Many of our current Oregon legislators went to college at a time when our public universities were very affordable and students could cover their costs with summer jobs and part-time work during the school year. As we all are painfully aware, that is no longer the case. Tuition at Oregon's public universities and community colleges keeps heading up and up while our state contribution has fallen so precipitously that we are 47th out of the 50 states in the level of public support for higher education. We leave it to the students to figure out how to pay the difference, and much of that ends up being unsustainable debt, averaging $27,000 for the current graduating class.
Many students are asking themselves whether college is worth the cost and the debt. Student debt impacts our state's economy as well, as young college graduates can't buy a car, much less a house, can't start a business and have to grab the first job that comes along, often one that doesn't require a college degree, just to meet interest payments on their student loans.
The Legislature set a very ambitious goal of achieving "40-40-20" by the year 2025 (40 percent with a high school diploma; 40 percent with a community college degree; and 20 percent with a university degree or better). To get there, they eliminated the higher ed board, created the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, eliminated the Oregon University System and spun off the universities to governance by independent boards.
What have those changes done for the cost of college? In the last few months, those independent college boards raised tuition in amounts ranging from 7.6 percent (Oregon State University), 4.2 percent (Portland State University) to 3.8 percent (University of Oregon), well above the annual rate of inflation rate of minus 0.2 percent. At the same time the University of Oregon's board recently offered a salary of $800,000 to their new president. No wonder they need to raise tuition!
At the very end of the legislative session, the Ways and Means Committee was able to increase funding for higher education by a substantial 22 percent over the last budget. Although still not back to pre-recession levels, this was a major increase of $700 million for the universities and $550 million for community colleges. The problem is, the Legislature did not mandate that this increase in state support result in any commensurate tuition cuts for students. Rather, the PSU president has said the additional funding might help to lower the planned 4.2 percent increase in tuition and fees. But increase it they will!
Meanwhile the Washington state Legislature took a dramatically different approach. They cut tuition for their public colleges and universities by an immediate 5 percent and by an additional 10 percent to 15 percent in 2016. Any increases thereafter will be tied to increases in Washington's median hourly wage. Oregon needs to do the same.
Oregon needs to start with a student-centered reinvestment budget, as opposed to an institution-focused reinvestment budget. This would include reining in the universities' sky-rocketing non-academic costs, increasing need-based student aid grants, lowering — or at least freezing — tuition levels and helping students meet tuition payments without incurring unsustainable debt.
The Legislature did budget $10 million for a much scaled down "free community college" bill. This effort, while helpful to some high school graduates, will not provide any assistance to the older worker coming to community college to get advanced training nor to any students at our four-year universities.
That's where the "pay it forward" program would have come in. "Pay it forward" offered students the opportunity to go to a public university without paying tuition upfront but, rather, making small, income-based payments after completion. Their payments would not go to out-of-state banks — currently some $200 million in student loan payments leaves the state every biennium — but would stay right here in Oregon in a fund that would help pay for future generations of students, eventually becoming self-sustaining. Yes, the state would have to come up with the initial funding, but this is a shared responsibility model, and the students would pay back into the fund after they completed their education so that future generations of students could have the same educational opportunity.
We have to revisit the question of student debt in the next legislative session. It is a problem that haunts the future for all of us.
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Barbara Dudley is senior policy adviser for the Oregon Working Families Party.
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