This is a variation of the "school voucher" idea. It should really be called "school coupons." You know all about coupons right? They give you a discount on an item you want to buy, in this case a college education.

So here, instead of subsidizing students at the UofW, the state would give every student a coupon to go to say Pacific Lutheran U., or Seattle U, or Whitman, private colleges. And the current public U's UW, Central, Wazzu et.al, would raise their tuition to private school levels. Now poor kids who don't qualify for a full tuition scholarship would even with a coupon be priced out of higher education.

This idea sucks.

My idea, is that we give kids in Washington a full scholarship, same as we do for high school. That way we have a fully educated workforce that is not in debt to private banks for student loans. Like civilized countries in Europe, notably Finland et.al. With a proviso of you have to work in Washington for at least 5 years after graduation.

Admission is still limited by grades an test scores, but at least poor smart kids would get the most education they can.

To make the idea "suck" less the grant/coupon should be directed to state schools only. The state must offer more 4-year degrees through community colleges. The state could then allow the state universities to raise its prices.

There is an artificial competition/scarcity for high demand degrees. It is a shame and a sham to restrict the number of institutions that can offer 4-year nursing degrees.

I think this is the first time I've heard such an idea, so I don't have an opinion yet, but I do see a potential problem.

Washington, like most (all?) other states, differentiates between in-state and out-of-state tuition. The reason is Washington residents are more likely to stay in the state after graduating, and so providing lower tuition to Washington residents is good for the state's economy. Under this proposal, however, it seems that the differential would be so great as to price non-Washingtonians out of our universities. This would make it harder for Washington schools to specialize, which could crimp industries such as the software industry which need very specialized education in order to prosper.

Is my concern well founded? Does the proposal address my concern in a way that I'm not seeing?

Will this “solve” the higher education funding crisis? No, because this doesn't address the expense side of the equation. Classified employees get automatic 5% "step" increases every 12 months, these having no relation to performance, until they reach the top of their pay grades. This is in addition to any COLA the State Legislature may grant, which has been little of late. Still, this beats inflation. The "step" increase needs to be replaced with a salary increase pool that is based on gains in revenue sources and meted out based on performance, with only the highest performers reaching the highest echelons of their salary range. Second, salary surveys need to include private sector employers for generic, non-specialized positions and factor in benefits vs. educational institutions in other states with widely-different funding. Third, managers' salaries must be limited to no more than 15% over the highest staff they supervise. There are presently wide gaps that should be closed. In short, salaries need to be better controlled in educational employment, which would free up money for equipment and other supporting needs. There also should be required reporting of building usage, which I think would reveal that mid-days there is a fair amount of capacity (vs. constructing new buildings), but is generally not revealed.

If you have even a normally questioning intellect, the whole article dissolves into a mass of unproven assertions, wrong conclusions, and old chestnuts, some of which, predictably, are rotten.

For example, the article starts with the assertion that the main interest of the state is the education of students. In reality, of course, the great agricultural and mechanical universities of the land grant system were intended to provide solutions- better grain, better bridges, better aeronautics- and the solutions were to the problems of building strong agriculture and industries. The two-year schools of today are meant to supply workers for industries where a little more than a high-school diploma is needed. The real dogma of American education is that the student is well-served if they can get a job in their field.

Then we go on to the rather dubious assertion that students and their families will make the best decisions about higher ed. Aside from claiming that competition will make schools more efficient etc etc (you know the drill) no reason is offered for thinking incoming students know more about providing college educations than the people who have been doing it for decades. The choice, in any case, is one that students and parents can already make by choosing among existing state schools.

So this is a plan to, first of all, whittle the U of W down to size, and then to deliver the knock-out blow with what happens to funding for the tuition scholarships. Believe it, every year those scholarships will get smaller. There will always be a reason to trim that budget a little, or at least not increase it to track inflation.

And nobody is going to fall on their sword to protect the funding for the 25% or even 50% of high-school grads who go to college- many of whom have parents who could pay the full bill if they wanted to. Students could not work hard enough to justify in the public eye the incredible munificence of a full scholarship, and one photo of a student napping under a tree in the spring might be enough to bring the whole program down.

One thing Startz is ignoring is that when MacDonalds came to town with their golden arches, they swept the marketplace, but not with better food. And Startz is performing the same function here, pretending to be a highly qualified professor, but serving up the same old burger you've seen so often before. It's enough to shake your faith in higher education.

"one photo of a student napping under a tree in the spring might be enough to bring the whole program down."

Then why are high schools still open? We see photos of kids at high schools out playing sports in the field, napping etc. just google "high school students napping tree" and there are tons of photos.

Even if only 25% of the eligible people went to college on a full scholarship, if in some way they were required to "pay back in time" it would still be worth it. As it is now we are creating a class of peonage with ridiculous amounts of debt. If we want those parents who could pay to pay, we can always institute an income tax.

But the college coupon idea is as bad as the high school coupon idea. It's usually floated by folks who want the state to fund religious schools.

Another voucher comparison: Section 8 vouchers instead of the feds building low-income housing. Except for very limited voucher allotments for existing federal housing, vouchers require that poor people go out into the marketplace to find housing. You can guess how well that's worked out.

Without governmental funding of higher education, schools have no sticks to do anything consumer-oriented, but plenty of carrots to raise tuition/cherry-pick students/take funding from corporations to offer only corporate-approved courses.

What a great idea. The term "deregulated" in the article causes the reader to suspect--just suspect--that the author is a libertarian.

Privatizing public colleges would be a terrible direction, a scam to enable the wealthiest among us to get our public assets, turn a profit from recurring state revenue and then choose what may or may not be taught. Ugh.

I'm not against free market options to compete against better structures, but obviously an all-free (or would it be free-for-all?) market doesn't work for many lines of human endeavor that serve the public interest. One can envision diploma-mill "colleges" offering kick backs to "applicants" and our prestigious state universities getting sold off to the Rupert Murdochs of the world, a vision for a banana republic. Drown this idea in the bathtub please.

We'd get higher-quality results by imagining what we actually want as a society and look around for examples of what actually works. A fine example of what we should aspire to is provided by the happiest country in the world-- Denmark -- where the public pays for education and health care as basic human services, and just look at their quality of life: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5224306.stm

Let me get this straight--you are going to give 18 year old kids just out of high school the power through the voucher system to decide which state university gets funds or doesn't get funds. Do you really think that they have the knowledge to make these decisions at their age?

This is another one of the free-market fundamentalist theories that sounds good in theory but in reality falls apart.

Didn't we find out during the last 10-years that the Chicago school version of economics which predisposes that consumers and sellers have perfect knowledge to be inherently flawed?

In the event that you are interested there are good resources on this web site:
http://www.hecb.wa.gov/index.asp

2009-2010 statistics of tuition indicate the following share of costs between tuition and state support:

University of Washington
$10,993 per year (62% tuition & fees; 38% state funded)
Washington State University
$8,715 per year (77% tuition & fees; 23% state funded)
Evergreen State College
$11,965 per year (39% tuition & fees; 61% state funded)
Central Washington
$10,153 per year (46% tuition & fees; 54% state funded)
Eastern Washington
$9,789 per year (47% tuition & fees; 53% state funded)
Community & Technical Colleges
$6,706 per year (35% tuition & fees; 65% state funded)
[Reference: Key Facts About Higher Education in Washington, 2009-2010
http://www.hecb.wa.gov/keyfacts/index.asp]

There are some good comparisons to other states at this site.

And here is why this "proposal" is DOA.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorials/2013532898_edit29loans.html

Seattle Times ran an interesting editorial about for-profit higher education:

"For an education sector that has grown tenfold in the last decade, lax oversight has fostered a system of high tuition costs and low graduation rates."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorials/2013532898_edit29loans.html

We should predicate college funding on a race-based social-justice paradigm.

Set tuition.

White students pay 150% of the set price, receive no financial aid.
Asian students pay 100% of the set price, all but Chinese and Japanese eligible for financial aid.
African Americans pay 75% of the set price, eligible for financial aid.
Hispanics pay 50% of the set price, eligible for financial aid.
Illegal, undocumented immjigrants (and their children) pay nothing, eligible for financial aid AND other social-assistances.

That probably doesn't qualify as "radical", but there it is.

The educational process has been the subject of much comment by academics and writers. Their observations range from praise to cynicism, mostly the latter. Education is an easy target for criticism because its stated aims are often so nobly ambitious that they have little chance of being realized. It should give us pause that so many people who have made their mark in the world of ideas,
The job sector has not been at its best for a while. One of the hardest hit groups, believe it or not, is current university graduates. The joblessness rate for current grads is 50 percent over the national average. The forthcoming graduate students has less of a pay check to look toward than they would probably like.