A group charged with drawing up proposals for better state funding of Vermont’s college system scrapped its original report on Friday.
In a draft proposal, Vermont PreK-16 Council recommended that the Vermont Legislature increase state subsidies for higher education with money raised from lottery games and taxes on legalized marijuana.
That plan was abandoned. A subcommittee of the council instead will recommend that the state simply increase spending on higher education based on the rate of increase in overall General Fund spending, plus 1 percent. In fiscal year 2016, for example, the increase would be 4.9 percent.
Clarence Davis, a committee member and a lobbyist for the University of Vermont, opposed the idea of funding higher education through “what some will view as drugs and gambling.”
“I think it’s just inappropriate and I don’t think there would have been support for that from a broader community,” Davis said.
Officials from the Vermont State Colleges and the University of Vermont have long bemoaned the state’s underfunding of higher education. Vermont ranks 46th in the nation for state support of post-secondary education.
The committee was established last May under Act 148 with the goal of boosting state support for higher education, which has fallen dramatically over the past three decades. In 2014, 6 percent of Vermont’s General Fund expenditures were on higher education, compared with 11.8 percent of the General Fund in 1980, according to the report. As a percentage of personal income, the amount spent is dramatically lower. In 1980, Vermont spent $7.78 per $1,000 of personal income on higher education. That amount fell to $3.38 per $1,000 by 2013.
Meanwhile, the Vermont State Colleges have been hurt by falling enrollments and the financial crisis has taken a toll. Earlier this month, Vermont Technical College sent lay-off notices to eight faculty members. In addition, 27 adjunct instructors might not be hired again in the fall.
Representatives of students and faculty at Vermont colleges, members of the business community, and state legislators drafted a policy proposal that was expected to be approved at the January meeting. However, along the way, committee members became divided over the proposal for taxing legalized marijuana and limiting the use of VSAC grants out of state.
On Tuesday, four committee members agreed on a conference call that they would not support the committee’s drafted proposal, and said they decided to draft the pared-down alternative proposal.
Tim Donovan, the former chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges who was at the meeting as the acting chancellor’s designee, presented the new draft to the committee, voicing his concern that the original proposal would be met with resistance at the Statehouse and would distract from the goal of raising state support for higher education.
“One of the things that I have expressed through the course of this is that I don’t think we want to do anything that gives the general assembly or governor a reason to be dismissive of a very, very important change of direction,” Donovan said.
Meanwhile, Scott Giles, the president of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, told the committee that his decision to support the new proposal was influenced by the $100 million budget deficit the state will face this year. He feared that the original proposal came across as ignorant of the state’s overall situation, and would therefore be left in the dust.
“If we come up with something that is too aggressive in this environment, it will be just simply dismissed,” Giles said.
However, other members of the committee expressed dismay that the new draft had been drawn up at the 11th hour without consulting the other representatives. Liz Beatty-Owens, the committee chair and a student at Johnson State College, as well as faculty representatives from the University of Vermont and Castleton State opposed the new proposal.
“I’m devastated that this is the turn that it took,” Beatty-Owens told the committee, “and I’m actually really ashamed that so many people have no problem throwing out process and virtually silencing the voices of so many students that were here to participate in the conversation.”
CORRECTION: The substitute report proposes to raise general fund higher education spending, not by 1%, but by the rate of increase in overall general fund spending (comparing the last fiscal year versus the previous fiscal year), plus 1 percent. For FY 16, this would yield an increase of 4.9 percent, according to Tom Little, an executive with VSAC.
