Issue date: 10/22/08 Section: Opinions

Our View
Situation:	A recent study revealed that there are more college students nationally, but lagging resources reduce the quality of education.
Stance:	State governments nation-wide are having funding problems and the federal government should institute solutions.

Approximately 159,000 jobs were lost in September, marking the ninth consecutive month of job losses, according to the office of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Ma. The number of unemployed Americans rose to 9.5 million, and the number of workers unemployed for more than six months rose to 2 million. However, Kennedy told the students of Massachusetts that a college education is one of the many solutions.

"A college education is more important than ever - important to individual opportunity and important to our nation's economic health," Kennedy said on May 7. "Yet, as problems in the mortgage market have rippled through the lending industry, access to college loans is at risk."

Funny how everything goes back to loans, huh? Few solutions at any level involve increased funding, but instead aim to provide safer, larger loans to students or to cut institutional costs.

Kennedy is the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for the U.S. Senate. And while national studies are being released that show a drastic increase in high school graduates enrolling in college throughout the past 10 years, a lack of equally increasing government funding is also being reported.

The inconvenient truth (for Illinois) is that education is a state provided service and the federal government has limits on what it can and cannot do to help this educational crisis. And yes, we say crisis because the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released its 2008 Education at a Glance study that reported decreasing quality in offered educations due to a lack of increased resources.

OECD brings together governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy and is one of the largest publishers in the fields of economics and public policy, according to its Web site.

This dilemma presents an oxymoron because our national education system cannot support the jolt of students that Kennedy and other legislators say will help pull our economy back together.

So, how do Kennedy and our fellow countrymen expect us to help jumpstart the economy when we're not being adequately prepared for the real world? But then again, with the cost of education being pushed onto the students, who can blame us for taking time off school to save money?

"I've been working to ensure that all students are able to finance their education," Kennedy said. "We succeeded last year in Congress in increasing grant aid to low-income students and improving the terms of student loans, making the largest investment in college access since the G.I. Bill."

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor has also been busy as it took a lengthy testimony from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings on May 10 regarding oversight of student loans and fraud prevention initiatives.

The federal government sure seems busy with what it can do, despite not being the main financial supporter to universities and also failing to regulate real estate loan corporations.

The citizens of Illinois do not need another article critical of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, even though he is largely responsible for the current Illinois income crisis that prevents state support to dozens of programs.

Steve Brown is the spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Madigan, and he told The Daily Eastern News in July that public universities' abilities to raise tuition make them vulnerable.

"Sometimes what happens in regards to public universities is that legislators and state administrators know those schools have other sources of revenue and the (institutions) get pushed aside," Brown said.

The 2008 Fiscal year was the first time ever that Eastern's generated tuition income surpassed state appropriations. Illinois appropriated $49,189,200 to the university this year and tuition generated $49,494,000.

Brown agreed that competing programs are fighting for a limited amount of funding and that some organizations and institutions have more advocates that may be more influential than Eastern's supporters.

"This administration and governor Blagojevich feel more strongly in advancing health care then anything else and I believe he's one of those people who see that universities have elsewhere to get its money," Brown said.

Former Gov. Jim Edgar told The DEN in July that the steady increase in higher education funding broke down with former Gov. George Ryan's economic management and that no one in Springfield has taken care of the lingering issues.

But remember, the OECD concluded that this is a national trend. Congress could very well have set up a trust fund that would loan money to states that are actually experiencing economic woes.

After all, a lack of appropriations usually comes during a low point of economic activity and we are experiencing a very low point right now.

Then when states rebound, they'd pay back into the trust fund instead of granting substantial increases to its own institutions. The idea is that some states would be repaying funds when others would be in need of assistance and the cycle could therefore be self-sustaining and a one-time expenditure or multi-year savings. That expense would be a better use than the $700 billion spent on last months economic bailout bill.

That way, projected inflation could be monitored and accounted for and consistent funding would be provided instead of experiencing extreme highs and extreme lows.

Again, state governments are responsible for providing educational services -not the federal government - but tough times call for tough decisions that could be justified multiple ways.

The government tied the drinking age of 21 into the highway bill of 1984 and states could potentially lose 10 percent of its federal funding for highways if the drinking age is lowered.

Numerous types of similar legislation could be passed with clauses that expunge the trust fund or designated regulations in a certain amount of years. Several states, Texas leading the way, have explored trust funds for their own individual college systems, but the OECD study shows that all states are in need. So, why not set a fund up nation-wide.

While these types of suggestions are always argumentative through policy interpretations and jurisdictional battles, it's clear that something must be done because the national higher education front is in rapid flux.

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