Stan Geiger

Standard PEC Poop

Relative to both common and higher education, people are fed up with educators and their constant whining for more money. Polls show that.

Scathing results from a scientific polling of 1,200 Oklahomans were released not long ago. The majority of respondents said public schools have enough or too much money. An even greater majority, I believe it was 80 percent, said they would not have their kids in public schools if they had a choice.

I didn’t see it directly, but I got an email that said KOTV (presumably along with the Tulsa World) did a poll asking people if they thought the most recent round of tuition hikes was justified. Only a third of respondents said yes.

Support for more money for education among the rank-and-file has eroded. In response, the educators’ propaganda machine is kicking into high gear.

David Averill---World editor and card-carrying member of the political-educational complex---said, in a recent editorial, that lawmakers are to blame for high tuition because they just don’t give state colleges and universities enough of your tax money.

Wrong. Dead wrong. Educator greed is to blame for high tuition. It’s just as simple as that.

Let’s take a look at a couple of excerpts from Averill’s piece.

[U]niversities and colleges together face $43 million in increases for energy, health benefits and other fixed costs.

We have 25 public colleges and universities in this state. Averill says, as a group, these institutions face $43 million in cost increases for various items---including those under the somewhat vague category of “other fixed costs.” That averages out to about $1.7 million each.

Oklahoma State hiked its tuition by 10 percent this year. Reports say it now costs a fulltime student $6,200 for a year. Extrapolation tells me the increase was on the order of $500 per student for a year. I seem to recall hearing the increase only applied to the Stillwater and Tulsa campuses, so let’s conservatively say the increase hit 20,000 students. Do a little math, and it appears OSU will be bringing in at least $10 million more from tuition and fees this year.

So OSU was facing a couple of million in cost increases yet raised tuition enough to bring in 10 million new dollars.

You’ll note Averill mentioned energy, health insurance and, oh yeah, ‘other stuff.’ He made no mention of exorbitant salaries and bonuses, retirement contributions, private jets, country club memberships, free houses, free cars, free travel, free cell phones or free anything else that might be escaping me at the moment. Pointing to something like energy costs while ignoring what really eats the money is a standard PEC misdirection play.

Averill continued:

The less-than-standstill budget will continue a 10-year decline in the percentage of state support for state universities and colleges. Operating budgets in 1998 included 75.3 percent state-appropriated funds and 21.3 percent tuition and mandatory fees. By 2008, appropriated funds made up 49.5 percent of operating budgets while tuition and fees contributed 37 percent.

The above goes beyond misdirection; it falls more under the heading of disinformation. Notice the absence of any pertinent information. There is no mention of how much tax money goes to higher ed this year. There is no mention of how much tax money went to higher ed in 1998. After all, we wouldn’t want readers to be able to compare and contrast, right? Averill pulled one statistic out of his ass and put a spin on it, trying to make it look like state funding for higher education has been going down for 10 years. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I don’t have the numbers, but I’d be willing to wager the state’s appropriation for higher education has doubled since 1998---increasing by several hundred million dollars per year. The change in the percentages has nothing to do with a lack of tax money flowing into colleges and universities; the percentages have changed because tuition and fee revenue has increased so bloody much over the past 10 years.

In a sense, though, ol’ Dave has a point. Lawmakers are indeed partly to blame for high tuition. Not because they haven’t routed enough tax money to state colleges and universities, but because lawmakers---in an unconstitutional delegation of authority---gave unelected regents unilateral power to raise tuition and fees at will. Righting that wrong should be at the top of their agenda in the coming legislative session.

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