Reprinted from Higher Education Matters, the online arm of the Higher Education Works Foundation
By all accounts, North Carolina is growing rapidly. We added 480,000 residents between 2010 and 2015. We passed Michigan to become the ninth largest state.
We are growing by 276 people a day, or 1,930 every week. Over the next two years, we are expected to grow by 200,000 more.
We now have 2.3 million children under 18 – 511,000 more children than the state had in 1995.
In such a burgeoning state, the demand for education is hardly shrinking.
Those 2.3 million children will need teachers, community college instructors and university degrees to compete with their counterparts in China, South Korea, Taiwan and India.
Yet the budget proposed by the N.C. Senate would reduce the state’s ability to educate those children – it would shrink the size of future budget pies.
To be sure, the Senate’s proposed budget for 2015-16 would increase state spending by 3 percent.
But the tax cuts included in the Senate’s plan would eliminate future revenue that could help educate those North Carolina children. The Senate’s proposal would reduce state revenue by $121 million in 2015-16, by $421 million in 2016-17 and by $2 billion over the next five years, according to the General Assembly’s fiscal analysts. (Emphasis in the original.)
Those cuts come at a price.
Our state’s public universities have endured $700 million in budget cuts since the Great Recession, and the budget proposed by the state House at last offers some relief:
- It would provide 2 percent raises for university faculty who’ve seen just one raise in seven years.
- It would increase investment in research that promises to put North Carolina at the forefront of emerging technologies.
- It would provide new online and competency-based learning.
- It would provide new support for beginning teachers.
But because the Senate wants to tighten the budgetary faucet, its plan would provide none of those –and it would impose yet another $18 million in so-called “management flexibility” cuts to universities.
It’s really quite clear which approach is better. The House’s plan would devote $450 million more than the Senate would to public education at all levels, $108 million of that at our public colleges and universities.
The House’s proposal looks out for those 2.3 million North Carolina children.
