Student leaders from public universities came to Annapolis this week to plead for another year of tuition freeze, a move strongly supported by Gov. Martin O’Malley.
“We realize we need a longer-term solution” to keep tuition affordable, O’Malley’s policy chief Joseph Bryce said.
The governor and lawmakers hope that a solution will come from a commission on funding higher education headed by Sen. Patrick Hogan, a Montgomery County Democrat and one of the General Assembly’s acknowledged experts on education funding.
The 28-member commission started work last week with the good news that a WB&A Market Research public survey of registered voters taken last summer found Marylanders rate the overall quality of the state’s higher education fairly high.
The so-so news is that they see higher education as “among the second tier of problems or issues facing the state’s leaders,” according to WB&A Market Research President Steve Markenson’s analysis.
The telephone poll contacted 1,106 registered voters last July and August, and has a 2.9 percent margin of error.
Markenson said the “realization that higher education has improved over the last 10 years” surprised him. More than half the respondents — 52 percent — considered Maryland’s higher education “much better” or “somewhat better” than it was 10 years ago. Markenson said such questions more often generate the response “about the same” from a majority, but only 21 percent inthe poll chose that response.
