Soak the rich is the motto of many Maryland legislators. But through willful ignorance or hypocrisy, they subsidize a lot of rich college students attending state schools and their parents to the long-term detriment of taxpayers and learning.
Freezing tuition is their method of choice. State legislators cut less than one percent from the University System of Maryland’s operating budget this year and paid for all of its capital projects, paving the way for its Board of Regents last week to freeze tuition for the fourth straight year.
Far from holding costs down, the decision just shifts who pays more from students in this uber-wealthy state to taxpayers and provides no guarantee that students will come out smarter or Maryland’s workforce more prepared.
Gov. Martin O’Malley praised the move: “Investments in Maryland’s workforce are more important now during a national recession than at any other time, and that’s why our budget included this tuition freeze and why the Board of Regents just affirmed the importance of this action.”
In-state-tuition at University of Maryland in College Park, the state’s flagship school, is $8,000 per year – an anticipated 18th highest for state universities.
While a great public relations stunt, it’s a stretch to say that freezing tuition is an “investment” in the state’s “workforce.” Nowhere does he include statistics about how many students stay and work in Maryland after they graduate to bolster that claim.
Neither does he explain why focusing aid on poor students is not a better solution to making college more affordable. And last, when will legislators start investigating whether thousands more theses in post-modern literature really make us richer and constitute a “public good”?
This is another example of how success in Maryland is measured by how much money taxpayers put into a particular program, not what they get out. For the $426.4 million taxpayers contributed to the University of Maryland last year, the school ranked 53rd overall on the U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” report and 18th for public universities. The same goes for K-12 education in Maryland, where Maryland’s No. 1 ranking reflects spending, not student learning.
It’s time our legislators started to demand better results for the taxpayer money they contribute to the university system. They don’t need to look far for a better model. The University of Virginia provides a lot more bang for the buck for Virginia taxpayers than the University of Maryland does for state residents.
State contributions make up 8.2 percent of UVA’s budget, compared to 28 percent at College Park. And UVA now receives more from private donations than from taxpayers. It is the second ranked public university in the nation after the University of California, Berkeley and 23rd overall, tied with Georgetown. A second public university in Virginia, the College of William and Mary, ranks sixth for public universities on the U.S. News report.
“The University” — as UVA students and alumni like to call it — didn’t ask for less funding from the state. In the 1990s, state legislators began cutting state aid to much uproar in the university community.
The cuts spurred a massive fundraising effort, resulting in about a $4 billion endowment, compared to College Park’s $350 million at the end of last year. UVA’s newfound wealth also gives it more autonomy to plan capital projects and fewer state strings means more control over academic and professional policies.
This is not a revolutionary idea. University of Maryland officials have only to look to its business school for a plan. Howard Frank, dean of The Robert H. Smith School of Business from 1997 to 2008, transformed the school over the past decade. He raised tuition, opened satellite campuses and offered evening and weekend programs, attracting more students, higher rankings, top faculty and more alumni support.
The state’s liberal arts institutions may not be able to offer lucrative executive education classes like Smith. But what’s clear is that more taxpayer money means less effort to raise money from alumni and develop other revenue streams to improve instruction and learning on campus and offer scholarships to low-income students.
Current students, especially the wealthy ones enjoying a cheap education, benefit in this arrangement. But taxpayers and the university system will suffer in the long-term both academically and financially as places like UVA earn top honors and enough money to make education affordable to all those who attend.
Washington Examiner columnist Marta H. Mossburg is a senior fellow at The Maryland Public Policy Institute.
