Arizona, we have a “mega-problem.” At least that’s the message ASU President Michael Crow gave at a meeting with The State Press editorial board when talking about education, budgets and the possible increase in tuition.
Perhaps you remember the special election held for Proposition 100 last spring. It was the supposed saving grace for the education system, promising two-thirds of the revenue from a 3-year, 1-cent-per-dollar sales tax increase.
However, the revenue from the tax increase so far is about $44 million lower than expected, according to an estimate by Arizona’s finance advisory committee.
In the wake of an underperforming tax increase, legislative leaders now want to go back on an earlier claim that standard education funding won’t take a hit because of a boost from the tax money.
What this means is that when stimulus money runs out at the end of this fiscal year, ASU will need to find a way to replace that money as well as the state money likely to be taken away.
“We have to replace [the stimulus funds] with tuition,” Crow said. “That’s all the tuition we wanted to ask for. We just wanted to ask just for the replacement of the stimulus funding. Nothing else. But if we have the stimulus funding that has to be replaced and there’s another budget reduction, now you got big problems.”
What’s worse, though, is that some of our state legislators wanted Proposition 100 to look like a mistake.
Early on, they said it wouldn’t be the solution to our problems. We didn’t expect it to fix everything, but a promise that it wouldn’t result in more cuts to education certainly fueled at least some of the 64 percent approval that this tax increase received.
Of course, the state’s education funding would have been in worse condition without the tax increase, but now, by planning to cut even more state funding to universities, our legislative leaders will tell us how they warned us beforehand that a tax wouldn’t do any good.
Some people consider Proposition 100 Gov. Jan Brewer’s most selfless promotion of legislation. By supporting a tax increase in this state, she took a chance, and while it garnered less media attention, it was the more surprising of her two great political successes last spring.
But aside from this one instance, we haven’t seen elected officials care about education. Our best hope at this point seems to be that we can elect officials who surprise us by supporting the state’s education, but it’s impossible to know who that is beforehand, and the chances aren’t worth putting any money down.
It’s time to start educating yourself about candidates running for office this November. Even if you didn’t make yesterday’s deadline for voter registration, you should still research candidates, reach out to them, and help them tell other people that we can’t afford to cheapen our education.
With higher tuition, less available financial aid and the loss of thousands of teachers statewide, the educational process is being threatened.
This affects not only K-12 education and college students, but the recovery of our economy.
With a tuition increase of about 20 percent this year for incoming freshmen, the incentive is reduced to pursue a degree and become educated enough to solve the problems our generation is bound to face in the future.
