The New Hampshire University system announced an in-state tuition rate increase of 2.75% but that wasn’t supposed to happen.
UNH wanted $205 million from the next budget to (so they claim) avoid that increase and they had a list and names, and phones, and I imagine some pens as well but to no avail.
Governor Maggie Hassan asked the legislature for $181 Million dollars. The Legislature settled on $153 million Dollars, according to the Union Leader, but since the governor vetoed that budget, well, UNH is up the social justice creek without a bigger taxpayer funded bailout paddle.UNH will TRY to cut administrative costs, but in-state tuition is going to have to go up. Students will be forced to spend a little bit more of their own money to pay for their own education. But, but…
(As reported by Paul Feely, NH Union Leader)
“While we understand the fiscal challenges facing our state, we are disappointed that we cannot freeze in-state tuition for an additional two years.” said Pamela Diamantis, chair of the USNH Board of Trustees, in a release.
“While USNH is rated as the most efficient university system in New England with the lowest administrative cost per student, we will continue to take steps to review expenses in order to keep tuition as low as possible.”
“It is critical for the future of our state that we keep public higher education affordable while also maintaining high quality standards,” said USNH Chancellor Todd Leach in a release. “We will continue to work with state lawmakers, our partners in the business community and most of all, our students and their families, to provide a world-class education at the lowest possible price.”
So, those taxpayers we’ve been milking had better come around. We can’t keep expecting students to pay our inflated costs for a crappy degree in left-handed lesbian albino studies. That means electing representatives willing to use the force of law to take money away from the productive sectors of the society so we can crank out more experts in fields with no productive value whatsoever.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see UNH (or some unbiased third-party) audit its curriculum to determine if its credential effluent was actually generating more or less of the sort of wealth to which they feel entitled? Think of it as the Renewable Education Bailout Standard. You want more private sector money to feed your monkey house? What kind of tricks did you teach them and are they growing the economy or sucking off it after college?
If you look at the modern University system degree programs the sucking sound is getting louder. More and more of them appear to create careers that are a net drag on the tax-base. What are experts in gender-outrage studies or white-intolerance advocacy going to do? Work at a university? Work for the government? Work at a non-profit?
These are not wealth creating occupations. These are cash-sinks that bloat budgets. Your reward for coughing up your hard earned income to keep tuition rates low is an army of taxpayer funded axe-grinders bent on silencing your speech and emptying your wallet.
Why should taxpayers bail out universities to increase per-capita tax load? Real value, real tax-dollar efficiency, creates jobs that produce private sector wealth not consume it. We want graduates who will reduce per-capita tax load. So we need an index that would measure this burden–or the reduction of it–and then dial the university bailouts back as a disincentive to get them to abandon programs with no real world value for the tens of millions of our dollars they waste to support them.
Taxpayers must push for this and hard. The university will never self-correct its self-indulgent addiction to plunder.
Once we have obtained that result we can calculate the increased tax cost to taxpayers. Then we threaten to shift that burden on to the back of the University that created it. We deduct it from their bailout, year after year, until they owe us money. It shouldn’t take long to get there from here.
It might even incentive them to change their ways.
No, none of this will ever actually happen. It’s more of a Swiftian “modest proposal. But the publicly funded university system needs some incentive to focus on graduating talented individuals with skill the economy needs.
They need to look to colleges that keep tuition rates down and produce graduates who provide real value.
I know. That is way too much to ask from a bunch of smart people who claim to be experts. But I’ll keep asking.
By the way. Where can we find the data that demonstrates that “USNH is rated as the most efficient university system in New England with the lowest administrative cost per student”? I’d like to see that. I’d also point out that, even if true you may just be the best of the worst, you are still begging for legislative plunder. You can’t be to terribly smart if you can’t compete WITH your so-called lowest administrative cost.
Figure it out. Isn’t that what you exist to do? Figure stuff out.
