An Economic Solution
Education is not a social issue. It is an economic one.
Investing in education is, hands down, the best forward-looking solution for our state’s and our nation’s economic hardships. Consider for a moment the role the University of Missouri plays as Columbia’s economic backbone — and what we stand to lose without the resources to maintain a quality institution.
MU employed some 13,380 people in the past academic year; that’s at the Columbia campus alone. According to the MU Fact Book, our campus pulls in an average of $1.7 million in private donations and grants to Columbia every week. In 2011, MU spent $434.8 million on job-creating programs in research enterprise and commercial services.
Among the four UM campuses, our university system generated $85 million in sponsored research and provided $23.5 million worth of unreimbursed health care services last year.
And yet MU, our state’s flagship university, remains drastically, tragically underfunded. Only in three states do schools receive less funding per student than in Missouri. Each of our neighboring states and every state represented in our new home, the Southeastern Conference, beats us in that statistic. And it’s getting worse.
In the past two years, the state has pulled more funding from higher education than from any other part of Missouri’s budget. We’ve seen a combined budget cut of more than 12 percent in the past two years, and if Gov. Jay Nixon’s State of the State plan had become reality, that figure would have been 25 percent in a three-year span. That’s a quarter of state support for Missouri’s flagship university gone in less time than it takes for a student to earn his or her bachelor’s degree.
Facing the economic headwinds
Industry in Columbia, with its focus on insurance, education and health care, should be more aware than most the importance of a college-educated citizenry.
We, as students, love Columbia. Many of us want to live here, and many of us want to work here — for you. Investment in our education is an investment in your community. It’s an investment in your ability to hire excellent employees and ultimately an investment in your success.
Columbia possesses the highest rate of degree ownership in Missouri, a fact that cannot be separated from our comparative resilience to Missouri’s economic woes (unemployment in Columbia is 4.7 percent; in Missouri, it’s 7.1 percent). Allowing our state to divest from higher education will make our city poorer, dumber and less able to face the economic headwinds.
Treating funding for education as an economic investment is an idea once heavily endorsed by U.S. lawmakers. After World War II, U.S. veterans returning home were given a golden opportunity at a partially financed college education through 1944’s G.I. Bill. In the decades that followed, the United States built a thriving middle class and raked in higher revenues in income tax as those veterans found higher-paying jobs — and performed at higher levels — than they would have without the huge investment the government had placed in their education.
MU has an unfortunately long tradition of dealing with budget cuts. Last year the UM System received less funding from the state than it received 11 years prior in 2001. Meanwhile, it educates 17,000 more students. Ours is not a question of efficiency; it is a question of math. As former interim UM System President Steve Owens put it, “It is fair to ask how long we can continue to do more with less.”
Funding rejuvenation
Missouri’s leaders pledge their commitment to education on a regular basis, but the rhetoric is not enough. We need action from our lawmakers and from our governor to show that education and the resulting potential for economic rejuvenation is still a priority in Missouri. Current decision-making from Nixon and other politicians who would see MU cut to the bone with further budget restraints only shows a view of education as the easy target in Missouri’s budget.
That’s a notion we at the Missouri Students Association have tried to dispel in the past year with our More for Less campaign for higher education funding. We brought lawmakers from both parties to campus to engage students, we sent more than 6,000 letters from students promoting our message to state legislators, and on April 26 we brought hundreds of students to Jefferson City to make the case for higher education in funding.
We were pleased to work with state lawmakers, including Sen. Kurt Schaefer (R-Columbia) and Rep. Chris Kelly (D-Columbia), in passing a budget with no cuts for university funding through the Senate and House. We were less pleased when Nixon chose to withhold a small portion of that funding, but we remain encouraged by the substantial progress made whittling cuts down from the 12.5 percent number originally proposed by the governor in January.
We look forward to working with lawmakers and Columbia’s business leaders to accomplish our goals in the future. Help us ensure education, a tried and true economic investment, remains a priority in Missouri.