Montana’s economic future depends on higher education

As a Billings Senior High School student nearly 50 years ago, I wrote an article for a school publication bemoaning the fact that so many of Montana’s best high-school athletes were going to college out of state, and how that was adversely affecting the won-loss record of Montana college teams.

By DON OLIVER
Alliance for Montana’s Future
Billings Gazette

If I were writing it today, I would be less worried about the victories on the athletic fields and much more concerned about Montana’s universities losing the best and brightest of all the students graduating from state high schools.

I would be concerned because the university system today gets no where near the level of financial support from the state that it did as recently as 10 years ago. If this isn’t remedied, the quality of Montana’s higher education is bound to suffer. As a high school senior in 1954, I was not worried about my future at the university. Today I would be.
Diminished state support

When I was a college student, the state paid 78 percent of the costs of my education at the University of Montana. Without that support I could not have afforded to go to school. Since then the price of higher education has gone up — way up — yet students now receive less than 34 percent of the cost of their education from the state. Sixty-six percent is paid by the students and their parents in tuition and fees.

I haven’t been a full-time resident of Montana for many years, so where do I get off urging the people of the state to increase the support that state government provides to higher education.

Well, I am very proud of the education I received in the Billings school system and at the journalism school of the University of Montana. I owe this state a lot and have attempted to repay it by teaching at the university, heading the journalism school’s advisory council and serving as a trustee on the board of the U of M foundation — raising private funds to help the university meet its costs.

Each of the schools in the Montana University System has a foundation and each is composed of dedicated men and women who have donated and raised millions of dollars from private sources in recent years. But at the same time, the Legislature has cut many more millions from the amount provided by the state to the Montana University System. At this point, the state of Montana pays only 16 percent of the annual operating budget of the university system.

Montana politicians, of both parties, tell me that as they rang doorbells this year, they heard time and again from parents pleading that the cost of higher education has gotten beyond their means and their sons and daughters may have to withdraw.

In a recent study of all the states, Montana ranked at the bottom in affordability of higher education.
Graduates’ higher earnings

I know times are tight and Montana’s average income ranks last, but cutting funding for higher education is not going to help solve the state’s economic woes. In fact, it will do just the opposite. Statistics show that college graduates earn $17,500 a year more than workers who complete only high school. If more and more students can’t afford to go to college or leave the state because the quality of education has declined, Montana’s economy will lose the benefit of those higher salaries.

In order for the state to work its way out of the economic mire in which it finds itself, Montana must invest more in higher education. The state can’t afford not to — even if it means tapping the coal severance tax fund or imposing a moderate state sales tax.

The future of the state depends on a quality higher education system.

Don Oliver, a member of the steering committee for Alliance for Montana’s Future, lives in Los Angeles. He graduated from Billings Senior High School and the University of Montana in the 1950s. For 30 years he was a national and international correspondent for NBC News.

Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2003/01/15/build/opinion/guest2.inc