A visible course change.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation's leading trade journal for colleges and universities, publishes an almanac each year that provides snapshots of issues and trends affecting higher education in each state. For more than a decade, it has been painful to read the entries for Oregon. In the edition published Aug. 31, however, the Chronicle provides a refreshingly sunny assessment:

"If Oregon's 2005-07 biennial budget showed small improvements for the state's struggling public colleges and universities, the budget lawmakers passed for 2007-09 promised an all-out recovery."

The entry describes how a property tax limit approved by voters in 1990 provoked a fiscal crisis. Legislators saw that colleges could obtain revenue from increased tuition and other sources, so they reduced state support for the Oregon University System. "The budgets of smaller and regional colleges were hit particularly hard; from 2001 to 2007, community colleges, forced to raise tuition and cap the size of some programs, saw enrollment drop by nearly 50,000 students."

That's not the profile of a state that expects to prosper in a global economy that will demand high levels of training and education. The Chronicle notes that Gov. Ted Kulongoski dubbed the students excluded from higher education by higher costs "the lost generation."

But Oregon's economy, described by the Chronicle as "booming," allowed this year's Legislature to exceed the budgetary appropriation proposed by Kulongoski. "It passed a budget that called for the Oregon University System to receive 23 percent, or about $164 million, more support in 2007-09 than during the previous two years," the Chronicle says, plus a $233 million program of building repairs.

A major portion of the increased funds will go toward making higher education more affordable. "Overall, students' share of the state's higher education costs is projected to drop in 2007-09 for the first time in a decade, to 53 percent."

It's encouraging to see that state lawmakers' efforts are recognized beyond Oregon's borders. And indeed, a decision to invest in higher education has far-reaching repercussions. Out-of-state students, prospective faculty members, institutions that award research grants and businesses seeking sites all pay attention to the direction a state's institutions of higher learning are headed.

Oregon still has a long way to go - it will take more than a single biennium to restore affordability, bring faculty salaries more closely in line with those at comparable institutions, rebuild community college enrollments and take other steps to strengthen the system of higher education.

But at last the tailspin of the past decade and a half has been reversed. Oregonians are not the only ones paying attention.