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Higher Education Must Lobby or Lose

Editorial
Jersey Journal
April 13, 2006

Look for New Jersey's higher education students to pay a lot more tuition at a time when public colleges in other states are looking to upgrade their facilities because those states are awash in surplus funds.  While most of the country has benefited from a flourishing economy, New Jersey is drowning in deficits.  With a $4 billion hole in the next state budget, Governor Corzine is proposing many increases in taxes, some new taxes, increased fees and cuts in service.

Among the proposals is a $169 million cut in higher education funding.

In Hudson County, New Jersey City University's operating budget is about $116 million.  NJCU President Carlos Hernandez said a proposed cut of $3 million in its base budget would, in effect, reflect an overall loss of $9 million.  The loss of funds would return the university to 1999-level operations.  Only today's campus has a greater enrollment and offers many more services that are now in danger.

Should the Corzine proposal be accepted by the Legislature, Hernandez, said, everything will be on the table when discussing possible college budget cuts.  Academics is the first thing the university will protect, but that is not to say that the number of some classes won't be reduced.

While Hernandez applauds Corzine's efforts to tackle the state's fiscal woes with an eye to making more permanent fiscal structural changes rather than one-shot fixes, the governor's financial blue-print places higher education in New Jersey in a near-catastrophic position.

NJCU serves an urban population and students who could least afford big tuition hikes.  While Hernandez says there are state programs that should protect the needier students, he notes that there is a layer of enrolled and prospective undergraduates who would feel the impact of any larger tuition increase.

NJCU and other public higher education institutions have to place a premium on lobbying efforts in the Legislature to prevent such a large budget cut.

New Jersey has a national reputation for exporting the most high school graduates to other state colleges and universities.  As it is, the state higher education system would have to make available an additional 70,000 college undergraduate openings just to reach the national mean of 25 college seats per 1,000 people.  It would call for a major building upgrade at many campuses.

This is a bad time to underfinance our colleges and universities.