Amendment 23, Neuman-Lee said, is reaction to TABOR’s and Gallagher’s effect on public education funding. This amendment, according to the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute Web site, mandated increased levels of funding for K-12 public education based on rates of inflation plus an additional one percent for every 10 years.
Koehler said that because Amendment 23 stipulates spending on K-12 education when there are fewer funds to do so because of the loss of property taxes, Colorado has to pull money from funding higher education to make sure it meets the constitutional requirements to fund K-12.
“On top of all of this, because of TABOR we can’t raise property taxes to cover the gap. So to recap, TABOR limits the increase of taxes, Gallagher mandates property taxes and Amendment 23 mandates K-12 spending,” Koehler said.
What is left, after a tangled web between the three amendments, is an unfortunate collision of constitutional constraints where the three effectively reduce funding for local and the state governments alike.
But there is a short-term solution, Neuman-Lee said, and it comes in the form of the government stimulus package.
“The condition of the stimulus bill for higher education dollars was that in order for us to get it we had to spend on higher education at 2005 and 2006 levels, and that year our spending was $555 million,” Koehler said. “So at this point, we are way below that amount of spending for higher education. But instead of using stimulus dollars to allow us to have more money for our programs, we’re taking the stimulus money and filling the holes because it’s below $555 million. Since we currently haven’t gotten approval from Secretary Duncan….we’re not really supposed to be doing that.”
Eventually, when stimulus money runs out, tuition money will make up the difference. Neuman-Lee said students can expect to see a nine to 10 percent increase in tuition over the next few years.
Smith took a more personalized look at the consequences of dwindling funds for higher education when she illuminated the effects it would have on first-generation and minority students.
“The way CU Boulder defines first generation is students who have parents who didn’t receive any sort of higher education,” Smith said. “Strictly looking at Colorado, there are a growing number of people who identify as first generation. This group, perhaps more than any other, is really feeling how harsh these budget cuts are going to be.”
Smith said should scholarships for first-generation students run out, there is going to be a huge drop in racial and ethnic minority numbers on campus. She also said CU does all it can to pull all the in-state students of color into the university, but the pool from which they draw from is small.
“One of the things the university is looking to do is to increase the first-generation program. We’re actually finding students when they graduate high school, but we can’t bring them here because there’s no money for them. They often come with a lot of expertise around grassroots organization, and are coming in looking for ways to change this institution and higher education, but we can’t tap into this resource,” Smith said.
These students are the very organizers Katz was looking to get involved in the community and political process. Paradoxically, they’re the ones unable to afford college.
“We’re trying to implement a culture of inclusivity, but we’re having a hard time getting these students to the university because we don’t have money for them,” Smith said.
But the biggest problem with the fiscal dilemma is finding a solution. What makes a resolution so difficult to find is that in order to do so, Coloradans are going to have to vote on it.
“Coloradans have to say, ‘we don’t like TABOR,’ which isn’t going to happen easily. First of all, to have something to untangle this web is complicated, and it’s not going to be easy to describe to voters,” Neuman-Lee said. “Secondly, single-subject TABOR would need several different initiatives to untangle. Most lawyers say we can’t get rid of TABOR with one amendment. There is no flex with fiscal policy.”
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Sheila V Kumar at Sheila.kumar@colorado.edu.
