Higher ed officials altering their quest for funding

OGDEN — With feelings of being "irrelevant," public higher education officials are changing how they approach the Legislature for money.

In a meeting Thursday with the Utah Board of Regents, Utah Commissioner of Higher Education Rich Kendell put the main problem in the simplest terms.

"If you want to grow, I think you're going to have to do it with tuition — or find another source," he told regents.

The trend is this: Every year the regents go to lawmakers with a request to fund enrollment growth. They get little or no money. Schools are left to find "creative" ways to fill the funding gap.

Now, the thinking is that regents won't even approach the 2005 Legislature with a request to fund all the new students entering the system or even to make up for the 7,000 or so new students that lawmakers have been unable to fund in recent years.

The idea is to let tuition increases handle growth, which could mean 10 percent tuition hikes every year for the next five years.

Then the focus of regents becomes increasing efforts to preserve or improve the quality of a public higher education by mining for state monies to fund staff and faculty compensation increases and several key education initiatives.

That's just part of the metamorphosis of the governing body for public higher education. Among its ranks are those who don't like what they see.

"We're really becoming a taxing authority, I think," regent David Grant said.

It's Grant's perception that the regents have become "enablers" for the Legislature, which he says gets to avoid raising taxes to fully fund higher education while regents approve tuition hikes year after year.

The fear among regents and school presidents is that lawmakers might be starting to think that Utah's 10 public institutions can fund enrollment growth on their own "in perpetuity."

The fiscal grousing doesn't stop there.

College presidents stood before regents Thursday and made their best pitches for their highest building priority, with more than $200 million in total capital needs to consider.

Rising to the top was the University of Utah's Marriott Library, which the regents adopted as their top priority, requiring nearly $50 million in state tax funds. Today the State Building Board will consider a list of nine higher education projects before finalizing its own priority list.