OLYMPIA – With all the attention in Olympia on pumping more money into K-12 education this legislative session, will colleges and universities get shortchanged?
University lobbyists say that isn’t the case, and figure that any talk about boosting education usually is good for everyone.
“The governor’s budget is a good example,” said Larry Ganders, lobbyist for Washington State University. “She said she was going to make education a priority and she did it for the whole section.”
Legislative progress in the area of K-12 is nearly as important to the University of Washington as money for its own programs and buildings, said university lobbyist Randy Hodgins.
“We’re extraordinarily pleased with the governor’s budget because it follows the Washington Learns recommendations, which we also were very happy with,” Hodgins said. “We don’t have students ready to succeed in higher education if we don’t have a strong K-12 system.”
The governor’s budget includes faculty raises, money for 3,300 new high-demand enrollment slots and 5,000 regular enrollment slots, cash for a new scholarship program to encourage students to pursue math- and science-related majors, a plan to freeze tuition at community and technical colleges while making up the difference, a cap in tuition at the universities, and various other scholarship and student support programs.
The price tag for the governor’s higher education budget is $3.2 billion in just general-fund spending or $9 billion including money from all sources, especially tuition dollars.
Sheral A. Burkey, lobbyist for Western Washington University, said she’s expecting this to be a big year for education of every kind – from the preschool classroom to the universities where the next generation of teachers will be trained.
“I don’t remember a session when things were so aligned to support education,” said Burkey, who has been lobbying in Olympia for about 17 years.
Sen. Paull Shin, D-Edmonds, chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee, agreed this is going to be a good year for higher education in the Legislature.
“Without education, economic opportunity will vanish,” Shin said. “I appreciate the governor’s generosity and her support of education. Between the executive and legislative branch I think and I hope we’ll really get a lot of mileage out of it.”
Ganders and other university lobbyists said they didn’t get everything they asked for in the governor’s budget. “But it’s a budget we’d like to go home with,” he said.
The governor asked the Legislature to pay for about 80 percent of the things on WSU’s list, including a few innovative ideas, Ganders said.
WSU suggested a new way of paying for enrollment slots for more expensive majors that train nurses and workers in other high-demand fields. At WSU, the state subsidy for a major such as nursing is about $14,000, while the subsidy for most majors is about $6,000. In the current budget, the state pays for a certain number of regular slots and a certain number of more expensive students.
Ganders said WSU suggested a third alternative: The state would pay the difference if an existing student moved into a more expensive major. The governor’s budget provides for 50 of these “augmented enrollments” – saving some money and better meeting the needs of existing students, Ganders said.
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