Time for the U.S. to put money where its education is

According to the Chinese Education Center Ltd., the budget for tuition-free higher education in China increased by 45 percent from 2007 to 2011 and has continued a similar pace. Enrollment is over 35 million, up from 9 million in 2001. These are indicators of a culture on the rise.

Since 2010 enrollment at the Missoula campus of the University of Montana dropped by 22 percent. In the past 30 years or so in Montana public funding for the university has gone from over 90 percent to less than 17 percent. The deficit has been largely replaced by tuition, which most students can’t afford, and, so, can’t attend without incurring about $25,000 in debt. These are indicators of a culture in decline. Our grandparents had a vision of the future. To accomplish it, they willingly chose to tax themselves to provide free higher education for the generations to follow them. But in the 1980s something sour and cold entered the hearts and minds of citizens and legislators. They continually reduced public funding for higher education and forced the cost onto the students. The dream of our grandparents and the futures of young people have been betrayed by both the regents and the legislators. This betrayal is nationwide, and is one thing at the heart of our national decline.

There is more to the decline. In the late 1960s — in the days before tuition — the U.S. had the highest percentage of new college graduates in the world. Today, Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea (all with free higher education) have a higher percentage of degree holders ages 25 to 34 than the U.S. Soon China and other countries will also be ahead of us.

In the late 1960s, tuition-free higher education and the GI Bill had been a major contributor to making the U.S. arguably the most prosperous and egalitarian society the world had yet seen and was the envy of the rest of the world. After the end of World War II other countries, our competitors, saw our example and built their own systems of free higher education

Economists tell us we must have more and more college graduates to remain competitive. To supply the skilled workforce we need, we need to enroll more and more students whose parents did not attend college. Unfortunately, our efforts to get these students into college and keep them there are failing because they can’t afford it.

College loan debt is now over $1 trillion (that exceeds credit card debt). In 2011 the U.S. Department of Education spent $1.4 billion on student loan collections and guarantees. A 2011 study by the Washington, D.C., Institute for Higher Education found that 58 percent of the 1.8 million borrowers whose loans became due in 2005 had not received a degree. Because they can’t raise the money, they are dropping out or they are defaulting. Over half of that 58 percent were delinquent. Continually rising tuition causes students to work long hours which reduces the odds of completing a degree. Today, one in four borrowers are behind on their payments, and 8 million are in default.

In Montana we have made a critical error — an error we share with other states. Our forebears deeded us tuition-free higher education but our generation has incrementally — legislative session after legislation session — cut funding and imposed and then raised tuition until less than 17 percent of the university academic program is now supported by public funds. The burden has fallen on to the students. Very few of them have the approximately $25,000 it will cost in tuition for four years on the university campuses. So they borrow money.

Back when students left college without a massive debt, they had already begun to think about buying or building a home and putting money into some other part of the local economy. Today, paying off a student loan requires sending any available money to New York bankers. Then, there is the multiplier effect on the economy of money spent locally. Tote it up and the cost to the Montana taxpayer of sending those funds out of state is greater than it would cost to pay taxes for tuition. One of those few times taxing can save money for all of us.

What do we need to do? We need to return our university and community college systems to zero tuition. To do that (for the university system) will require approximately a reduction of $1,000 per student per year for six years or $500 a year for 12 years — not much of a bulge in the state budget.

Where to get the money. Simply restore the cut in top-bracket income taxes of a few sessions ago to what it was before. Let the people who have most benefited from free education in the past pay for the same treatment to the coming generations, That top-bracket tax cut was supposed, by magic, to raise the economic status of all Montana citizens. Of course, it didn’t. That’s why it is called voodoo economics.

Gov. Cuomo of New York has a, perhaps, more palatable plan. It is to provide tuition-free college at all state four-year and community colleges to all accepted students if they or their families earn less than $125,000 per year.

We have betrayed the trust our forebears passed on to us, and we have betrayed the futures of young people growing up in Montana. At the rate we are reducing funding for the higher education, it will be only a few years until the paltry 17 or so percent we taxpayers now put into the academic program will disappear. Funding will depend entirely on corporate grants and tuition. The cost of tuition will price the universities out of the reach of more and more potential students, and, the publicly funded university system, as we have known it for the past century, will collapse, and we will be back to when only the wealthy attend college.

Robert O’Neil is a resident of Kalispell.