4-year colleges rap bill aiding 2-year schools

DENVER - A bill that would generate an additional $2.05 million for Pikes Peak Community College — and $16.3 million for community colleges statewide — is being criticized by some higher education leaders who have begged for more funding for years.

SB85, which goes Friday to the Senate Appropriations Committee, is an attempt to restore some funding that two-year public colleges lost during the recession earlier this decade.

The money would go to keeping tuition costs affordable and increasing the salaries of instructors, said Nancy McCallin, president of the state’s community college system.

Public colleges and universities of all sizes got socked with funding reductions in 2003 and 2004 and a number of schools, including the University of Colorado system, receive less from the general fund now then they did before that.

A recent study showed public universities and colleges need $840 million more a year to catch up to comparable schools nationally.

Larger four-year universities have been able to raise tuition rates while two-year schools catering to lower-income students have not.

Community colleges remain the only institutions running on less money when inflation is factored in, McCallin said.

Urban community colleges like PPCC are feeling a large brunt of that because 14 percent of their annual revenue is redistributed by the state to rural two-year schools that don’t have funding to sustain them.

So, even as PPCC has grown to nearly 12,000 students, it can’t pay for all of its growth, President Terry Kinkel said.

The bill would raise base funding levels for Colorado’s six rural community colleges so the seven urban schools no longer have to subsidize them.

PPCC wouldn’t get any new money, but it would be able to keep more than $2 million it now has to give away.

With that, PPCC could replace more computers, which are now on pace to be updated only once every 16 years, and could expand a nursing program that has a two-year waiting list, Kinkel said.

It also would increase pay for adjunct instructors, who are so hard to find at current levels that the college had to cancel three sections of English this year, he said.

“The system is not sustainable, and we have to just do a better job of making that case to the public,” Kinkel said.

One powerful lobby that opposes the bill, however, is many of the state’s four-year colleges.

The money would not be taken from them — it is set to come from the undesignated general fund — but its allocation would disrupt the delicate unity that schools have achieved so far in seeking more money, Department of Higher Education Director David Skaggs said.

The department has been working on a formula that would ensure schools funded at the lowest levels compared to comparable schools nationally, such as Adams State College, get the larger increases.

The formula will not be ready until next year, but Skaggs said any changes that favor one group of schools over another violate the spirit of that plan.

“If we cut a deal for certain schools, it will undo the work we’ve done to keep everybody together,” he said. “We need to go about it fairly.”

Rep. Mike Merrifield, a Colorado Springs Democrat who is a House co-sponsor of the bill with GOP Rep. Stella Garza Hicks of Colorado Springs, said that while the funding is desperately needed, he’s not sure if the bill can survive.

“It at least will focus attention on the overarching problem that we are not funding higher education institutions,” he said.

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