Why would I want to be integrated into a burning house?    --James Baldwin

In all the intense and wide-ranging testimony about the Marriage Equality bills (SB 6239 and HB 2516) nobody asked an obvious question: Why would anyone want to be married by the state?

Even the most cursory glance at the history of marriage in the Western world reveals an institution whose primary purpose has been to oppress and exploit women and hoard and protect property while naturalizing a heterosexual romantic narrative that disguises power arrangements that are overwhelmingly homosocial and homoerotic.  If you’re looking for an institution with which to reinforce gender and class inequality, you couldn’t do much better than marriage.  And yet no one in the legislature has introduced a bill to abolish marriage.

And everyone who testified about marriage equality seemed to take it for granted that marriage as we know it is something that’s generally O.K.  The folks who testified for the bills talked persuasively about the mainstream legitimacy and the boatload of social and economic benefits that will come with marriage. 

The people who testified against the bills, on the other hand, brought nothing less than the Wrath of God.  The unblinking, possessed looks in their eyes, the slight quiver in their hands, and the thunder in their voices as they talked of abominations against nature had us here at the blog just about ready to repent, head to the confessional and save our heathen souls before it’s too late.

But then we remembered what we’d have to give up if we started living our lives within the bounds of what nature has given us.  Clothing, for example, is not found in nature, to say nothing of iPhones and Prius’s.  Cooking your food isn’t natural.  Heck, crapping in a toilet, instead of wherever the urge hits, is not natural.  So, after a long struggle with our inner blog, we resigned ourselves to an eternity in hell and took the side of Katherine Hepburn when she imperiously told Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen that Nature is what we were put on this earth to overcome. 

And it has been a great comfort to us to see so many other prominent straight people (many of whose best friends are no doubt gay) having the same wrestling match with their consciences over this issue.  Senator Mary Margaret Haugen, who announced herself as the pivotal twenty-fifth vote in the senate, evoked memories of those crusty white people reluctantly embracing civil rights, as she talked about generational differences and strong Christian beliefs.  And Governor Gregoire dominated a whole news cycle when she soliloquized like Dante about her 7 year journey (7 years that gay Washingtonians were denied equality, but who’s counting) and worried about the Vatican (no doubt a legitimate fear given how hard the Catholic Church has come down on those bishops who looked the other way while priests abused children). 

But still nobody paused to suggest that now that we’re about to give more people access to the burning house of marriage perhaps we should do a little something about putting out the fire.  Perhaps we should at least think a bit about an institution that to this day remains, at least symbolically, an exchange of woman as property between two men (“Who gives this woman to be married to this man?”), an institution that created the concept of spousal abuse.

And it may be that a greater inclusion will change the institution for the better.  After all the love and monogamy and parenthood smoke has cleared, what the legislature and the governor will have enacted is greater access to basic rights like health care, equal taxation, binding wills, and the ability to visit loved ones in the hospital.  And that will be a great thing that should have been done a long time ago.

And perhaps this law will move us a little bit closer to a Washington where people don’t have to live in fear of social exile or losing their jobs or being beaten or killed simply for who and how they choose to love. 

What we do know for sure is that something is probably changing for the better, otherwise so many angry people wouldn’t be about to spend so much money on a referendum to overturn a law on which the ink has barely dried.

A big thanks to Senators Hill, Tom, Becker, Kastama, and Litzow, who have put some money in our pocket here at the blog.  Last year, when the bill to establish Western Governors University-Washington was slithering through the legislature and everybody was promising that WGU would never come back looking for state funding, a betting pool developed around how long it would be before WGU came back looking for state funding.  The smart money was on two years, thinking the WGU folks would have the decorum to lay low for at least one legislative session.  But on a hunch we doubled down on one year.  And now, exactly a year later, Senators Hill, Tom, et al have introduced SB 6322—“Allowing nonprofit institutions recognized by the state of Washington to be eligible to participate in the state need grant program.”

Come to Papa.

WGU is a nominally non-profit enterprise, but their business model is no different from for-profit operations like Kaplan or Phoenix.  They depend a lot on federal and state financial aid, which is why the play for state need grant makes sense.

Their business also depends on a special appeal to working people.  With the same faux populism that Newt Gingrich uses to bash Mitt Romney, WGU-Washington tells prospective students that they can go to school after they’ve put the kids to bed, they can get credit for all the things they’ve learned out there in the rough and tumble world and they don’t have to put up with all the stuff that those twenty-year olds at real college do—football games, beer bongs, classes, actual professors, stuff like that. 

Despite the fact that we’re hopelessly snotty and elitist college professors here at the blog, we’re actually all for the Western Governor’s model in theory.  Godspeed to those who can teach themselves, those whose work and life experience have given them the knowledge and skill necessary to earn a credential, those who can demonstrate competence without logging any class time.  And certainly we’re all for people with jobs getting the training they need to get better jobs. 

What we’re not for is those people getting ripped off. 

Tuition at WGU-Washington will run you between $2890 and $3250 every six months.  Then there’s the extras: the resource fee ($145), the application fee ($65), the science lab fee ($350), the student teaching fee ($1000), and the education leadership practicum fee ($1000).  So let’s say you’re going to WGU to get a BA in Information technology.  And let’s say it takes you their advertised two years, half the time a real BA would take.  That’ll cost you $12,120, give or take (Nursing an Teaching will run you more). 

And here’s what you get for that 12 grand:

• Coursework attempted and completed, and learning resources (excluding textbooks) scheduled into your Degree Plan.
• Assessments (limited by individual course guidelines and a standard number of permitted re-takes)Counsel from dedicated mentors.
• Note: Tuition costs do not include the price of textbooks and various materials (varies by course).  

This is taken straight from the WGU-Washington website.  Translated, it means you get  1)  Course materials you can find for free in lots of other places all over the web (but not textbooks, those are extra); 2) some tests; and 3) someone to call for pep talks (not to be confused with teachers).  Twelve thousand bucks for that.

If WGU were really the working class heroes they claim to be, they would post links to all of the free learning resources for the subjects they teach online.  Then they would make their assessments available for a $100 processing fee.  You could do the same studying at night or on your coffee break and then take the tests and get your degree for a hundred bucks instead of twelve thousand.  The pep talks you’d have to get from your friends and family. 

That would, of course, cut into the budget for all the other stuff WGU does.  Advertising would take a hit and we’d certainly miss those peppy WGU-Washington commercials every ten minutes on T.V.  And then there’s lobbying--the Salt Lake Tribune reports that from 1999 to 2005, WGU spent at least $1.6 million on lobbying.  And the executive compensation packages would surely suffer. (A lot of folks in Olympia made a big fuss a few weeks ago when the CWU Board of Trustees all got high and gave Jim Gaudino $500,000 spread over the next five years—WGU Chancellor Bob Mendenhall’s $700.000-plus annual salary makes President Gaudino look like one of the 99 percent.)

That’s the stuff that’s now going to be covered by state need grant money—taxpayer money.  Or, at least we have to assume that’s where it will go.  At a time when the legislature is regularly beating on our very open and transparent real public universities to become more open and transparent, Washington’s sparkly new public online university is utterly unaccountable to the state.  WGU-Washington does not make its accreditation reports, its graduation rates, its student debt loads, its budgets, or its salaries publicly available.  SB 6322 is asking Washington taxpayers to take it on faith that their money going to WGU-Washington is somehow a good investment. 

But hey, WGU did turn out to be a pretty safe bet.

Like a SuperPac not coordinating with the McKenna campaign, the Seattle Times called out Democratic Leadership by name this week.  They told us that a study from the University of Pennsylvania had told them that Chris Gregoire, Frank Chopp, and Lisa Brown are responsible for the fact that not enough people in Washington go to college. 

A big tip of the blog hat to the folks at the Times and their capacity for imaginative leaps.  The Penn report only mentions Gregoire in passing and says nothing about Chopp or Brown even though it is titled “State Policy Leadership Vacuum.”  A better title might have been “Ivy League Thinking Vacuum.”

The study starts off well, detailing how Washington’s public universities are among the best, most efficient, and most productive in the country.  It then stays strong, pointing out how underfunded and deeply cut our universities have been.

But then, after a brief detour for some obligatory K-12 bashing, the report goes right off the logical rails, telling us that the solution for saving an excellent system that has been devastated by relentless budget cuts is to spend money on more bureaucracy and new layers of administration. 

Being the college professors we are here at the blog, we try to steer clear of making fun of academics who ignore the obvious in favor far-fetched theory and lugubrious detail.  But in this case, it’s pretty tempting to put on our best James Carville drawl, turn to our colleagues at Penn and say, “It’s the money, Stupid!”

Which is something we might also say to our friends at the Times.  The next time they want to bash Democrats (and here we mean all of them, not just the guv, the speaker, and the majority leader) for lack of leadership, they should point to Washington’s ridiculous tax policy, and the way that Tim Eyman and millions and millions of corporate dollars have hijacked Washington’s future.  You can’t rescue Washington’s state universities with Ivy League studies, you’re gonna need some money.

Last month, Western Washington University held its Board of Trustees meeting at Safeco Field, the house that Washington taxpayers built.  The last part of the meeting was devoted to a panel discussion with a distinguished group of legislators and business leaders. 

One of the peppiest panelists was a fellow named Lew McMurran, the Vice President of Government and External Affairs for the Washington Technology Industry Association.  Mr. McMurran enthusiastically led the panel in chorus after chorus of Washington’s state universities need to produce more graduates in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields. He told the trustees that while those sociology degrees might be interesting if you like that kind of thing, it was time to quit funding that nonsense and pour all the resources into the techno-degrees that his folks needed to hire.

Here at the blog, we can’t tell you what a relief it is that sociology seems to have supplanted English as the whipping boy of choice when our hard-nosed pragmatist friends want to decry the frivolity of college majors that are not business or STEM related.  Social scientists falling to the status of poets can only be yet another sign of progress in a late capitalist world. 

But alas, much as it might pain us to say it, we still need the sociologists, if for no other reason than they subsidize the engineers.  The good news about those worthless humanities and social science degrees is that they’re cheap.  The professors have no job prospects in the real world so they work for peanuts, there aren’t any labs and it has become perfectly acceptable to batch process those students in classes of 500.  The ever-increasing tuition that philosophy and history majors take out more and more loans to pay more than covers the cost of their navel-gazing education, so universities can take the extra and ship it down to the science and technology end of campus to help pay for the real degrees.  So the key to more STEM degrees turns out to be more humanities and social science students.

But STEM cannot live on sociologists alone.  The post-World War Two techno-industrial boom that drove American prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century was fueled by public university systems that were almost completely subsidized by state and federal tax dollars.  That public investment made America the runaway leader in scientific and technological development.  STEM-mania (and the job market it serves) is one of the strongest arguments for public universities that are much more robustly public than what we have now.

But when the conversation at the Western Board meeting turned to taxes, Mr. McMurran’s enthusiasm dimmed considerably.  In response to a couple of legislators who felt that the state should explore some new tax revenue and that perhaps businesses (especially the ones stockpiling mountains of profit) should pay their fair share, Mr. McMurran reacted like a parent whose child has farted in church, going so far as to suggest that many legislators have been just plain rude to business on the subject of taxes.

Calling for more STEM degrees without at the same time demanding more business taxpayer investment in public universities is kind of like trying to make cake without flour and eggs.  STEM degrees are expensive, which means that you either have to revive state support to universities or you have to keep jacking up tuition.  And the more you raise tuition, the more you create a student population that won’t necessarily be interested in STEM degrees. 

Sadly enough, when students arrive at universities, we still let them choose their own major, much to the chagrin of those people who want universities to produce more STEMs the way a sweatshop in a third world country might produce more Nike shoes.  Students from lower middle and working class backgrounds (precisely the students now being squeezed out of higher education) tend to be the ones who choose the business and STEM majors, the majors with sound economic futures.  The children of the professional, managerial, and owning classes, the ones whose parents bought them piano lessons and had the nanny take them to museums, tend to be the ones who fill up the music, philosophy, and poetry classes.  At Western, in the midst of the Great Recession and with tuition going up by double-digit percentages every year, demand for Creative Writing degrees has never been higher.*

The technocratic industrial revolution in the second half of the twentieth century was not spawned by private universities.  It was fueled by widespread access to publicly funded public universities that allowed the children of bus drivers and typists to become scientists and engineers. 

*These are, of course, just the impressionistic musings of an English professor.  For the real data on the relationship between economic class of origin and career choice, you should probably talk to a, um, sociologist. 
 

Now that Governor Gregoire has released her list of ways to cut another $2 to $4 billion from the state budget (in the hope that this cut-into-the-bone list will help people get interested in some new taxes), she and Department of Revenue director Suzan DelBene have turned their attention to revenue possibilities.  Faithful readers of the blog know that, despite being descended from East Texas bootleggers, we are big fans of new revenue to help keep state infrastructure from disappearing. 

But there’s revenue and there’s revenue and what kind we raise makes a big difference.  For reasons that can only be traced to the power of Gramscian hegemony, voters in this state continue to reject the high earners income tax that every other state that has no oil to tax seems to have.  So that pretty much leaves us with a debate between sales tax and closing tax loopholes (although our friends at the Washington State Budget and Policy Institute have shown us some other ideas (here).

The word on the street is that our state’s business plutarchy has let it be known that they would not necessarily spend their customary millions to defeat a state sales tax increase referendum (and referendum we must have thanks to Tim “minority rule” Eyman—see Gramscian hegemony above).  This is the kind of generosity we have come to expect from our business elites. 

A sales tax increase would produce enough revenue that revenue pragmatists might in the end be willing to overlook the fact that it also will make a bad situation worse.  Sales tax falls disproportionately upon the poor and Washington already has the most regressive tax in the country (at last count, poor people in Washington paid an average of 17% in taxes, while rich folk paid 3%).  A sales tax increase just makes that worse and also makes us even more vulnerable to the continual boom and bust cycle that characterizes Washington revenue collection. 

A sales tax increase could also have pretty far reaching political consequences.  If a sales tax increase heads to the ballot earmarked for education or health care, and the education and health care communities hold their nose about regressive taxes and work to pass the referendum, you can bet the farm that Rob McKenna will beat Jay Inslee with that all the way from March to November.  Every chance he gets, he’ll tell people that those damn teachers and nurses and state employees have once again dipped their hands into your pockets to pay for their outrageous salaries and lavish pensions.  The usual stuff about unions and social services and teachers will be bullshit but the part about regular people and people who are hurting paying more tax will be right.

Proponents of sales tax increases often argue that while it’s obviously not perfect, it’s across the board.  It doesn’t single anyone out, the way closing a tax loophole would.  The problem with that argument is that some people have already been singled out.  State employees have been laid off by the thousands, taken a 3% pay cut and are about to have their health care costs go up. 

And yet Governor Gregoire’s list of proposed cuts included asking the state employees to reopen their contract and give back even more.  The Washington Federation of State Employees wasted no time responding with a polite “No Thanks” and then offered this suggestion to the governor:

“Before there’s any talk of taking more from the state workforce she must convene a meeting of corporate entities and ask them to take a 3% cut in any tax break they are already receiving from the taxpayers of the state of Washington.”

A lot of people saw this as pithy rhetorical posturing, but a lot of others, including Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat, thought it was a pretty good idea (link).

Probably the most disappointing response came from the governor herself.  “I hope they will reconsider and come to the table,” she said of the unions. “I don’t collective bargain with businesses. I collective bargain with my work force.”

It seems to us here at the blog that someone who has inhabited the office of governor to the point where she’s able to think of 63,000 state employees (most of whom will still be state employees when she’s no longer governor) as “my work force” ought to be able to muster the confidence to think of businesses that turn big profits in her state as people she could at least ask to accept their share of the shared sacrifice.  Businesses would be under no obligation to take her up on that offer, but, as WFSE pointed out, state employees are similarly under no obligation to reopen their contract.  It turns out, in this instance, that the governor’s power to further bleed her work force is no greater than her power to ask her businesses to give back 3% of their tax breaks.  Now is not the time to make technical distinctions about collective bargaining, now is the time to use the bully pulpit of the governor’s office to make the case for what’s right. 

Which brings us to the other dubious thing the governor said when she released her budget cut ideas:

“I have not thought about revenue.”

That would make her about the only person in the state who hasn’t. 

Governor Gregoire has reached that bittersweet place at the end of a politician’s career when she is no longer running for anything.  The silver lining in that lame duck cloud is that she’s free to say whatever she wants, not just what she thinks voters want to hear.  It is time for our elected leaders to lead and finally do something about the most regressive tax system in the country.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to Scott White’s family. 

Scott was a great public servant who was in that line of work for all the right reasons.  He cared deeply and he cared enough to make good things actually happen.  The future of this state got a little dimmer when Scott died, and people who never heard of him will miss him. 

But we’ll all miss him not just because he was great state senator, but mostly because he was a great guy. 

The White family has set up several ways to contribute to Scott’s memory:  

Donations can be made to the Wedgewood Elementary PTSA, EarthCorps or to the Scott White Memorial Fund, an education fund for his two children, which has been established at Wells Fargo:

Scott White Memorial Fund
PO Box 95675
Seattle, WA 98145-2675
Account Number: 1559550528
Routing Number: 125008547

First published in the Everett Herald, Oct. 15th 2011

As Washington looks toward the next special legislative session, higher education is again on the cutting block. It is likely that new cuts will be forthcoming absent new taxes. As a result, the cost to students to attend college will continue to rise.

A major reason why public college tuition has been rising in Washington is not because it costs so much more to attend college these days, but because the portion of that cost subsidized by the state has declined dramatically. As the state cuts, more of the cost is borne by students and parents.

Commentators have noted the effect rising tuition has on student debt, but few have paid attention to curricular dimensions. As tuition increases, however, legislators have responded by making fundamental changes to college education that threaten to redefine college's very purpose. It is worth pondering whether this is a direction we wish to take.

At the heart of American college is what is known as "general education." In addition to one's major, college students take courses in different disciplines and areas in order to gain a broad education in the arts and sciences -- a liberal education.

General education took its modern form after the 1945 publication of "General Education for a Free Society," by a Harvard committee under its president, James Bryant Conant. Conant argued that specialization and depth must be balanced by general education and breadth. Modern universities and faculty were too focused on their disciplines, and students suffered. In Conant's words, general education refers to "that part of a student's whole education which looks first of all to his life as a responsible human being and citizen; while the term, special education, indicates that part which looks to the student's competence in some occupation."

General education takes time and money. As legislators shift the burden to students, they have sought to bypass general education requirements to make college degrees cheaper, faster to obtain, narrower in focus, and geared more directly to vocational training.

The key two programs are Running Start, which allows 11th and 12th graders to enroll in college courses at the state's expense, and the more recent "College in the High School," which urges high schools to offer college credit courses.

Both programs are designed to save the state and students money. Both send the message to students that general education is unimportant and the more quickly you can get it over with, the faster you can graduate and get on with life. Both erode the campus experience of which general education is a large part.

The last legislative session witnessed a three-pronged attack on general education. The first was the establishment of Western Governors University-Washington, which has almost no general education requirements when compared with other colleges. WGU, instead, criticizes colleges for requiring so much "seat time."

The second was a bill granting Boeing and Microsoft huge tax breaks for a scholarship fund for students majoring in science, engineering, health care and other high-demand fields. Legislators were not troubled by allowing two large corporations to determine which subjects ought to be prioritized. Students majoring in the humanities would be out of luck, as would those choosing to pursue careers that Boeing and Microsoft do not prioritize

The final prong was a bill urging colleges to develop three-year degrees for advanced students, as if avoiding a year of college ought to be a reward for hard work. In fact, advanced students may benefit the most from the arts and sciences. We should give them an extra year for free. The only explanation is that legislators consider college primarily job training and see the extra time required to gain a general education as wasteful.

If colleges wish to respond, they will have to make the case that general education matters. This will require effort. Faculty must become as committed to their general education students as they are to students in their majors, and administrators must fund smaller, more engaging courses and sequences. Students should leave college valuing their general education as much as their major.

Washington's legislators face a dilemma. Citizens want and deserve access to post-secondary education in order to get better jobs. But there are many avenues to this end, including high-quality certification and apprenticeship programs. We instead have sought to make college fit all students without being willing to fund it. In doing so, we threaten what makes distinctive a college education while forcing many students to spend years earning a degree they neither want nor need.

A more balanced approach would preserve and fund college education for students who want it, while offering quality alternatives to those who wish to get the training they need for a better job.

Sit on a fence long enough and you end up with a fence post up your ass. 

So now is the time for everyone in Washington’s public university community—students, parents, alumni, faculty, staff, administration, and trustees—to get off the fence and strongly support revenue solutions to the new state budget problem. 

With the ink still drying on last year’s bi-partisan, sustainable, all-cuts budget, the state economist has predicted that tax revenues will be down another 1.4 billion.  Much hubbub has ensued and on November 28 state legislators will head back to Olympia for a special session to try to put the house back in order.   

Times like these are especially tough on public universities.  Unlike those snotty kids in public schools or those pesky old people living high on the pension hog or those freeloaders sucking up Medicaid, our budgets are not constitutionally, contractually, or federally protected.  This is compounded by the fact we seem to be everybody’s second priority.  Democrats tell us they love us and they’re going to give us the funding we need just as soon as they raise taxes.  Republicans tell us they love us and they’re going to give us the funding we need just as soon as they cut all those social services.  In a state where unconstitutional initiatives keep majority Democrats from governing with a majority and where a critical mass of Democrats often act like Republicans, this kind of love triangle can leave college folk twisting themselves into knots trying to be all things to all people.  University presidents tend to feel like they’ve navigated the legislative Scylla and Charybdis just right when Republicans think they’re Democrats who lean right and Democrats think they’re Republicans who lean left. 

But now the jig is up. 

If our public universities are going to remain public, if the middle classes and below are going to continue to have the opportunities that come with a genuine college education, if the state is going to continue to have the economic development and social stability that comes from strong universities, then this state must raise more revenue.  With nothing but dark economic clouds on the horizon, we can no longer continue to try to walk a political tightrope, thinking that if we don’t do anything to piss off anybody, then maybe somebody will give us some money.

It is time for us to get off the fence and make full-throated arguments for tax reform and new revenue, including but not limited to the following:

--Even if public universities weren’t going to benefit from increased revenue, it’s high time Washington’s tax policy joined at least the late twentieth century.  We have the most regressive tax system in the country.

--When some Democratic legislators say that they are unwilling to kill people so other people can go to college, they have a point.  Capitalist economies without social safety nets should only exist in Dickens novels.  The state budget has been so bad for so long that higher ed folks have started eying K-12 and social services as competitors for scraps and that’s a sure sign that we’re losing our way.  We’ve taken to making the morally dubious argument that a dollar invested in higher ed makes more long term sense than a dollar invested in children’s health care or food for poor people. It’s time for us to stop that and start telling people that there should be two dollars.

--Public sector jobs are still jobs.  The demonization of public employees has been so relentless that you’d think they were just a bunch of thieves stealing our tax money.  Actually, they’re cops, firefighters, teachers and other hard working professionals, thousands of whom have been laid off.  This not only erodes the public infrastructure to dangerous levels, it also drives the unemployment rate up, because . . .

…most of those private sector jobs ain’t coming back, taxes or no taxes.   Both Republican and Democratic administrations have kept tax burdens on the well off unconscionably low in the hopes of spurring job creation.  That hasn’t happened, because a variety of factors (mostly technology) have made it possible for companies to downsize and maintain or increase productivity.  Insisting that rich people and corporations pay their fair share of taxes won’t kill jobs and isn’t class warfare, because...

…to quote Elizabeth Warren, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.  You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”     

--Taxes don’t drive away business.  Study after study, leaked internal memo after leaked internal memo have shown that taxes are not near the top of the list in corporate calculations about where to do business.   Boeing is much more likely to leave because our public universities aren’t graduating enough engineers than they are because taxes went up a little bit to pay for those engineers.

Here at the blog, we have often had the opportunity to share a beverage and conversation with revenue averse legislators, and we can say with sincerity that they are not like their comrades in the other Washington.  For the most part, they are decent, thoughtful, and well-meaning people who are not simply trying to score political points.  However committed they may be to smaller government and lower taxes, they aren’t likely to toss the university baby out with the tax bathwater just because we disagree about how to solve the budget crisis.

So it’s time for everybody in Washington’s public university community to get off the fence.  We need to say as loudly and as forcefully as we can that enough is enough.  We cannot just continue to cut.  We need more revenue.

Washington's Senate Bill 5442 authorizes Washington’s colleges to create three-year baccalaureate degrees. (link to bill).

A three-year degree is not necessarily a  threat to higher education. It may even be a good idea. The amount of time it takes to earn a degree is not scientific; it depends on practice, tradition, and the goals of college education. It is up to us to decide what we want students to get from college. Washington's colleges ought to explore what a three-year degree that takes liberal education seriously would look like.

The challenge, however, is that the bill’s stated goal is not improving the quality of higher education, but simply making it easier for qualified students to obtain degrees more quickly.

The opening lines of the bill make clear that it is not concerned with improving higher education:

“The legislature finds that some students are eager to complete a degree in the shortest time possible in order to enter the job market. The legislature further finds that providing  streamlined path to a baccalaureate degree would shorten the time required for students to complete a degree, improve the graduation rate, and improve accessibility for students who have proven academic abilities.”

Of course students want a degree in the shortest time possible. I bet I could conduct a poll that finds that most Washingtonians prefer junk food to vegetables. But higher education is not just another consumer product that must blindly respond to these preferences, for several reasons.

First, although higher education responds to the marketplace, it also upholds other values. Any reform must be true to these values.

Second, like other complex goods in the marketplace (medicine, for example), consumers do not always have the information to understand the “product” they are buying. After all, the goal of higher education is not to sell a widget, but to educate, that is to teach students about things they do not already know.

Polls demonstrate that most Americans do not want higher education to be just another market good. A recent Seattle Times story about the University of Washington recruiting more out of state students reminded Washingtonians that they do not want what they asked for. Having told the UW to act like a business, they feel betrayed when education is sold like other products on the market (see Danny Westneat’s column, UW Gives Us What We Asked For).

Parents and students do not want colleges to treat students like consumers. They believe that education ought to be more than just a product. They want students to be seen as special, not just dollars and cents. They want faculty to care deeply about each student, and to work with him or her closely. They recognize that a real education is about building relationships between teachers and students, relationships that are vital to fulfilling higher education’s mission (see Should Colleges Operate Like Businesses? ). Parents and students alike expect colleges to live up to their trust, not just bow down to their preference.

The bill reduces the authority of colleges and their faculty to determine what constitutes a college degree by mandating that three-year degrees “must allow academically qualified students to begin course work within their academic field during their first term or semester of enrollment.”  Yet one of the core commitments of American higher education is the principle that college graduates are more than just technicians. The bill presumes that the primary purpose of college is the major.

It ain’t so. The goal of going to college is as much to become a more profound thinker, a more thoughtful person, and a more knowledgeable citizen, as to choose a major. In fact, in the arts and sciences, the major is arbitrary. It shouldn’t matter if one majors in English, history, chemistry, or biology. Employers consistently say the same thing. They want graduates who can think, can write, and are creative. All arts and sciences majors do this. The goal of the major is to give students a chance to gain intellectual depth, to foster curiosity, and to develop an approach to the world.

One of the great things about the first year of college is precisely that students do not, and should not, know their major. They take a broad array of courses in different disciplines and fields; they are urged to explore, to discover what might interest them. Students deserve a chance to make meaningful choices about their future, and this ought to be available for all students, including the most academically qualified students this bill targets. For example, most students have no idea what sociology is before coming to college, yet it is one of the most popular majors on campus once students discover how sociology can help them understand the world in which they live.

One of the challenges facing a three-year degree is that many professional programs require more courses than majors in the arts and sciences. The reason is because those programs must ensure that their graduates are credentialed. The problem, however, is that this leaves less space for each student's broader education. Any three-year baccalaureate degree must balance the high credit demands of some professional programs with the equally important expectation that all college graduates are given meaningful exposure to the arts and sciences.

Europe has embraced the three year degree with mixed results. Some studies suggest that it has reduced the market value of baccalaureate degrees, leading more students to seek masters degrees, and thus has extended the time it takes for students to enter the marketplace.

A three-year degree is only as good as the education behind it. A recent Wall Street Journal article, India Graduates Millions, but Too Few Are Fit to Hire, argues that increasing the number of degrees is less important than ensuring that college graduates can do the work that employers and society expect of them. The article details how, despite raising the number of degrees, many of India’s college graduates lack the language and reading skills expected by employers. Fast-tracking college degrees, and increasing the number of graduates through online programs, may offer students a credential but not an education.

If three-year degrees are designed in a way that erodes the ability of students to explore, threatens the broad foundation of liberal education in order to produce more narrowly-focused graduates, and reduces student choice, they may produce more graduates but at a great cost to Washington’s students.

On the other hand, if a three-year degree can be crafted in a way that sacrifices neither the breadth of liberal education nor the depth of a major, we could graduate more people at lower cost. The process must be deliberate. At its best, it would ask faculty to think seriously about what they really want college graduates to know and do. This is no easy task, but it is an important one. The legislature has urged us to explore the idea, and there is no reason to shy away from the task.

So the House budget proposal was unveiled on Monday, and, well, it could have been worse.  Don’t get us wrong, here at the blog we still feel that tax loopholes should be on the table (giving money to out of state banks and private jet folks while people go hungry and die is, no matter how hard you squint, just wrong), that there ought to be a more serious and sustained effort to reform the goofiest tax system in the country, and that every proposed budget this year is just another step in the destruction of our crucial public infrastructure. 

But . . . given the local problem of creating a budget within ridiculous constraints, Rep. Ross Hunter and the House Dems did a remarkable job.  Obviously not everyone is going to buy into all the choices, but this budget has a coherence and clarity that we haven’t seen in a while. 

For our state universities, the House budget whacks $100 million more than the Governor’s proposal did.  But a tip of the blog hat to Representative Hunter and his colleagues for making the extent of the cuts clear.  You don’t have to dig into the murky footnotes to find how the details of pension adjustments and salary reductions add up to more than the advertised cut.  The full damage was right up front in the presentation that Representatives Hunter, Darneille, and Sullivan made at their press conference.  The slide showing the higher ed cuts had a big asterisk making it clear that the cut percentages included all the back of the book stuff. 

The other great thing that the House budget presentation did was make it clear that state spending and public services continue to shrink.  State spending per person is the lowest it’s been since 1986 and dropping.  Remember that the next time somebody tells you that state spending is out of control.

And while state spending has been dropping steadily, spending on higher education has dropped precipitously.   With both the governor’s and the house budget proposals out now, the writing on the wall is pretty clear.  When the smoke clears on this year’s legislative session, state support to our public universities will have been cut by 50% or more in the last two biennia. 

To understand the consequences of this disinvestment, we need only turn our eyes to Oskaloosa, Iowa, the home of Tom Mortenson, publisher of the newsletter Postsecondary Education Opportunity [link] .  Since 1991, Mortenson’s newsletter has “relentlessly calculated, documented, and reported” the consequences of state disinvestment in higher education over the last two decades.  Mortenson lists Washington as one of his “dumb, dumber, dumbest” states, for having recorded our poorest rates of investment in higher education over the last two fiscal years.  In FY 2010, we spent $5.48 per $1000 of personal income in this state on higher education.  That’s 63.7% below our peak of $15.53 in FY 1974.

Perhaps the clearest consequence of the thirty-year choice that policy makers in Washington and other states have made to disinvest in public higher education has been the exacerbation of the gap between those who are born with stuff and those who have to work for it.  As Mortenson points out:

This decline in state investment in higher education has occurred during the Human Capital Era of the U.S. economy.  Since 1973 income and the welfare that income provides has been based almost entirely on educational attainment, particularly higher education.  Since 1973 the real incomes and living standards of people of all genders and races and ethnicities, families, households, cities, and states have been reallocated according to educational attainment.  Those with the most education have prospered and moved farther ahead, while those with the least education have suffered and fallen further behind.  Higher education has become the distinct line of demarcation between those moving forward and the rest moving backward in their incomes, health, wealth, and general welfare.   

This race to the bottom will continue this year, no matter what budget is ultimately adopted.  The House budget proposal cuts between 3.2% and 5.4% from the total budgets of each of our universities and raises tuition by 11.5% to 13% just to keep those cuts from being worse. 

So, while the House budget writers did a good and thoughtful job, the bottom line is still that our students will be paying 11% to 13% more to get 3% to 5% less. 

The organizing and education that members of the higher education community have done has made higher ed more of a priority for legislators.  But if we’re going to preserve the future of this state through the middle class expansion and economic, political and cultural development that access to high-quality, publicly supported universities brings, we still have a lot of work to do.