As was expected, the to-heck-with-the-poor-folks philosophy that rules Kansas these days will result in a tuition increase at the six state universities in the fall. The increases range from 6.9 percent at Emporia State to 4 percent at Kansas State and Fort Hays State. The total increase in dollars the students will pay is estimated at $26 million.
Loading the students and their families with the in-creased cost of operating the universities will mean that, for the first time in modern history, students will pay a bigger share of the cost of attending college than the state does.
Over the years, the shift from the state — meaning all 3 million of us — to the students, about 90,000 in all, has been dramatic. The rule of thumb a few decades ago was that tuition covered about 25 percent of the cost of operating the regents schools. With this latest tuition hike, the state pays a smaller-than-ever share of operating the state’s universities, students and their families pay more and the share covered by the federal government and private donors keeps growing.
The long-term implications of the decisions that led to these funding shifts are disturbing. Tuitions are rising while unemployment is still high and earning levels for the lower- and middle-income groups are stagnant or falling. While some students and their families are willing to borrow heavily to cover the difference between the cost of attending college and their ability to pay, others are put off by the prospect of starting their adult lives carrying a heavy debt burden and opt out.
The result is to widen still further the gap between the haves and the have-nots; to harden the class lines in our culture.
Perhaps more important, the result of raising the cost of higher education — a category that includes technical education, engineers, nurses, physicians and other health care workers as well as liberal arts students — will be to reduce the number of those trained to do the country’s most needed work.
This takes Kansas 180 degrees away from the course it should follow. Rather than spend more on educating the people needed to make the state’s economy thrive, we have decided to spend less — and let the employers who need top-flight workers go elsewhere to find them.
You get what you are willing to pay for. The people we elected to run our state have decided that a second-rate Kansas is good enough.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
