Sputtering engines.

Byline: H i g h e r E d u c a t i o n ' s s l i d e The Register-Guard

In a series of editorials over the past several weeks, The Register-Guard has presented statistical evidence of Oregon's failure to support its institutions of higher learning.

The evidence has been easy to find. Tuition costs are too high, too much is demanded of faculty and state support has declined steeply. The results include low graduation rates, fewer top-performing faculty and students and losses in competition for federal research dollars.

Many more indices of distress could be offered - but the essential point is made by a final chart: Oregon is starving not only its universities and community colleges, but its own future. Higher education is the engine of prosperity, and in Oregon the engine is running on fumes.

The chart shows the clear correlation between personal income and the level of educational attainment. While examples can be found of millionaire dropouts and paupers with doctorates, on average, the climb to prosperity is achieved on the ladder of education.

As people's incomes rise, the taxes they pay rise even faster. While holders of bachelor's degrees earn 2.3 times as much as high-school dropouts, they pay 2.8 times as much in taxes. For professional degrees, the pay multiplier is 4.4, while the tax multiplier is 6.2.

Not only do better-educated citizens pay more taxes, they consume fewer public resources. According to the College Board, each successive level of educational attainment brings lower unemployment, lower rates of incarceration and less dependence on social programs. Better-educated people are generally healthier, more likely to volunteer and less likely to use tobacco or illegal drugs. They're even more likely to give blood.

Legislators, most of whom have themselves benefitted from higher education, understand these correlations. Yet over the past two decades Oregon has steadily deprived its universities and community colleges of the resources they need to improve the economic and social productivity of the state's citizens.

Since 1990 the percentage of the Oregon University System's budget that is provided by the state has declined by nearly half, while the share obtained from tuition and fees has nearly doubled. Per-capita state appropriations for higher education have fallen by 44 percent since 1989-91.

State policy has given Oregon a generation of young citizens who are less likely than their parents to have a college degree. The policy is blamed on chronic shortages of state revenue; the chart suggests that the state can expect such shortages to continue.

One cause of legislators' willingness to support a self-defeating approach to higher education could be the mixed messages coming from higher education officials. The chancellor of the Oregon University System and college presidents have made a clear and consistent case for better public funding. At the same time, however, they must take care to avoid bad-mouthing their institutions. Sounding the alarm too loudly, they fear, would risk scaring away donors, students and faculty - and might also give lawmakers reason to conclude that Oregon's colleges are failing institutions undeserving of support.

While pleading poverty on one hand, on the other higher education officials point with pride to such strengths as high faculty research productivity, record-setting private fund-raising and nationally ranked academic programs.

What legislators hear is that while the state's universities and community colleges could use stronger state support, they're doing quite well without it. They conclude that improvements in higher education funding can wait until later - after the economy improves, after the tax system is reformed, after other pressing needs are addressed.

We are under no obligation to adopt higher education officials' diplomatic stance. In the course of its series of editorials detailing higher education's slide, The Register-Guard has deliberately avoided consulting the Oregon University System or the University of Oregon. We have documented serious signs of distress with statistics we found on our own - information that is readily available from a variety of sources. With this approach we intended to avoid repeating the claims that higher education officials have been presenting to the public and to lawmakers for many years.

Our independent assessment is that the situation is not as bad as the OUS and college presidents say. It's worse.

To arrest and reverse this slide, Oregon will need to sustain a budgetary commitment over many years. Gov. Ted Kulongoski made a modest start with his proposed budget, calling for a 12.5 percent increase in funding for universities and 12.6 percent more for community colleges. Equally important, the governor's budget recommends a substantial investment in buildings and equipment, along with the first step toward full funding of a student grant program to ensure that higher education is within the financial reach of every Oregonian.

Some legislative leaders, however, have other priorities. The draft budget released by the co-chairs of the legislative Joint Ways and Means Committee scales back the general-fund increase for universities, and hits community colleges even harder. The co-chairs' budget all but eliminates the governor's capital investment proposal. Only the proposal for an enhanced grant program was left intact.

Such pound-foolishness lacks even the redeeming virtue of being penny-wise. Oregon cannot prevail in national and global competition with colleges and universities that are both underfunded and expensive to attend. The evidence is already in - Oregon ranks 46th nationally in college credential attainment. That means more Oregonians will be represented by the shorter bars on the chart below, with low incomes generating less taxes.

The legislators who find it hard to pay for higher education today are making it even harder to pay tomorrow.