PRAISED GOALS / MISPLACED BLAME

Reader Comment    By Jon Marc Taylor  Bio/Address

"Our nation is grappling with a college cost crisis that is threatening to push higher education out of reach for low-income and middle-income students," states Rep. Howard "Buck" Mckeon (R-CA). "This is unacceptable," pontificates the chairman of the House subcommittee on higher education.¹ A noble sentiment that is myopically addressed.

In typical symptomatic buck-passing, Mckeon has again (trying since at least 1998)⁸ introduced a section in the Affordability in Higher Education Act that Ignores the essential cause of the crisis and instead would establish a "college affordability index" as the Commissariat’s central planning solution. This index would co-spare a school's tuition increases to the period's Consumer Price index (CPI).

Institutions' tuition and fee increases that more than doubled the CPI rate would have to design plans to reduce the increases, or would be placed on "collage affordability alert" status (id est double secret probation). Those colleges and universities that fail to improve their ratios would become ineligible for federal work-study and other various campus-based financial aid grants for their students.¹

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America incarcerates more than two million people, a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world. Correspondingly, the United States spends more on prisons than on the Department of Education, Environmental Protection Agency and foreign aid (i.e. excepting the Iraqi package).²

For the past twenty years, prisons have been the fastest growing budget item, out racing even Medicare and Medicaid.³ During the 1980s, state-level spending on corrections increased 95 percent, while higher education endured a 6 percent decrease.⁴ By 1999, the U.S. spent more building cell blocks ($2.6 billon) than constructing college classroom ($2.5 billion).⁶ "Higher education," simply put has been "the prime cash cow for state budgets," comments Steven Gold, director of the Canter for the Study of the States.

Congress has had a significant hand in stimulating this growth with the 1995 Crime Bill providing $10 billion in prison construction funds to the states. For every one of these federal gulag greenbacks, however, the states had to spend $3 to $5 of their own money. Construction, though, represents only 6 percent of a prison's total lifetime cost, with the remaining operating expenses having to be financed from state revenues. Moreover, to receive this largesse states had to acre than double the amount of time their prisoners serve behind bars, thus more than doubling their greatly expanded operating budgets as well.⁸

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Nowhere has this trend been more evident than in Rep. McKeon's California. Since 1980, Buck's state spent $5.6 billion constructing more prisons to incarcerate more people than any other state.⁹ From 1984 thru 1994, the Golden State built 21 prisons and only one new university, funding this prolific growth with a 209 percent increase in the prison budget, compared to an anemic 15 percent (less than the rate of inflation) increase in state university allocations.¹⁰

From 1990 to 1997, the share of the state university systems' budget shrank by a third, from 12.5 to 8 percent. Predictably, the penal portion of the budget more than doubled from 4.5 to 9.4 percent, a near identical gain to higher education's loss.¹¹ The result of the prison building binge is that tuition at California universities have rocketed upward⁷ and the state has sunk to 46^th in higher education funding among the states.¹²

"What happens in California it used to be said," ominously presaged columnist Anthony Lewis, "is a preview of what happens to all of America."¹³

The same relationship is demonstrated in the sidebar charts chronicling the states' with the highest public collage tuition increases compared to their allocations between higher education and prisons from 1985 thru 2000. Overall, for these ten diverse states, they increased prison spending six and half times more than what they devoted to their universities.

This shift in relative decreasing state support has made it virtually impossible for state university systems to improve the availability and quality of academic programs. In order to offset the reductions in state appropriations, higher education administrators have increasingly hired less expensive (and concomitantly experienced) part-time faculty, expanded class sizes, cut programs. Halted enrollment, and, above all, significantly increased tuitions.¹⁵

"Two pots of money fund public colleges and universities — the state and students," observes Travis Reindl, policy analyst with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). "What you don't get from one you pull from the other."¹⁶ The association goes on to report that tuition increases at public colleges matches losses in state allocations" almost dollar for dollar."¹⁷

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"It is unfair to hold campuses responsible to decisions they don't •make," the AASCU issued in a recent statement.¹

Political decisions at the national and stats levels have dictated the prodigious growth of prison populations and in the rise of college tuitions. The majority of criminologists across the spectrum cite rainy reasons for the downturn in crime rates, with only one of them being the unprecedented use of imprisonment.¹⁹

"These findings," states Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project, "debunks the popular belief that Imprisoning more people single handedly has led to historic drops in crime."¹⁹ Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Justice Policy institute observes "there is no credible link between crime rates and incarceration rates."²⁰ Yet there is an irrefutable link between increasing prison budgets and escalating tuition fees.

To shift the burden of an increasingly punitive penal policy onto the shoulders of higher education administrators and students is misplacing the blame for the greatest social engineering project in American history: the prison-industrial complex.⁸ "If sanctions are warranted," the AASCU iterates, "they should be imposed upon policymakers, not upon campuses struggling to provide financial assistance to students."¹

JON MARC TAYLOR is a Missouri prisoner, whose doctoral dissertation analyzes the relationship between correctional spending and higher education.

Jon Marc Taylor DOC No 503273

Crossroads Correctional Center

1115 East Pence Road

Cameron, MO 64429

816-632-2727 / H.U. 5

SOURCE: The Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board Nascimento and Laird (2003)

SOURCE: National Association of State Budget Officers (1987; 2001)

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