World ends, higher education hit hardest

As a University of Oregon alum, I received an "important message" from University President Dave Frohnmayer yesterday (emphasis in original):

We are at a critical time in the budget negotiations in Salem, and I need your help to protect our state funding. In December, Governor Ted Kulongoski proposed a budget for higher education that would provide stability and begin to undo a decade of disinvestment. However, the budget recently proposed by the co-chairs of the Ways and Means Committee takes a significant step backwards from the governor's request. Simply put, this proposal, if enacted, would degrade the quality of the University of Oregon.

It would degrade the quality of the school? Wow, it must be bad. You'd think Republicans were in charge of the budget, but no -- the Ways & Means co-chairs are Sen. Kurt Schrader of Canby and Rep. Mary Nolan of Portland, both Democrats.

The email continues:

The co-chairs have cut $35 million from the Oregon University System operating budget. This includes cuts to enrollment growth and faculty salaries. If enacted, the cuts would mean higher tuition for Oregonians. The co-chairs also cut 83 percent from the Oregon University System capital construction budget.

Thirty-five million? What are they thinking? Did Karl Rove plant mind probes into their brains?

It concludes by asking me to contact the committee members to express my concern "about the proposed cuts to higher education - concern that is being conveyed almost daily in newspaper editorials across the state."

Oh, newspapers are editorializing against it? Double wow. It must be really bad.

But wait.

At Rogue Pundit, we get a clearer picture of what's really going on. RP wrote last week that the current higher ed budget is $735 million, which was actually about $6 million less than the 1999-2001 figure. Clearly, the higher ed budget has slipped over the last eight years, so for 2007-2009, Gov. Kulongoski proposed a new budget figure of $859 million, an increase of almost 17 percent.

The Ways & Means co-chairs reduced Kulongoski's proposal to $843 million, so it's only an increase of nearly 15 percent. So what President Frohnmayer calls a "cut" is really just a smaller increase, and what he claims will "degrade the quality of the University of Oregon" is really a lie.

Yes, that's right. A lie. It might not be the increase Mr. Frohnmayer wanted. It might not even be the increase that's justified. But an additional $108 million dollars will not degrade the university system or the U of O, and I believe Mr. Frohnmayer knows it. And his threat of higher tuition is a reprehensible, unjustified threat.

(The governor's recommendation of $483 million for community colleges was reduced to $458 million; and his $401 million budget for university construction bonds was reduced to $56 million, because the Ways & Means co-chairs were concerned about the level of the state's already-existing debt load. But those figures do not "degrade" the university, either.)

Rogue Pundit makes another interesting observation: inflation over the last eight years has increased by 23.2 percent, so even a 17 percent increase falls behind inflation. It would have to be $914 million to match inflation.

But meanwhile, the K-12 budget, which was $4.6 billion in '99-01, is scheduled to increase to $6.245 billion in '07-09, an increase of almost 36 percent.

If we were concerned with keeping up with inflation, that figure would only be $5.67 billion, or a difference of almost six hundred million dollars. If we kept the K-12 budget at the rate of inflation, we could bring the university system up to the inflation level and still have half a billion dollars to fill a rainy-day fund without increasing taxes on corporations.

If we wanted.