I hope you don’t mind, but we have been advocating for your tuition to increase. As your student representative on the University System of Maryland Board of Regents and your chair of the USM Student Council, this does not come easily. But we must advocate in the practical world.
We must recognize we are not the only ones investing in our education. For the current fiscal year, tuition makes up a little more than a quarter of this university’s funding. This means that local, state, federal and private funding pays for nearly three-quarters of the academic and research activities going on at this university. In fact, the state appropriated $10,766 this year to the university for each full-time equivalent student, more than in-state undergraduate tuition. To help pay for our recent four-year tuition freeze, faculty and staff have seen furloughs, cost-of-living increase delays and no merit pay. In other words, we are not paying our way alone — we have partners supporting us and our futures, from our college professors to our members of Congress.
During the past five years or so, we also have seen unparalleled state support. Since the beginning of the 2008 recession, most states have cut funding to higher education, resulting in annual double-digit tuition increases in many states. In this state, we are lucky to have lawmakers who decided to take a different path. Since 2008, our state has seen the lowest percent increase in tuition and fees in the entire country because Gov. Martin O’Malley’s administration and our legislators made us a priority. They increased higher education funding by enough each year, despite significant fiscal challenges, to ensure tuition would not increase by more than 3 percent.
But make no mistake: we do not support the governor’s fiscal year 2014 budget proposal for the university system simply because of recent success. We support it because we must avoid the generational selfishness that has plagued other age groups’ politics. From our ever-increasing national debt to climate change, an important pattern emerges: When we fail to make hard decisions and up-front investments in our societal systems, we pay in the long run. To support O’Malley’s proposal is to not only support our state’s investment in higher education, but our own as well.
As current students and citizens, we have an obligation to help pay for improvements that must be started years in advance of reaping full rewards. We must help pay for widespread course redesigning that will take full advantage of advances in both technology and cognitive science to dramatically improve teaching and learning. We must help pay for targeted science, technology, engineering and mathematics enrollment so our degrees will one day be more efficiently linked to workforce needs.
We understand many of you are struggling to pay for school. We know we are far from having state universities that are financially accessible to everyone and that the university system is able to meet just 57 percent of financial aid need, well below its peer systems in other states. But the governor’s proposed budget should provide some much-needed improvement: It allocates an additional $16.5 million of campus-based financial aid over last year’s budget. As long as our budgets make significant increases in campus-based financial aid, small tuition increases could actually help close the financial need gap.
For all the reasons mentioned above, we support the modest 3 percent increase in undergraduate tuition proposed by O’Malley for fiscal year 2014. Our collective investment now will pay huge dividends for future students.
Steven Hershkowitz is the student member of the University System of Maryland Board of Regents and can be reached at smhershko@gmail.com. Zachary Cohen is chair of the USM Student Council and can be reached zbcohen@umd.edu.
