House Proposes Raiding College Student Fees to Fill Budget Deficit, Singles Out University of Washington for Extra Cuts

Students at Washington state’s four year colleges and universities may be surprised to learn that the state House of Representatives has proposed channeling the mandatory fees students pay each quarter into the state’s general fund.

The tax package the House released Monday seeks to avoid raising taxes by instead drawing money from the state’s rainy day fund and reducing the state’s cash on hand. But the third major way that the House is seeking to avoid raising taxes is by raiding the capital budgets of various state agencies.

The biggest capital budgets the House seeks to draw from are those of the state’s public universities. Those university capital budgets are funded not by taxpayer dollars, but by mandatory student fees which undergraduate and graduate students are required to pay into each quarter that they are enrolled in school. Students at the University of Washington (UW), for instance, pay $102 every quarter in mandatory fees to the UW’s building budget, or roughly $1200 through their college career.

The House’s budget proposes transferring $35 million from four year colleges’ capital budgets and $3 million from community and technical colleges’ capital budgets to the state’s general fund to plug the state’s budget deficit.

The University of Washington—the state’s largest public university, with over 40,000 undergraduates on three campuses— receives the lion’s share of the House’s proposed cuts. A full 53 percent of the capital budgets it seeks to transfer from four year colleges, or $18.3 million, would come from the University of Washington.

“It’s astonishing,” says Norm Arkans, UW spokesperson. “They’re taking money from our students.” Arkans also called the proposal “objectionable” because “we [higher education] have been taking a much larger share of the cuts than any other sector,” and the UW in particular “has been treated worse than every other sector of higher education for a decade.”

Jake Faleschini, President of the UW’s Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS), expressed more outrage, and threatened to file a lawsuit if the legislature passed the House proposal.

“It’s not just ridiculous,” Faleschini says, “it’s illegal. They can go ahead and try to do it, but we’ll sue them. It would violate I-960. There are still the provisions of I-960 that prevent them from creating a new tax without voting on it… They’re essentially discriminating against a certain segment of the population in order to make money for the general fund. It’s not going to go through for the same reason it didn’t go through last year. Straight up, and you can quote me on this, it’s dumb, it’s discriminatory, and it’s illegal.”

In addition to hitting the UW for the majority of cuts to its building fees, the House budget also targets the UW for a higher share of budget cuts than any other higher education institution. It proposes cutting the UW’s budget 4 percent, other public university budgets 3 percent, and community and technical college budgets 2 percent. The Senate’s proposed budget would cut all public university budgets at the same rate of 6 percent.

These proposed cuts would be in addition to the 26 percent budget cuts that the legislature passed on to public higher education for the 2009-11 biennium—cuts that were higher than originally proposed by the state Senate, and driven largely by leadership in the state House.

The Democratic Party leadership in the state House was instrumental last session in pushing for budget cuts to higher education larger than the state Senate proposed as part of its attempt to save housing and human services programs without raising taxes. Speaker of the House Frank Chopp is a particularly strong advocate on behalf of housing and human services (he’s the founder of Fremont Public Association, now called Solid Ground).

Ironically, Chopp, who represents the 43^rd District of Seattle (which includes both Solid Ground and the UW campus), held a workshop with UW students last week to provide them with tips about how to effectively lobby the state legislature. According to Publicola, Chopp encouraged students to emphasize personal stories as part of their public testimony. He also criticized the UW for not sufficiently cutting the salaries of its top level administration, saying, “It becomes an issue around the state, you want to take my money to pay for that [UW President Mark Emmert’s] salary?”

Chilly relations between the UW and the state legislature— particularly the state House— are part of what informed the UW’s push this year to “deregulate” the UW and give it greater autonomy to raise tuition and control its capital budget. That proposal, while it passed the state Senate, has effectively died in the state House, but is likely to return next session, especially if federal dollars used to back-fill last year’s cuts run out.

While the legislature remains in control of tuition setting authority at the UW, it signed off last year on a 30 percent tuition increase over the 2009-11 biennium to compensate for the deep budget cuts.

In the meantime, the UW administration is still circulating a one page sheet titled  “Seeking a Sustainable University Business Model in an Era of Limited State Resources.” It claims that while government spending has increased 38 percent since the 2001-3 biennium, the state has cut the UW’s budget by 12 percent.  By contrast, the state increased spending on community and technical colleges by 28 percent over the same time period, and cut other public universities by just 3 percent. “For the first time” in its almost 150 year history, the UW claims, “state funding now comprises less than 50 percent of UW funding per FTE Student.”

[NOTE: Trevor Griffey is a PhD student in U.S. History at the University of Washington]

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