Pawlenty: Still pulling the ladder up

When Gov. Tim Pawlenty ran for reelection in 2006, one of the more effective and abiding themes used against him by his most formidable challenger, Mike Hatch, was the governor’s hypocrisy in the matter of funding higher education. Noting that a key part of Pawlenty’s “regular Joe” biography included his account of putting himself through college at the University of Minnesota, Hatch cited the skyrocketing tuition costs both at the U and throughout the 32-school MnSCU (Minnesota State Colleges and Universities) system as a result of budget cuts and stingy allocations from Pawlenty. The accusation that Pawlenty “pulled the ladder of opportunity up behind him” became an indelible part of Hatch’s stump speech during the campaign. A defensive Pawlenty finally responded with a budget-busting proposal that all Minnesota high school students in the top quarter of their class be provided a year’s free tuition.

But now that Pawlenty has secured his second term and that no-tuition gambit is a distant memory, he’s back to his old tricks. Campaigning for John McCain in Michigan in mid-January, the governor was able to promote his “son of a milk truck driver, put myself through school” schtick to a wider audience, one that will expand further still when he delivers it on a national stage at the Republican convention this September. Meanwhile, his fiscal policies continue to put the screws to higher education. 

Continued: Click “Read more”Recommendations for capital budget funding — commonly known as the bonding bill — for this legislative session reveal a striking gulf between the governor and the Legislature over how much to allocate for construction and renovation in the MnSCU system. The House is recommending $208 million, the Senate $200 million — and the governor less than half that, at just $99 million. Indeed, capital funding for MnSCU accounts for a large majority of the $140 million disparity between the governor’s bonding bill recommendations and what the House and Senate have passed through their chambers. (A House-Senate conference committee has been chosen and will soon begin meeting — probably next week — to hammer out the minor differences in their bills so they can send the legislation to the governor.)

Along with undercutting the House and Senate on the fundamental maintenance needs for MnSCU (in a line item known as Higher Education Asset Prevention and Replacement, or HEAPR), the governor recommends funding only six of the 37 specific projects on MnSCU’s list. By contrast, the House and the Senate provide funding (albeit less than MnSCU requested) for all 37 proposals.

“There is not too much new stuff in what we requested — it’s almost all classic bricks and mortar renovation and repair of existing spaces,” says Al Johnson, MnSCU’s associate vice chancellor for facilities.

The governor’s capital budget recommendations for the U of M total $129.3 million, much closer to the Senate ($134 million) and House ($136 million) bills than he was on MnSCU. However, the governor’s recommendations omit authorization for constructing more buildings in the biological sciences complex, a project regarded by U officials as vitally important not only to their future reputation and efforts to recruit quality faculty in the field, but to the state economy as a whole.

“It is absolutely a cornerstone, for us and for the state,” says Richard Pfutzenreuter, the chief financial officer at the U. “Minnesota has a comparative advantage over other states in this area. The biomedical industry is especially strong in this state, beginning with Medtronic, and as a result we have brought other companies like Coloplast [who relocated from Marietta, Ga.] into our economy. So the complex is absolutely complementary with the Minnesota economy.”

Pfutzenreuter says that funding this ambitious project will be undertaken in a manner very similar to the U of M stadium financing — which Pawlenty supported — with little upfront money required in the first five years, and afterward anywhere from $15.5 million (if you follow the House version) to $16.5 million (Senate version) required annually for the next quarter century. “I have been in the governor’s presence when he publicly endorsed the [biological sciences] proposal,” Pfutzenreuter says. “However, we haven’t heard him speak about it for many months and he didn’t include it in his capital budget recommendations, so we don’t know what to think.”

The governor is also far less supportive of higher education than most other state lawmakers in his proposals for solving the $935 million deficit in the current biennial budget. While K-12 education is specifically excluded from the governor’s cuts, he recommends that the U of M budget be axed by $27 million this year (or $54 million for the biennium) and MnSCU’s budget be cut $26.5 million. At a press conference announcing this budget solution, Pawlenty, without prompting, called out U of M officials, saying that if they need any assistance in making those cuts, he’d be happy to meet with them and offer recommendations, beginning with whacking administrative costs.

“We take his comments seriously,” Pfutzenreuter says. “We agree that when there is a problem with the state budget that the University has to be part of the solution. But we feel 4 percent [the $27 million figure] is too much, because we are just climbing out of the situation we faced with massive cuts the last time the state was in a fiscal mess [in 2003]. We are thankful that both the House and the Senate substantially reduced the amount we would be cut in their budget proposals. For the House it is $6.2 million recurring per year and for the Senate it is $5 million recurring and $10 million in one-time money.” Both better than the recurring $27 million per year proposed by the governor.

One reason the governor lit into the U of M and not MnSCU was that he claimed the latter has recently been more responsible about limiting the size of tuition increases. But getting dinged $26.5 million by the governor’s latest proposal may change that relative affordability. “For the coming year, we had planned on tuition going up just 3 percent for state university students and 2 percent for those in community and technical colleges, which would be the lowest percentage increase since 1998,” says MnSCU spokesperson Linda Kohl. “But last week, it was March 19, our board [of regents] postponed action on that schedule and delayed it to the May meeting so we can see what happens with the budget.” Asked specifically if that meant the regents were looking at boosting tuition if the governor’s cuts were enacted, Kohl replied, “It would be irresponsible of us not to look at all avenues if we had a cut of that magnitude. It is a large cut.”

Pfutzenreuter concurs. “No one denies tuition has gone up substantially since 2003″ — the year Pawlenty notoriously balanced a $4.5 billion deficit without raising taxes. “With help from a legislative bill that provided some scholarship money, we were able to lower the increase for graduate students who were Minnesota residents to just 1.9 percent this year. We hope to hold that to 4.8 percent in the second year of the biennium. But that was before these cuts were on the table. Raising tuition will be a last resort. But at $27 million in cuts, clearly everything is going to have to be on the table.”

Thus it appears that Pawlenty is once again “pulling up the ladder of opportunity” with his disinvestment in higher education. But more seriously, at a time when the state economy has fallen into recession even more rapidly than the nation as a whole, the governor’s policies may be exacerbating our ability to compete for jobs in the future. Consider these words from state economist Tom Stinson, in an interview I had with him earlier this year.

“I think we have to seriously think about tuition policy at our four-year institutions, as well as graduate school education tuition policies,” Stinson said. “When there is a large number of graduates available, getting quality people to come to the universities here may still be a challenge, but you have a larger pool of people to draw from. When the pool gets smaller, it becomes more and more difficult for local firms to recruit the high quality engineers and accountants and staff people they would like. It certainly is going to be easier to recruit someone off the campus in Minnesota than off the beach in California. So to the extent that we need to be competitive, we need to think about how we keep Minnesota-raised students in Minnesota and how we draw students from other states. Certainly, tuition policy would be one of the things to think about.”

He meant lowering tuition costs, Gov. Pawlenty. Not raising them.