Expected budget cuts could drastically affect higher ed

The ease of enrolling at Colorado’s community colleges could soon have a catch: it could cost more than most current students could afford to pay.

“We have gone beyond just trying to be more efficient,” said Tony Kinkel, president of Pikes Peak Community College. “We’re at the point where we have to ask if we should still be open enrollment, if we should cut high-cost workforce readiness programs.”

But cutting such things as auto mechanic and culinary arts courses — among the most popular — would change the school’s mission.

Similarly, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs could supplant in-state students in its Beth-El College of Nursing with out-of-state students, who pay higher tuition. The additional money could help the school remain solvent in tough times, but such a plan would eliminate opportunities for Colorado students.

“We’re not about to do that,” UCCS Chancellor Pam Shockley-Zalabak said, adding that granting slots based on how much students pay is contrary to the concept of public higher education.

But the two higher ed chiefs, speaking Wednesday at a luncheon on the State of Higher Education in El Paso County, warned the philosophy that helping more students access higher education benefits a community is at odds with state funding levels.

Indeed, Colorado is at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to state funding of higher education. In 2008, it ranked 48th of the 50 states in per capita funding and has since dropped to last place, Kinkel said. That national average for per capita funding was $257 in 2008 and Colorado spent $151.

State higher education funding is lower than it was a decade ago — and headed over a cliff in 2012 if budget trends continue, Shockley-Zalabak warned.

Even in the next two years federal stimulus money will not make up the anticipated state shortfall, leaving a $55 million gap, she said. That means a $1.5 million cut next year for UCCS.

Shockley-Zalabak predicted that UCCS must find $12 million in new revenue during the next couple of years to blunt an anticipated drop of state revenue in 2012 when the federal money goes away.

She noted that UCCS is one of the most efficiently run universities of its size. A comparison with 31 peer universities showed: similar overall graduation rates; higher minority graduation rates; 42 percent fewer staff members; 21 percent lower expenditures per student; and more money spent in the classroom.

She said the university would look to such things as partnerships, enterprises and operating efficiencies to meet the budget challenge.

Both UCCS and PPCC have a large percentage of first-generation college students, low income students and minority students.

That’s why UCCS kept its tuition increase last year to 5 percent, rather than the 9 percent allowed.

“You have to have tuition that has market reality,” Shockley-Zalabak said.

Kinkel said that as the policy and funding debates continue he hopes that politicians and the public will remember some of the tenets outlined when PPCC was created in 1968.

The founders talked about “our sons and daughters” and “citizens” who could attend college classes at affordable rates.

Community colleges are economical, provide opportunity for the most needy students and help reduce government costs, he said, noting that college-educated people have lower rates of smoking, obesity, divorce and incarceration.

“What we do creates individual and community wealth,” he said. ”We have to do a better job of selling that to Coloradans.”
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