An assignment for higher ed

BYLINE: DAVID SARASOHN, The Oregonian

SUMMARY: As Oregon's colleges continue to take a funding hit, the Legislature should consider forming higher education panels or subcommittees

Looking over the committees and subcommittees of the Oregon Legislature --a pastime for either a calculating lobbyist or an unimaginably bored citizen --you can survey education, health, justice and commerce, all the great concerns of the public servants of Oregon.

With one exception.

In both House and Senate, higher education is the kid who didn't show up for the yearbook photo, there but not really there. Higher education floats around every legislative session as an afterthought to education committees far more absorbed by the problems of K-12.

And like the kid who misses the yearbook photo, it seems to fade from people's thinking.

From 2001 to 2006, the average state appropriation for higher ed rose 9.9 percent nationally. Washington's rose 14.9 percent. Oregon's Legislature actually spent 8 percent less.

Higher education has plummeted, stonelike, from 12.2 percent of the general fund budget in 1987-89 to 6.3 percent now. Oregon now ranks 46th in the country in per-student higher-education funding, while Washington is 21st and California 24th.

Lately --as politicians orate about an information society and "seamless" education funding --fewer Oregon students are actually going on to college.

The situation might deserve some official legislative attention.

"I think we have disinvested in this state in the past 20 years," says George Pernsteiner, chancellor of the Oregon University System. "Our young people are not attending college at the rate they did 10 or 20 years ago. We've been going the wrong way."

Having a higher education committee or subcommittee wouldn't change all that and wouldn't reinvent the state's economic realities. But lots of other states --states that do better in maintaining their higher education system than Oregon, although that's not much of a distinction --seem to find it useful to have specific legislators charged with thinking about, or even arguing for, higher ed.

Eighteen states have higher education committees in one or both of their legislative houses, not counting many others with higher education subcommittees. Connecticut has a joint legislative committee, Minnesota has a committee specifically on Higher Education Finance, and the Wisconsin Senate has a committee on Higher Education and Tourism --which sounds like a strange mixture, but probably has something to do with cheese.

All of Oregon's fellow Pac-10 states --Washington, California and Arizona --have a higher education committee. They seem to find it useful.

"I think it's just a must," says Rep. Phyllis Kenney, D-Seattle, chairwoman of the Higher Education and Work Force Education Committee in the Washington House.

"You can't focus on everything if you have it in one large (education) committee. Everything gets lost in K-12."

The Washington Senate has recently gone to a single Education Committee, with what Vancouver Sen. Craig Pridemore, vice chairman for higher education, calls "mixed results. . . . The K-12 system has really dominated. I will say that over the past two years higher education has not gotten the attention that it needs and deserves in the Senate."

Oregon knows the feeling.

Oregon has seven state universities, but every legislator has elementary schools in his district. And faculty members and accounting majors don't storm the Capitol in busloads demanding support for higher education.

"I do believe, by unscientific opinion, that we come out better when a legislative committee is devoted to higher ed," says Jim Sulton, executive director of the Washington Higher Education Consulting Board. Legislators "get more introspective, they devote more time to it, they concentrate on higher education.

"We'd get a better shake on the budget, better understanding of what we do, more intensive focus on access and quality." Washington, he notes, "has placed a more serious focus on this than many other states."

A higher education committee or subcommittee might move some legislators to look at realities that seem to float around the state Capitol without landing anywhere in particular.

Since 1991, most states have seen a decline in real per-student state spending on higher education. But Oregon's spending has dropped the most in the country. The average state decline has been 13.5 percent; Oregon's support has fallen 41.4 percent.

In 1987-89, higher education received 12.2 percent of the state general fund budget. This budget period, it gets 6.3 percent. Twenty years ago, tuition and fees covered 29 percent of the higher ed budget; now it's 61 percent, and Oregonian students graduate with five-figure debts.

Over the past few years, the state university system has gotten a little bigger. But that's because of a rise in revenue-producing out-of-state and international students; the number of Oregonians attending has actually dropped.

The situation is worst for the regional universities. As Oregon's legislators gathered last week to elect next session's leaders, the president of Southern Oregon University in Ashland formally announced consideration of a state of emergency, which would allow the university to abolish programs and fire tenured faculty.

Nobody expects this incoming Legislature to fix 20 years of neglect. But it might not hurt to have some legislators responsible for thinking about it.

"It seems to me that this is an idea well worth considering," says Rep. Jeff Merkley, D-Portland, elected last week by his fellow Democrats to be speaker of the next House. "One thing I've been looking at is an Education Committee with a higher education subcommittee."

Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, also thinks, "Maybe a subcommittee of Education would be the best option," although he argues the Senate Education Committee has focused on some higher education issues. But, Courtney admits, when funding questions get to the education subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, "There's no question that the 10,000-pound penguin in the middle of the room is K-12. That's where it's more pronounced."

That's why Sen. Ginny Burdick, D-Portland, whose district includes Portland State, says, "What you really need to be talking about is a Ways and Means subcommittee." Over the past years, she notes, as costs went up across the budget, "Everything's come out of the hide of higher education."

With no legislator particularly charged to watch its flanks.

Oregonians, says Gov. Ted Kulongoski, consider K-12 a basic right and responsibility, but "They look at higher education differently, and the legislature reflects that."

Tony Van Vliet spent 17 years in the House as a Republican from Corvallis, most of it on the Ways and Means education subcommittee. Asked whether K-12 issues tended to roll over higher ed concerns during his time there, he agrees, "They pretty much did."

For the last two years, he's been on the State Board of Higher Education and thinks something needs to happen differently.

Higher education, says Van Vliet, "really does need some special attention because it's fallen so far back. We've fallen so far behind we really do need a shot in the arm."

Legislators, in campaigns and even in Salem, say all the right things about higher education, about its being central to Oregon's future, about its being the way up for Oregon kids and their chance to get a job that could support a family and let them stay in Oregon. But responsibility for it doesn't land in any particular legislative pocket.

That could be helped by an actual Higher Education Committee, or a subcommittee, or even --in an imaginary Oregon where the state's universities were actually considered a priority and vital to the state's economy --a Ways and Means higher education subcommittee. Any of them would sharpen the legislature's focus and improve higher education's Salem prospects.

Because the best way to ensure nothing gets done is to give nobody the assignment.

Anyone in education --at any level --could tell you that.

David Sarasohn, associate editor, can be reached at 503-221-8523 or davidsarasohn@news.oregonian.com.