The 11 Florida state universities’ presidents met in October, to try to improve the quality of and access to higher education in the state. They decided to lobby the state Legislature, who funds public education, for more money next year. They even set up a website: www.qualityandaccess.org.
Last spring, the Legislature cut the university budget by $40 million. This cut forced universities to take in 20,000 students that weren’t funded this year. According to the website, the public universities “can make room for these students if the Legislature funds them.”
Last year’s cut wasn’t a one time thing. According the Palm Beach Post, “The budgets of Florida’s public universities have been cut by more than $484 million since 1990, and spending has fallen 16 percent in four years and is less than what it was 15 years ago.” In fact, in 2001-2002, the Legislature cut the university budget by $160 million, which was the most dramatic of the cuts in the last decade.
Only four years since 1990 has the Legislature cut more from university budgets than they did last year. The Legislature is not providing sufficiently for higher education, and every year they affirm their commitment to poorer education. In fact, at FAU, according to the Post, “FAU’s budget has been cut by $10 million the past two years and $30 million since 1990.”
Not only have funds been slashed over the past decade, but Florida ranks 42 in number of bachelor’s degrees in the country. That’s completely unacceptable, especially for the fourth most populated state in the country.
If Florida is supposed to be committed to keeping college graduates in Florida and making them crucial to the economy, they’re not doing a good job of it. Either Florida students aren’t graduating from college, or they are going away to school. The Post says that “Florida’s universities would have to award 14,000 to 15,000 bachelor’s degrees every year through 2011 just to reach the national average.” The state of Florida is willing to spend $310 million on bringing Scripps Research Institute, which is supposed to increase jobs for people who have college degrees. Who are they going to hire?
The absurdity of this is that Florida wants to improve their economy, but without improving education, who’s going to be working these jobs? It seems as if the first step is to bring in corporations from other states, then, since we have so few college graduates, we’re going to have to import workers to take these jobs. So, basically, any effort to bring new corporations to Florida is self-defeating until higher education is improved.
Next year, they expect the number of incoming students, and also tuition to be increased. But will it matter? University of Central Florida President John Hitt told the Boca News, “We ask the students to pay a lot more, and we can’t really give them any more.” That’s sums up the budget woes just fine. Every year our tuition rises and every year the university’s quality standards drop a little more.
If the Legislature doesn’t shape up and start allocating the money to schools, we’ll quickly find our degrees are better served as fans to cool ourselves off, as we wait patiently in the ever increasing unemployment lines that plague South Florida.
In the end, the last sentence of the quality and access website says it best: “Funding Florida’s public universities is not an expenditure; it is an investment in the future, an obligation to our children and a powerful engine to drive the economic climate of our state.”
