Quinn Majeski, director of ASUW’s Office of Government Relations (OGR), said because the state budget deficit was more than $5 billion this year, the 2011 legislative session was “easily one of the toughest sessions in recent history.”
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Quinn Majeski, director of ASUW Office of Government Relations, and Ben Henry, vice president of GPSS, frequently visited Olympia to lobby on students behalf.
One special session later, the 2011 state legislative session has come to an end, and UW lobbyists have had time to reflect on their process of maintaining the student voice in Olympia. Members of the state Legislature announced last week that they will be cutting state funding to the UW by $209 million over the next two years.
Ben Henry, Graduate and Professional Student Senate vice president and Washington Student Association (WSA) legislative liaison, said he believes the state should invest in education because students who will soon be in the work force are the ones who have the ability to change the economic crisis.
“The Legislature has made a clear and deliberate choice to shift even more of the burden of funding higher education onto the backs of students,” Henry said. “This will mean more students who must take on suffocating debt just to compete for a job. It will mean more instances of a quality education going only to those who can afford it.”
Margaret Shepherd, UW director of State Relations, also said the shift in who pays for college from the state to the student is concerning because it has been a dramatic transfer over the past three years.
“I hope this session marks the low point for higher education funding, and we can build on the momentum established this session to refocus on public reinvestment and rebuilding,” she said.
Although he said the decrease in the state budget created obstacles, Majeski said there were also challenging policy decisions, such as HB 1795, which is also known as the Higher Education Opportunity Act. This act grants tuition-setting authority to the UW Board of Regents, as opposed to the Washington state Legislature.
After the signing of the bill, which Gov. Chris Gregoire has said she would sign, the regents will have unregulated tuition-setting authority for the next four years. Members of the Board of Regents are expected to review tuition flexibility and financial-aid policy at their June 9 meeting.
Majeski said the passage of the tuition-setting authority bill is his biggest concern because he said the policy has no official place for student opinion in the decision-making process.
“The Legislature relinquished control of tuition-setting authority to the Boards of Regents, eliminating public discourse on a key policy decision,” he said. “In the process, they also failed to provide students with any additional means of affecting decisions made at the local level.”
Shepherd said she has called this term “the best worst session the university has experienced.”
“Despite unprecedented state budget reductions to the UW and to higher education, the Legislature and the public took notice of what’s happening in higher education,” she said. “The Legislature did its best to give the university the tools needed to manage through the economic recession and provide students with the quality education they deserve.”
Although some student leaders did not approve of the passage of HB 1795, Shepherd said she was proud of the “strong, bipartisan conversation and action around higher education funding and tuition policy” that took place.
However, Henry said he believes members of the Legislature should be responsible for ensuring that student voice is preserved in decision-making processes that affect them.
Student leaders from ASUW and GPSS were unsuccessful with their Tuition Advisory Amendment, which would have been attached to the bill itself. The amendment would have created communication mechanisms that would have maintained a strong student voice in the tuition-setting process, such as requiring public testimonies at regent meetings.
Without the success of this amendment, Henry said it is up to next year’s student leaders to maintain a strong student presence in budget-related decisions.
“It is more important than ever for students to maintain a strong presence in Olympia … [because] in the future, tuition will largely be set based on the expected state appropriation. So it is imperative that students re-up our efforts in Olympia to prevent the need for large tuition hikes like the ones we have seen in recent years.”
Adam Sherman, GPSS vice president-elect, has frequently lobbied in Olympia over the past few years. He said with the regents having tuition-setting authority, there will be pressure for board members to listen to students, but said that students should also understand the stresses the regents face with a smaller budget to work with.
“It created an opportunity for students to think about what we want our role to be with the regents,” he said, adding that he hopes to see strong relationships and means of communication between students and the board.
Another component of the budget is that the state Legislature decided to fund the State Need Grant (SNG) to balance the rate increase of resident undergraduate tuition. However, the grant was also cut to provide money for the federal Pell Grants because members of the Legislature have said they expect application rates for the federal grant to increase.
Although the grant was preserved, Henry said it would not cover all students who may need financial aid.
“While many of our most needy are getting their tuition covered, middle-income students are going deeper and deeper into debt,” he said.
According to a brief by the UW’s Office of Planning and Budgeting, in the 2010-11 academic year, 22,000 students were eligible for the SNG but did not receive it.
“From a policy standpoint, the SNG program is not fully funded until all eligible students receive funding [and] eligibility ranges for the SNG are not altered in this proposal,” the brief stated.
The final state budget also includes a 66.52 percent cut to the funding for the state’s work study program. In addition to the cut, the Legislature also decided that nonresident students would no longer be eligible for the program.
Henry said members of GPSS tried to preserve the work study program because it is the only financial-aid program that benefits graduate students. He has said that the program gives graduate students the ability to rely less on loans and gives them opportunities to develop professional relationships while still in school.
Henry said he was relieved that funding to the program was not cut entirely, like the House proposed; however, he said members of GPSS are “deeply saddened by the loss of opportunities and ballooning debt that will result from the $31 million gutting that the program took.”
Although lobbyists from GPSS were not as successful as they hoped to be for the work study program, Henry said he is proud that their work to reinstate the Child Care Matching Grant program was victorious. The program provides financial aid for student-parents in Washington state.
“We worked really hard to get that program reinstated, and hundreds of student-parents around the state will benefit from it,” he said. “It is incredibly gratifying to see our efforts actually make some kind of difference.”
Shepherd said she saw a failure of this session being the unsuccessful attempt for a capital project management bill, which “would have leveraged capital project capacity at the UW and ensured that student building fees are spent to benefit students on our campuses.”
She said the bill passed unanimously in the Senate, but did not pass through the House.
“It will be a project we continue to work on next legislative session,” Shepherd said.
As a means to cut cost, the Legislature replaced the Higher Education Coordinating Board (HECB), which oversaw the state’s financial-aid programs and whose members acted as higher-education policy analysts for the governor and the Legislature, with a new council on higher education. The new council will not be finalized until 2012, but the Legislature proposed that it would consist of members of the government, individuals from the university administration and two individuals whom the governor will appoint to represent the public.
Henry said the creation of the council would not include a student representative, like the HECB did. He said because of this elimination of a student voice of the council, it would be important for next year’s student leaders to advocate for a student committee member.
“With the shift in tuition-setting authority, the comprehensive legislative divestment in higher education and the loss of an important student advocate in the HEC Board, next session will look unlike any other ever seen for students,” he said. “It will be up to next year’s student leaders to continue to vigilantly fight for student interests.”
Majeski said that he believes he and fellow student lobbyists from ASUW and the UW chapter of the WSA made a positive impression on members of the Legislature and have gained respect in the state capital.
“The obstacles this year were insurmountable, but the organizational groundwork laid this year and the respect we, as students, have garnered in Olympia will pay dividends for many sessions to come,” he said, adding that Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Reuven Carlyle. D-Wash., have commented on the strength of student presence during the session.
Shepherd said that, although students and members of the UW administration were not always in agreement on the details of policies, the level of discourse this session was impressive, and agreed with Majeski that members of the Legislature took notice.
She said, “I have a lot of respect for the student and faculty leadership at the UW, the business leaders who made higher education a top legislative priority, and our alumni and concerned citizens who lent their voice on the value of their UW education.”
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