News and Updates

I was interested to see the story from KNKX radio in yesterday’s news clips that showed that the University of Washington has the lowest “net” price for families of any university in the state according to The Hechinger Report and Education Writers Association.  This study lets consumers see the sticker price and then the net price that students and families actually pay once all financial aid and scholarships are factored in.  This low net price is a testament both to our state legislature which has been relentlessly focused on keeping college tuition affordable since the end of the Great Recession and the thousands of generous UW donors who have contributed towards student scholarships during our current Be Boundless capital campaign.

While low tuition is a good deal for students and families, it remains also a huge part of the funding that keeps the UW and other four year institutional operating budgets afloat.  That’s why if a state is going to go the route of keeping tuition low, it’s critical that state funding make up the difference.  Most of the UW’s competitive peers around the nation who have low tuition for resident undergraduates enjoy relative high levels of state funding per student.

The funding crisis that the UW faces as we head into the 2019 state legislative session is that this situation is not the case for our university. In her annual address to the campus last Tuesday, President Cauce displayed a series of charts that show while the UW ranks near the bottom in terms of our tuition price, it also ranks third from the bottom of our 25 public peer group in state funding per student – about $5200 per student compared to $14,000 to $24,000 per student for the four universities who also rank low on tuition per student.

As the saying goes, “this is no way to run a railroad!”  It simply isn’t sustainable for a large flagship university to rank low in both state funding and tuition revenue per student.  Given the recent rapid rise in the cost of living in the Seattle metropolitan area, it’s also a recipe for long term disaster.  These are the stakes as we head into what some legislators have hopefully called “the year for higher education.”  We hope so too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about college majors recently.  No, I’m not planning to go back to school for another degree (although the idea of being a Triple Dawg has some appeal).  No, I’m thinking about majors because my daughter is a sophomore this year at the UW and is in the process of trying to sort out her academic future for the next three years.

There’s been a lot of negative attention on four year degrees in the last couple of years, particularly bachelor’s degrees in the liberal arts which many feel do not lead directly to a good paying job.  Certainly universities nationwide have seen a slow migration away from the liberal arts for many years.  For example, in 1998, the top five undergraduate majors here on the UW Seattle campus were Business, Biology, Political Science, English and Sociology.  In 2017, the top five were Computer Science, Psychology, Business, Biochemistry and Electrical Engineering – a pretty good reflection of the significant changes that have occurred in the regional economy during this time.  In case our elected officials were wondering, many of our students seem to have gotten the “STEM” message.

But that does not mean that a liberal arts degree has no value and in fact, according to a recent survey commissioned by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, while the general public remains skeptical of their value, executives and hiring managers in the business community not only have confidence in universities and colleges, they value those skills that are generally taught as part of a liberal arts education.

The survey covered 500 private sector business executives and 500 managers whose duties included recruiting and hiring new employees.  More than 60% of those surveyed expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in U.S. colleges and universities and between 75 and 80% of the same group who think completing a college education is very important or absolutely essential in today’s workplace.

More importantly, when it comes to skills necessary to succeed in today’s workplace, business executives and hiring managers value more generalized skills that aren’t specific to certain majors such as oral communication and critical thinking.  And while these skills are highly valued, less than 50% of the same group believe students are well prepared in this regard.

So, let’s hold off on the requiem for the liberal arts for the time being.  Sure, computer science and engineering are still going to be both popular with students and necessary given the direction of the economy.  But it seems that there is still a viable place in the workplace for the humanities.