WSUV students, supporters detail pain of budget cuts

As state legislators in Olympia churn out a 2011-13 state budget brimming with unsavory program and service cuts, higher education will take a big hit. Again.

Bart Phillips is certain of that, he told a crowd of about three dozen at an advocacy event Thursday evening at Washington State University Vancouver.

Phillips is president of the Columbia River Economic Development Council, which tries to lure employers to grow in Southwest Washington. He sees an uptick in the state economy, but any boost to state coffers won’t show up for at least two years.

For now, lawmakers must shelter constitutionally protected K-12 schools, fragile social services and other mandates. And they’ll ratchet up tuition rates again and trim higher ed funding support to cull another couple hundred million dollars from the system.

“It’s the elastic part of the budget,” Phillips told WSUV students and others who joined a panel discussion and dialogue.

That doesn’t make it right, he said. It’s high time Washington residents and business leaders see that continuing to undercut higher ed harms the region’s economy and its most valuable resource — its current and future work force — he and others said.

“I’m not sure the business community has drawn a straight line” to that link, Phillips said.

The statewide WSU system has stripped 1,080 courses from its catalogue since early 2009. It shed 517 full-time positions, phased out 16 degrees or options and merged or dropped many other programs.

All this happened while four-year tuition rose nearly 30 percent the past two years (at two-year schools such as Clark College, it’s about 15 percent). The governor has proposed another back-to-back increase of 9-to-10 percent.

That’s not a good way to go, considering how Southwest Washington fought so long and hard to bring four-year options here for a growing population rife with potential high-tech workers, first-generation students and place-bound job seekers, Phillips said.

Sure, employers are tickled by WSUV’s latest technology building and new Electrical Engineering degree program, Phillips said. But the campus is being choked by a million other cuts, unable to add talented faculty, foster new programs, keep class sizes down and financially or academically meet the needs of many students.

“We could be so much more,” said Lynn Valenter, WSUV vice chancellor for finance and operations during a decade of rapid expansion, now stalled. “It’s opportunity being taken away.”

Said Phillips: “My organization could be put out to pasture, if we had WSUV on steroids.”

John White, vice president of BergerABAM and former Clark College trustee, led the panel, which also included WSUV student Monica Santos-Pinacho.

White has voted for recent Clark tuition increases, only to later tote up the impact: A 50 percent jump for four-year university students, from 2009 to 2013, should current proposals hold.

“I had not sat down to look at the math, and said, ‘Oh, my God, look at the cumulative effect,’ ” White said. The higher ed model is “broken,” he said. “As a community, we have not applied enough brainpower … to how we unravel and rebuild this thing.”

Santos-Pinacho, a senior business student, has cobbled together state and federal financial aid, a work-study job and scholarships. She sees pending reductions and wonders if her younger brothers have any shot at college. “How are they going to get ahead in the world?” she asked.

Spring Atkinson, 34, a WSUV senior who leveraged a prized vocational scholarship, said she’ll still owe college debt in eight years, when her daughter turns 18.

“In pursuit of my education, I priced her out of hers,” Atkinson said, growing emotional. “It’s almost like all this effort (to improve our lot) doesn’t matter. With these cuts, they’re going to kill us, and kill this community that we live in.”

Washington’s current high-tuition, high-aid model is “disheartening,” said Mason O’Lennick, a senior in mechanical engineering. Students can’t count on future tuition rates, and his own class section jumped from 22 to 64 students in one leap, tying up lab equipment, he said.

Overstretched faculty can’t correct papers quickly enough, either, students said. Academic quality will surely suffer without a major reversal, Phillips said.

History shows Washington hasn’t really invested in higher ed when times improve, either — a mistake it can no longer afford, Phillips said. His takeaway message to students, urging them to support taxes that provide vital resources, once they get past today’s hardship: “Remember this.”