ITS NOT OVER YET, GOVERNOR VETOES THE HIGHER EDUCATION SECTION OF THE LEGISLATURE'S BUDGET
With just four days remaining in the 1997 regular legislative session, Democratic Gov. Locke vetoed virtually all of the higher education section of the Republican Legislature's biennial operating budget this afternoon. Sections of Substitute Senate Bill 6062 vetoed include all sections relating to Washington State University. He has sent legislative budget writers back to work on specific issues that he says must be resolved before adjournment:
- Student Financial Aid Funding Is Insufficient, Says Locke
"While I applaud the Legislature's commitment to access through increased enrollment at colleges and universities, another critical element of accessibility is affordability," the governor wrote in his veto message. He said the budget "threatens to limit access to a public higher education by students with low incomes and limited resources."
- More State Funding for Faculty Salaries Urged by the Governor
"To recruit and retain quality personnel for the critical mission of educating our state's population into the 21st century, the operating budget should include state funding to raise university faculty salaries to levels competitive with peer institutions, mitigate salary disparities for community and technical college part-time faculty, and provide adequate cost-of-living increases for all education employees," Locke said. At issue here, is a proposal by Locke that would allow up to $3.4 million allocated to WSU in general fund-state revenues to be used for faculty salary increases. In contrast, the Legislature provided up to $4.75 million but required the funding to come from increased tuition, a practice the governor disagrees with. Gov. Locke's proposed budget contained a general salary increase for all state employees at WSU equal to $12.4 million for the biennium, providing two annual pay increases of 2.5 percent. The Legislature provided a single 3 percent increase on July 1 with no scheduled increase in 1998. The Legislature, however, did provide a faculty retention pool of $1.2 million for WSU while the governor provided just $750,000 in his proposed budget.
- The Legislature's Accountability Standards for Higher Education Institutions Must Be Reworked
"The Legislature needs to create a more effective approach to accountability for higher education institutions," the governor wrote in his veto message. "Performance measures, numeric goals and annual improvement targets should not be established through a political process..." Locke suggested that performance measures should be developed with "careful deliberation and collaboration" between higher education institutions and the Higher Education Coordinating Board. WSU shares the governor's concerns. For instance, one of the accountability measures in the Legislature's budget is the "Graduation Efficiency Index." This is a new measure designed to determine how efficiently a university is educating students. The formula is the number of credits required by all students for a degree, minus the credits obtained from a community college, divided by the number of credits students took this semester, times 100. WSU supports this measure and found it useful in uncovering a discrepancy between students who spend all four years in Pullman and those who transfer from other institutions. WSU's GEI number for Pullman is 87 percent while the number for transfer students is 75 percent.
However, the Legislature's budget sets the GEI goal for students attending all four years in Pullman at 95 percent. That means WSU is 8 percent below the budget target. The budget requires WSU to close that gap by 10 percent. To do that, WSU would need to reduce about two credits from the academic program of every student who is a senior next year.
- Sanctions for Failing to Hit Enrollment Targets Are Unworkable
"...while I support the notion of holding institutions financially accountable for meeting a reasonable enrollment target, the sanction proposed by the Legislature is unworkable," Locke said. Gov. Locke recognized that institutions have problems predicting exact enrollment levels. WSU Pullman was about 600 students over-enrolled last year and is about 500 students under-enrolled this year. Locke proposed that there would be no penalty if WSU Pullman came within 3 percent of its budgeted enrollment. The Legislature's budget requires that WSU Pullman exactly hit its enrollment target.
SENATE BILL 5927 - CONFERENCE COMMITTEE WORKS TOWARD 4 PERCENT ANNUAL TUITION INCREASE
House-Senate conferees met this afternoon for the first time in public session to discuss the differences between the two houses on Senate Bill 5927, which will set new student tuition rates. There appeared to be agreement among the conferees that tuition should increase by 4 percent this fall and by another 4 percent the following year. It appeared that most rates would be set by the Legislature and not by each institution's Board of Regents as the House had advocated earlier in the process. Also apparently abandoned was the effort by the state Senate to set a long-term tuition policy that would give some predictability of tuition rates for many years to come. This bill will probably apply just for the next two years. Additional tuition increases are being discussed for the UW law school and for non-resident students at all institutions. A special tuition increase for UW business administration master's students appeared to be losing in conference.
