MILL CREEK – High-quality education is the key to the state’s economic future, the president of the University of Washington told Snohomish County business leaders Tuesday.
For the region to succeed in the 21st century, “you have to have lots of really smart people, and you have to have lots of really great ideas,” UW President Mark Emmert said. Without both, “you lose.”
Emmert, who moved into his job last summer, spoke at the Snohomish County Economic Development Council’s quarterly meeting, arguing that the state needs to increase funding for its higher education system.
“What we have to do as citizens is make sure we don’t lose that competitive edge,” he said. “Other communities and other states would cut off an arm to have what Washington already has.”
The UW, Emmert proclaimed, “is one of the greatest universities in America. Period.”
The school is one of the top two winners of research grants in the nation, and this year will bring in about $1 billion to support the efforts of its scientists and staffs, he said.
Soon-to-be-announced ratings by a national magazine also will put the UW School of Medicine at the top nationwide, he said, while the School of Business and School of Law also will improve on their top-20 ratings.
What that shows, Emmert said, is that the UW offers “an education that’s as good as it gets … as strong as Stanford or Harvard or Michigan.”
However, Washington lags when it comes to higher education funding, he said. It ranks 46th among the states in state support for research. Major public universities in other states also spend significantly more on teacher pay.
“I’ve spent way too much time in my first nine months talking professors into not leaving,” Emmert said.
On Tuesday, he said, he spoke to a professor who had been offered 40 percent higher pay to move to Indiana University.
Washington’s population has more than doubled in the past 30 years, but the state’s higher-education system hasn’t grown to keep pace, Emmert said. The state does not produce enough college graduates to fill all the technology jobs created by Microsoft, the Boeing Co. and the biotech industry, and as a result, “all the good jobs are going to people from out of state.”
Even with the budget crisis in Olympia, the Legislature needs to increase education funding, Emmert said.
“We recognize the fiscal realities of the state,” he said, “but the economic driver of the future is, in a big way, our education systems.”
Emmert said he could have lived with Gov. Christine Gregoire’s proposed $3 billion higher-education budget. “We thought that higher education was treated reasonably well,” he said.
But this week’s budget proposal made by Senate Democrats would have cut $90 million from state spending on higher education, forcing working-class students and families to make up the difference in tuition payments.
It’s one thing to increase tuition if you’re offering students a better education, Emmert said, but “to pay more and get less is a bad arrangement.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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