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PHENOM Lobby Day, 4/25/07 – Points #2 (Make Higher Education Affordable) and #3 (Hire More Teachers, Researchers and Staff) Mishy Leiblum, UMass Amherst Student Trustee Our state and federal governments have failed our institutions of public higher education. As a result, our institutions have pushed costs onto our families while cutting teachers, researchers and staff. This has created a crisis in both the affordability and the quality of our public colleges and universities. According to a recent study, this year’s college freshmen are wealthier than at any point in the past 35 years, and the income gap is widening between their families and the rest of the nation. Access to education – which is supposed to be the great social equalizer – is instead driving a wedge between the poor and the wealthy. As our tuition and fees double, our federal government has shifted grants into high-interest loans, while our state has cut financial aid for students in public colleges. Today, nearly half of all of our state’s financial aid dollars in fact go to students in private institutions! Today, even the most financially-needy students in Massachusetts are left with a annual “gap” of nearly $5,000 to cover their college costs, and that is AFTER their maximum family contribution, all grants, and all loans are taken into account. Today, many students are simply shut out of higher education, while others are using unhealthy coping strategies to manage this crisis in affordability. We know these strategies because we are living them.
As a result, many of us are graduating DOWNWARDLY MOBILE, if we are able to graduate at all. These individual coping mechanisms are unhealthy for our families, and they will not solve the increasing divide between those who can afford higher education, and those who cannot. We need is a bold, collective response to this crisis, and PHENOM is our response. Yet Massachusetts students should not simply be able to afford just any college education, but the highest quality of education possible. The key to best, high-quality education is to have enough fairly paid staff and faculty. Not only should public higher education ultimately be free for all qualified residents of Massachusetts, but also it should be of the highest possible quality. Yet today, our fees are being spent on capital projects that the state should be funding, instead of on the very people who make our campuses run: our teachers, researchers and staff. Across the Commonwealth, our teachers and staff are over-worked and under-compensated. Adjunct faculty are teaching back-breaking course loads every semester, and staff are saddled with unmanageable work loads and not enough help. Our faculty and staff are overworked because our campuses have seen a decline in faculty and staff, despite steady enrollments. So while the number of staff and faculty decline, and their compensation does not keep up with inflation, workers are doing more for less money. All too often, the call for greater affordability is pitted against the call for increasing staff and faculty, but it is a ridiculous to argue that these issues are antagonistic. The argument that a gain for affordability will translate into a loss for staff, or vice versa, is manipulative and short-sighted. For so long as we look at higher education, or our state’s fiscal policies, as a zero sum game, we might as well throw our state’s economic future into the dust-bin. There simply is no better investment we can make than our state’s system of public education. Yet it is a bad investment to build a system that is affordable but understaffed, just as it is a bad investment to create a well-staffed, high quality system that only the wealthy can afford. On the topic of investment, let us look at the money issue. The G.I. Bill of Rights – which paid the full cost of college plus a living stipend for millions of soldiers returning from WW II – returned at least $6.90 in taxes and increased productivity for every dollar originally invested in the program. Today, Massachusetts spends more on prisons than on higher education. This is bad public policy! Today, we need substantial immediate relief. We need the funding gap closed, we need capital bill, we need to expand the MASSGrant financial aid program. But PHENOM stands for dramatic change. But in the not-too-distant future, we need a GI Bill for everybody. Ultimately, we need to provide FREE public higher education for all qualified residents of Massachusetts, and this education needs to be of highest possible quality. And if you think free higher education is crazy, tell that to the majority of industrialized nations who provide free public higher education for their residents. PHENOM is our collective response to the crises. And PHENOM will refuse to operate according to the belief that the only future for higher education is one of privatization and neo-liberal reform, where costs go up for students, while faculty and workers get outsourced and downsized. While today, we take this struggle to our state legislatures, this struggle will happen on our campuses, in our communities and at a federal level for years to come, as we continue to build toward a system of public higher education that our Commonwealth and our children can truly depend on.
PHENOM: Public Higher Education
413-577-4121 Survivors, Inc., (617) 298-7311 
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