The Perils of Cutbacks in Higher Education

The combination makes public higher education a pillar of the nation's competitive advantage. That is as it should be. How else can bright young people from lower-income families afford a first-rate education? Tuition is usually too high for them at private colleges, and now it is shooting up at the state schools as they struggle to get by with smaller subsidies in a weak economy.

Higher education, it turns out, comes under the rubric of discretionary spending, easier to cut than outlays for kindergarten through 12th grade or programs like Medicaid. And states are taking this easier path, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. During most of the 1990's, outlays for higher education in the 50 states rose substantially. They even inched up 0.7 percent, to $58.2 billion, in the 2003 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, although that was the first year of drastic cutbacks in many states.

This year, the downward pressure is unmistakable. So far, 43 states have approved budgets for the 2004 fiscal year, the National Conference reports, and higher-education outlays have dropped by 2.8 percent, to a total of $37.7 billion, from $38.8 billion last year. The final tally for all 50 states may be slightly higher than last year's, but by a minuscule amount. "In all the cutting, higher education is suffering a disproportionate amount," said Arturo Perez, a policy specialist at the National Conference.
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When such cuts are made, quality inevitably suffers, along with affordability and access, not to mention global competitiveness. Many factors determine national winners in the complex global struggle, but education is undoubtedly one, and it is clearly being hurt in America as the gains of the 1990's are whittled away.

We are not, for example, making high-speed Maglev trains, the magnetic-levitation system that the Chinese are buying to serve as a commuter system for towns around Shanghai. Knowledge workers at Siemens and ThyssenKrupp are bringing Germany $5 billion from that sale. The industry does not exist in the United States and the technology is not high on the agenda, if it is there at all, at the nation's shrinking public universities.
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