In a guest column, a Georgia college professor criticizes the $66 million state funding decrease in higher education spending approved by the 2023 General Assembly.
Nicholas Barry Creel, an assistant professor of business law and ethics at Georgia College & State University, urges Gov. Brian Kemp to undo the Legislature’s action, which he says will set back the state’s respected higher education system and lead to larger class sizes for students.
University System of Georgia Chancellor and former Gov. Sonny Perdue has also blasted the cuts, saying, “This is an incredibly disappointing outcome, given the work done over the years by our state leaders to elevate higher education and send Georgia on a path to ascension. It will have a significant impact on institutions and the services that students and families depend on to advance their prosperity and help Georgia succeed.”
By Nicholas Barry Creel
To call the current financial picture of Georgia’s public institutions of higher learning bleak would be an understatement. Without significant and rapid action by the governor, most of the 26 member schools of the University System of Georgia will soon be forced to rely on drastic measures that will leave our students worse off and our state less competitive.
The financial woes of Georgia’s institutions of higher learning have been years in the making, largely due to the antiquated funding formula that uses a school’s enrollment from two years prior to determine its funding in the current fiscal year. As such, a dip in enrollment will cause a concomitant dip in state money, but not until two years after it hits.
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This funding decrement comes even if enrollment surges in a subsequent year, meaning a school will have to service more students with less money until funding finally increases to reflect their enrollment numbers. Given that an undergraduate student’s entire career is generally four to six years, this means somewhere between half and a third of their time at a school could be dampened by funding cuts that don’t accurately reflect the needs of the current student body.
As was true across the country, the impact of COVID-19 on Georgia’s college enrollments in 2021 was especially rough. So, given the aforementioned funding formula that awards money based on a lagged enrollment number, USG member schools were already on track for a $71.6 million cut in the upcoming fiscal year.
What’s more, this all follows a $230 million systemwide reduction in fiscal year 2021 as the state braced for the economic calamity of COVID-19. Luckily, much of that decrease was made up for with federal money in various rescue packages passed by the U.S. Congress. Unluckily, that rescue is not going to be repeated, and the state never restored us to our previous position.
Add to all of that our ballooning costs, particularly for utilities thanks to historic inflation in the price of energy, and it is easy to see why administrators at our schools see an oncoming financial tsunami of red ink headed our way. All of this is to say that now is hardly the ideal time for the Georgia Legislature to toss us a lead life jacket in the form of $66 million in new, unexpected cuts.
I’ll not recount the drama that led to the General Assembly adopting a budget that curtailed spending on higher education in a year where lawmakers were struggling to find ways to spend their unexpected surplus.
However, in a time of plenty, it boggles the mind that education spending of all things was targeted for such a drastic reduction. It is all the more curious for it to have happened in a year where that same Legislature’s budget mandated across-the-board raises of $2,000 per full-time university employee.
While I’m incredibly grateful for the raise, the second in two years we’ve been graciously granted by our Legislature and governor, I’m nevertheless in shock by what appears to be a callous cut to our bottom line. If these cuts go through, what was already shaping up to be a bad situation will be made all the worse. Many schools will likely be forced to reduce faculty, meaning class sizes will go up and the learning experience will be cheapened. Further, our schools will be forced to hike tuition to the maximum extent allowed for the foreseeable future, making college all the more unaffordable for the working and middle class in our state.
While some legislators have quipped that the University System’s “carry forward” funds could be tapped, this is highly misleading as those unspent funds are concentrated at six schools, including the state’s four top-tier research universities, and can’t be moved. Moreover, to the extent that pulling from these funds could help, draining them would prevent them from being used as they now are, as recruiting and long-term investment tools that allow our public schools to be some of the most elite in the nation. It is, very simply, not a legitimate solution.
All however is not lost, at least not yet. Our last hope to stem the bleeding from the newest wound rests with Gov. Brian Kemp. He may, with the stroke of his pen, issue a line-item veto to these cuts and restore our funding to the levels he requested when he submitted his budget to the Legislature.
I implore the governor to do just that, as the alternative would be to send us down a track where our public institutions of higher education become more expensive and less effective, a proposition I heartily believe Gov. Kemp is not inclined to accept.
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