Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 19, 1990 TAG: 9006200357
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Daniel Howes
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Just when public college administrators thought the painful budget imbroglio of 1990 was over, Gov. Douglas Wilder announced last week that the state's cash crunch is worse than expected and the budget cutting likely will begin anew.
Discretionary spending by state agencies and colleges and universities has been put on hold and the governor hinted that lottery money earmarked for capital projects might be used to fill some of the emerging gaps in revenue.
That's not the kind of talk higher education bureaucrats like to hear. For schools such as Virginia Tech and Radford University, tampering with lottery funds raises one question: What of new construction?
Tech officials wearily say they have no comment on what additional cuts could mean to faculty, students and building plans until they see how much Richmond wants trimmed. And the state won't know until it closes the books for the year on June 30.
Some summer vacation.
For Radford, which escaped the brunt of the budget axe the first two times, three may not be a charm. The 9,000-student school was one of the few state-supported universities to actually get the go-ahead to hire more professors in the next two years.
For the folks who pay the bills for Radford and Tech students, the good news is that any additional cuts will not be offset by increases in tuition for the coming school year. That's already been done and the increases, comparatively speaking, have been slim (Tech) to none (Radford).
So that leaves faculty and staff, supplies and travel. And don't forget the new pet programs that every college president seems to dream up. They'll remain dreams until something gives somewhere.
If the 1990 General Assembly session is any indication, that somewhere may be in what university planners (dreamers?) call "new initiatives." Many of the increases in appropriations to Virginia's colleges and universities during the past decade have been in salaries and fringe benefits-investments in people.
Operating funds - for insurance, utilities and other unavoidable, and skyrocketing, costs - have not been increased in the past 10 years. Lawmakers and Richmond bureaucrats call it "level funding." If Joe Worker got paid the same amount in 1990 that he got a decade earlier, he'd call it something else.
Still, the plight of tax-supported schools - colleges in general, for that matter - doesn't often elicit much sympathy from the body politic, which increasingly seems to see education more as a means to end (a job) and not a lifelong process.
That said, I wonder how you square the public academy's ever-burgeoning requests for more money with the scorn often heaped on public education from people and pundits whose tax dollars pay for it.
Robert Samuelson, a columnist for The Washington Post, suggested last week that college and high school educations could be improved if, say, high school seniors seeking federal loans to pay for college were forced to take competency exams first. No pass, no go.
"I guarantee that these measures would instantly improve high schools. Perhaps the top (or bottom) 10 to 20 percent of students wouldn't be affected. But students in the middle would react to the threat of not being able to go to college; they'd study more," he wrote.
Maybe. But forcing tests only on loan seekers conveniently skirts the upper middle class and wealthy who can afford a full-priced college education and whose children often can be as poorly motivated and lazy as anyone else's.
"We prefer to maintain poor schools . . . that everyone can attend rather than have good schools that might benefit most students," Samuelson contended.
His is an interesting argument, certainly one to spur debate and - probably before some are finished reading - charges of elitism. That, of course, is part of the problem.
Political predilictions, turf wars and a rush to judgment suggest that debates about the quality of American education aren't debates at all. They're dialogues of the deaf and all the money Virginia lawmakers can muster likely won't fix the problem - or help high school and college students get the most from their educations.
by CNB