Beatriz Gutierrez is no stranger to the golden man.
Gutierrez is a testament to the success of Oregon’s education system. A junior at the University of Oregon, Gutierrez is the first in her family to attend a university — made possible by her attainment of a Pathway Oregon scholarship.
As a board member of the Oregon Students of Color Coalition — a subset of the Oregon Student Association — Gutierrez travels to Salem regularly to campaign against Oregon’s educational failures.
As they assemble around the state capitol building, Gutierrez and other advocates protest the most relevant issues confronting local students: tuition, access, quality. Above their heads stands the Oregon Pioneer, a 22-foot-tall, gold-plated testament to the glory of governance in the Beaver State.
Year after year Gutierrez returns to Salem, yet her cries seem to fall on deaf ears.
The countenance of the golden man remains unmoved.
Sixty miles away in Eugene, the realities are impossible to ignore. As state spending per UO student has declined, tuition is on the rise: the university is paying the price.
Five years ago, Brad Shelton was tasked with helping balance the scales.
Shelton accepted the position as the first-ever vice provost for Budget and Planning with one goal in mind: implementing a financial model that would marry the needs of administration and academics.
Six months into his term, Shelton restructured the budget model to academic departments according to their annual academic activity to streamline funding.
The change came just in time.
The UO received $80 million in funding from the state of Oregon when Shelton started in 2009. That funding has since been cut in half.
“As state appropriations fell, student population grew and tuition revenues increased,” Shelton said. “If we hadn’t had the budget model to work with then we would have had chaos.”
State spending on higher education has decreased almost 20 percent on a national level since the start of the 2007 recession, according to a study conducted by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
In Oregon, it’s dropped 43 percent.
Higher education funding has been falling in the Beaver State since the early 1990s when Measure 5 was passed, severing the tie between property taxes and funding for higher education. More recently, the state has increased focus on K-12 education spending, taking the focus away from universities.
Ben Cannon is the newly appointed executive director of Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission and is responsible for the oversight of Oregon’s public universities and community colleges. With fewer dollars in the budget, he says, the Oregon University System has fewer dollars for every state student enrolled.
“The pattern over the last couple of decades has been one of diminishing state support, any way you look at it,” Cannon said. “That’s true not just of Oregon but of states across the country.”
In Gutierrez’s time at the UO, she’s borne witness to changes caused by chronic state disinvestment.
Three years ago, she could pay for rent and food with scholarships and minimal support from her parents. This year, she’s had to accept a job on top of hours of class and volunteer work to make ends meet.
In all, she thinks she’s got it pretty easy.
“I’m lucky that my parents can help some and that I got Pathway,” Gutierrez said. “A lot of my friends don’t even know how they’re going to pay their rent.”
In 1994, the UO’s price of educating an in-state student like Gutierrez was $14,679. Last year, it was nearly the same — up less than $1,000 to $15, 456 in 2012.
In those 18 years, state funding for that same student’s education has decreased 21 percent. And the cost of tuition has nearly doubled.
Not only has this increased pressure on students, Shelton says, it’s also had a significant impact on campus, resulting in everything from fewer administrators in Johnson Hall to fewer academic tutors in the Teaching and Learning Center.
“Nobody wants to raise tuition, but we want to keep the lights turned on,” he said. “Year after year we’re trying to figure out where to spend the limited funds we receive … In the last few years, the decision has been that we just can’t afford to hire anybody.”
The effect is visible.
Dilapidated lecture halls are pack tighter as enrollment increases with few faculty hires. Out-of-state enrollment increases to fill the funding void left by the state. Bank accounts and grade point averages plummet as finding employment becomes the only viable means of sustaining enrollment.
Atop the capitol dome, the golden man keeps shining.
From a national perspective, Oregon’s cuts to higher education — the 47th most severe in the country according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities — have left the UO struggling to compete with its peer institutions. An academic benchmarking report released in early October ranked UO last in spending per student and student to tenure-track faculty ratio when set side-by-side with comparable research institutions.
Gutierrez worries that decreased investment will negatively affect both today’s students and her home state’s future.
“How are we supposed to build a future without investing in our students and the generations to come? We’re heavily in debt — most of us — and we’re sinking,” she said.
At the UO, July 1, 2014 will mark the beginning of a new era.
Susan Gary, a UO law professor specializing in nonprofit management, will be at the forefront of that change as one of the 14 trustees on the new UO Independent Governing board whose jurisdiction over campus starts this July.
As of yet, there have been few discussions of financial practices, but Gary hopes that by the time they’re granted executive power, the trustees will be ready to make the decisions that count.
“I think there’s a real sense on the board that we want to make the university a place that excels in its academic mission but doesn’t do so on the backs of the students,” Gary said. “That’s something we’re critically addressing, but we’re not quite sure how that’s going to play out and when.”
Cannon believes it’s time for Salem to shoulder more of the financial burden.
A special session headed by Gov. John Kitzhaber in September resulted in a tuition buy-down to cap in-state tuition increases at 2 percent for the remainder of this academic year and prevent any increase through the spring of 2015.
The state is predicted to invest $1,500 more in support to the UO in 2014. Regardless, Shelton says the rise of the independent governing board is happening just in time.
“We have to continue to manage the institution in a direction where it is stable,” he said. “Now the (state) funding source is diminished and so now that responsibility to make sure that we’re still here to service the state is on our shoulders.”
As state spending for education declines, it’s posed in stark contrast to other areas of the state’s budget. Both enrollment and incarceration rates have climbed over the last decade, however as spending for one has declined, the other has increased. Oregon invests up to $1.3 billion in correctional spending per biennium, accounting for 23 percent of the state’s discretionary budget.
In 2011-2013 biennium, $1 of every $10 spent in the state of Oregon went to the correctional system. The average inmate cost: $30,955 of taxpayer money.
That same year, the state spent less than 10 cents of every $1 cost of a students education – $3,850 on average.
That’s a difference of more than $27,000 per person, per year — enough for the UO to buy its own golden man.