From the VP: States Relying More and More on Tuition Revenue

Interesting piece in this morning’s Inside Higher Education about the continuing importance of tuition as a major funding source for public higher education in the U.S.

Despite a backlash in Washington and other states to several years of double digit tuition increases during the Great Recession, more than half of the states used tuition to generate more than 50 percent of their total educational revenue in 2017.

Although the state of Washington in total is still below the 50 percent threshold, that is mostly due to the higher level of state subsidy provided to the community and technical college system. The University of Washington still relies on tuition revenue to fund about two thirds of its core educational operations which represents some modest improvement from the earlier part of this decade but is still significantly higher than the levels seen a generation ago in the early 1990’s.

Revising the share of state support versus tuition revenue, was the major operating budget issue for the UW. During the recently completed legislative session the campus will be closely following a study by the Washington Institute for Public Policy. During this interim period funding ratios will be reviewed in other states and recommendations will be made to the Governor and the state legislature on changes that could be made in our state.

From the VP: UC System Hikes Non-Resident Tuition

Since the end of the Great Recession in 2012, there has been a strong backlash in most state legislatures to increasing tuition rates for public higher education institutions. After four years of double digit increases in Washington, our state legislature froze tuition for two years and then actually reduced tuition two years in a row during the 2015-17 biennium. In the current biennial budget, undergraduate tuition will increase about two percent per year, tied to the growth in statewide median income.
Our neighbors to the south in California are dealing with similar problems. While the University of California (UC) system is under increasing pressure to increase access for both incoming freshman and community college transfer students, funding from Sacramento has been less than requested and tuition rates frozen or held to a couple of percentage points like our state.
Last week, UC Regents took the controversial step of increasing non-resident tuition by 3.5% for the 2018-19 academic year, read article in the LA Times here. The move would raise $35 million which would be used to reduce class sizes and support more academic support and counseling. Gavin Newsom, California’s Lt. Governor, an ex-officio member of the board who is also running to succeed Governor Jerry Brown voted against the increase asking to delay the vote until the legislature completes work on the state budget.

From the VP: Welcome to the 2018 reboot of Randy’s blog!

I retired my original blog back in 2009 after I left the state relations job on a full time basis, but for the past few months I’ve been thinking about resurrecting the blog as VP for External Affairs. I can’t predict how prolific I will be about posting but my goal is to try to get something interesting up an average of once per week. Sure it’s been almost nine years but what do you say we fire up the laptop and get started all over again?

I spent the end of last week in Washington D.C. meeting with lead staff for our state’s congressional delegation on the University’s FY 2019 Federal Agenda. Federal relations director Sarah Castro and I were able to make the rounds on Thursday and Friday thanking each of our great congressional offices for their past support and advocating for additional federal investments in scientific research, student financial assistance, health care entitlements and a number of other critical initiatives.

In conversations about the role of this office, I often get puzzled looks from folks when I mention we have a UW government relations operation in the nation’s capital. There is an understandable sense among many that Olympia is the government relationship that matters the most and I think a bit of ignorance about how much the University is truly dependent upon the federal government.

I often point out that in the UW’s $7 billion plus annual budget, most of the revenue that finances our spending comes from one or more federal government programs. Our hospital system and network of physician clinics could not survive without federal health insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Our research enterprise is fueled with grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation among others. And our Husky Promise program which celebrates its 10-year anniversary this year could not function without federal Pell Grant assistance for thousands of our students. And I’ve only scratched the surface of the dozens and dozens of federal programs and grants so critical to many other parts of the campus.

So I hope it’s self-evident to you why we maintain a full time staff of three professionals in D.C. to make sure that we are providing timely fiscal and policy information to our twelve congressional offices as well as facilitating meetings with elected officials and key staffers for faculty members, students, administrators and everyone in between.

Just last fall, we called repeatedly on our delegation to resist some of the most damaging provisions of federal tax reform that would have done great harm to graduate student financial support, student loan programs, athletic department finances and University capital debt management. While our Senators and Representatives were not able to fix everything, they did manage to correct a majority of problems and the strong relationships that we have built over the years with each of the offices played a large part in our success.

If you want to follow federal issues more closely, why not check out the Federal Relations blog for the latest in information from Washington D.C.