[G]W Plastics, a Bethel-based manufacturer with around 380 employees in Vermont, has plants in Arizona, Texas, Mexico, China, and Ireland. And it’s easier to find the right workers in all of those places than it is in Vermont, said the company’s vice president of human resources, Cathy Tempesta.
“College is becoming more and more important for every single job. It’s no longer a luxury; it’s becoming a necessity,” Tempesta said at a news conference Monday on state college system funding. GW Plastics needs skilled workers, she said.
“It is just good public policy,” Tempesta said. “For companies like mine, it can make the difference between growing in Vermont — which we love — or growing in another state with a larger pool of labor candidates.”
Tempesta was one of more than a dozen people who gathered at the Statehouse to support a plea from Jeb Spaulding, the chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges system, for greater state support. Spaulding said Vermont’s annual appropriation for its state institutions of higher education, at 17 percent of the schools’ budgets, puts it dead last in a national ranking.
As a result, Spaulding said, Vermont tuition costs are among the highest in the nation. In-state tuition and fees at the state colleges were an average $16,040 last year, the second-highest in the country that year, according to the College Board.
The expense is prompting Vermont students to leave for better-funded state systems.
And “when students leave the state, they stay out of state,” said Pat Moulton, president of Vermont Technical College.
Spaulding, who has been chancellor since 2015, said the appropriation for the state college system has been reduced or level-funded each year for the last seven years. In surrounding states, where colleges compete for Vermont students, public higher education institutions receive an average of 30 percent of their funding from the states, Spaulding said.
The base appropriation this year is $28 million; Spaulding would like Vermont to pay an additional $25 million to reach the 30 percent mark, increasing the appropriation gradually over the next five years.
The 1961 enabling legislation for the state college system called for support for the schools “in substantial part with state funds,” noted Professor Tyrone Shaw, who teaches journalism, writing and literature at Northern Vermont University. Yet funding has declined from a high of 49 percent since 1980, Shaw said.
For decades, staff, presidents, chancellors, students and others have asked the Legislature for more support, Shaw said.
“And today here we are once again,” he said. “Some very modest increases have been realized. They are not by any means enough to turn this misguided public policy around. Pressures at every level of our system continue to grow despite our considerable efforts to cost-cutting.”
For now, the low appropriation means students either go into debt to attend the state colleges, or they choose not to attend. At 58 percent, Vermont has the lowest proportion in New England of high school students who attend college within two years, according to the state college system.
Tempesta said she speaks to high school and college students as part of her job, and has heard many stories about the tuition bills and student loans that deter students from staying in college. In June, the state college system’s trustees approved a nearly 3 percent tuition increase at the system’s four schools, which include the Community College of Vermont, Castleton University, Vermont Technical College and Northern Vermont University.
“Friends full of potential and promise with a drive to continue their education drop out because they simply couldn’t afford college any longer,” said Adriana Eldred, a student at Northern Vermont University in Johnson. “Secondary education is practically essential for success for a young person in this first world society. So why is it so difficult to access?”
