Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 4 March 2009 | Nature 458, 14-15 (2009) | doi:10.1038/458014a
News
Public universities left reeling by recession
Slumping state revenues are putting US public universities under pressure. Rex Dalton reports on how one institution is coping.
Tucson, Arizona
At the University of Arizona in Tucson, the weekly finance cabinet meeting now resembles a council of war. Under the watchful eye of Hopi warriors in a painting, president Robert Shelton and other top administrators try to plot a course through financial and political landmines.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email webadmin@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
I am amazed that governments have failed to identify university funding as a form of economic stimulus. We are constantly being told that the economy of the future will be knowledge-based. Doesn't it make sense then to put money meant to stimulate the economy into institutions, such as colleges and universities, that are developing the new knowledge through research and training as opposed to pumping it into industries that have rely on unskilled labour and will move to wherever the lowest labour costs can be found. The money that state and provincial governments put into universities ultimately comes back to them in the long run anyway: university graduates have higher average earnings and thus pay higher taxes than individuals who have not completed post-secondary education.
This article paints a very accurate picture. However, this is only part of the story. Not only are the University administration in the "war room", but the faculty and even the students are being dragged into this as active participants. As a graduate student at the UA, the student committees I serve on have been in crisis mode since last year, and we are having to learn how to play politics in order to keep our pay, our health insurance, our TA-ships, and our labs!! My advisor is junior faculty, yet he's been in day-long budget meetings almost every week. This is not something we should have to deal with, and it is affecting the quality of teaching and education. I fear the sacrifices that future students will have to make in order to get a mediocre education at a once-great institution because all of the quality has been chopped out just to keep the doors open.
In 2006 according to the sourcebook.governing.com: Arizona ranked 46th (tied with two others) in per capita percentage of personal income spent by state and local government on higher education. http://sourcebook.governing.com/subtopicresults.jsp?ind=633 The good news is that we beat Tennessee and Missouri! But heck, we don't mind pouring money into prisons. In the same year, Arizona was 10th in the nation in the percentage of personal income spent by government on prisons. http://sourcebook.governing.com/subtopicresults.jsp?ind=602 Remember this was 2006 when we had a relatively decent economy and moderate Democratic Governor who tried to balance the budget and fight the Republican legislature on their insistence on slashing education. Now with a Republican governor, does anyone want to guess what the real numbers are for 2008 or 2009? My prediction for 2009 is that we drop to 49th on higher education spending and move up to 3rd or 4th on per capita prison spending as a percentage of income. I think we should change the state motto to: Come to Arizona: For the incarceration vacation of a lifetime! or Arisona! no edukation: lotta prisons! Time for all intelligent people to flee Arizona before we become a "failed state".