It’s time for state to address funding gap, UW President Emmert says

There’s a huge difference between state funding for the UW and what our competition is getting, says President Mark Emmert, but he has a plan to help the Huskies keep up with the pack.

For years, the University of Washington has tried to raise its state funding level to match the average of peer institutions. And for years, Olympia has been sympathetic to the UW’s plight, but unable to commit sufficient funds. This coming session could be different. Instead of a budget deficit, lawmakers are looking at a budget surplus. The Washington Learns commission has come out strongly in favor of more funding for all levels of education in the state. And under the new Husky Promise initiative, the UW guarantees that low-income and even some middle-income undergraduates from Washington will never have to pay tuition. In January, the UW will present a plan to eliminate the $4,000-per-student disparity between the University and its peers. Columns Editor Tom Griffin interviewed President Mark A. Emmert, ’75, on why the time has come to close the gap.

Alumni have heard that the UW is not well funded, but most are not aware that there is about a $4,000-per-student gap between the UW and the average of its peer universities. How did that happen?

The gap has emerged over many years of underinvestment in the University of Washington. It didn’t happen because of one cataclysmic event. It occurred incrementally. It’s like scooping up a handful of sand. You’ve got this great big handful of sand in your fingers and you know it’s trickling out. You can’t see any one of those little grains of sand falling, but when you look up and then you look back down, your hands are empty. That’s what has been going on with these small, incremental losses of competitiveness. Now we find ourselves with this big yawning gap that, if not addressed, is going to have a profoundly negative impact on the University.

What does it mean to have that much less funding per student? Give me an example in a typical undergraduate’s experience.

We’re a great university now, but imagine if classes were smaller. Imagine if there were more courses for students, so they could graduate on time without as much of a challenge. Imagine if we had much better student-faculty ratios and much better advising for those students. Imagine if we had better technology for all of our students. Imagine if we could allow more of them to take advantage of the research opportunities or international studies. That’s a different kind of University of Washington. And that’s where this funding gap shows up.

You like to tell audiences about the quality of the University of Washington. Both Newsweek and The Economist magazines recently named us one of the top universities in the world. But isn’t there a disconnect between those achievements and the funding gap? How did we get so good with so little money?

First of all, it’s because we have terrific people. All of the success that we have is a function of great professors and great staff. We find ourselves, though, increasingly behind the eight ball when it comes to recruiting and paying for those faculty and staff because of that gap. Seattle once was a beautiful and relatively inexpensive city. Now it’s a beautiful city, but it’s an expensive city. When you’re recruiting someone from Madison, Wis., or Iowa City, Iowa, they look at the cost of living and go, “Oh my goodness. I can’t come here for that salary.”

The second factor is that most of the rankings are in areas where we have great success with externally funded research. That’s a good thing. But if you’re in the history department, that doesn’t help you very much. If you’re in the theater department, that doesn’t help you very much. If you’re trying to pay for advisors, that doesn’t help you very much. So we’re at risk of having two Universities of Washington: Those faculty and staff who can enjoy the benefits of external funding and those who can’t. We don’t want to have two UWs. We want to have one.

We are close to raising $2 billion in our eight-year capital campaign and we earned almost $1 billion last year in research income. Why can’t we use some of this money to close the gap?

That’s a common misperception about research funding and private donations. On the research side, that’s all money that is highly restricted. It’s being given for a very specific purpose, to do research on one project and one project alone. You can’t take research dollars that are for a cancer research program and spend them on better advising for undergraduates.

In fact, it would be illegal if you did that.

It would literally be illegal. Now when a faculty member gets a research grant, that professor will also typically have money in for undergraduates and graduates to do research with him or her. So the students get a huge benefit, but it can’t replace core funding for your academic programs.

On the fund-raising campaign, we’ve just been so wonderfully successful. Our alumni and friends have been so generous. It’s quite overwhelming. We’ve raised $1.8 billion out of a $2 billion goal. But there, too, the gifts from our donors are highly specified. A donor doesn’t come in and say here’s a million dollars, do with it as you will. That happens, but not very often. Usually they’ll come in and they’ll want to endow a professorship or a chair or a scholarship program. It doesn’t replace the state or the tuition funding. It’s that margin of excellence that moves us from being a really great university to the best.

I don’t think you’re going to get much disagreement that the UW is underfunded, but how are we going to pay for it? Can you describe the multi-year plan for getting us to the average of our peers?

What we’re trying to do with the Legislature and the governor is get agreement that the issue of funding higher education isn’t just about access. It’s not just about affordability. It’s also about quality. People don’t come to the University of Washington just because it’s cheap. They come here because they want a world-class education. It’s incumbent upon us to deliver that today and into the future. That’s what closing this funding gap is about, making sure that when you graduate from the UW you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you got as good an educational experience as can be delivered, period, no qualifications.

We have to get everyone to agree that we have this funding gap, that our peer institutions are being funded better than us, and that, if we’re going to be able to compete over the long run, we have to close that gap. We understand that $4,000 per student is a big number when you multiply it by all of our students. It’s between $120 and $150 million. The Legislature can’t possibly deal with that kind of gap in one year or one budget cycle. So we’re saying, “Let’s set a plan together that closes the gap over a multi-year period. And we do it with a combination of new state investments, new state financial aid, institutional investments in financial aid and increased tuition.”

Our strong preference is to have tuition grow at no more than the rate it’s been growing for the past four or five years. That’s about 7 percent. The state would contribute the balance to closing that gap. That’s our first choice. If the state were unable or unwilling to increase its funding as much, then tuition might have to increase more. But what we want to be able to do is lay out this multi-year plan to shrink and eventually eliminate that funding deficit. And do it in a way so that the University remains affordable to our citizens.

I was looking at the numbers. Currently in-state tuition is $5,460. Let’s say we wanted to close the gap in six years and the state gave us nothing. That would be a 12 percent increase each year.

It would be. If the state gave us nothing, then it would be a very large tuition increase. And we don’t want to do that. I am very confident that the state is not going to put us in that position. So it’s really a matter of finding that right balance between state investment and private and tuition investments. I think the governor has gotten it right through Washington Learns.

I noticed that both the governor and the Washington Learns panel have recently given the UW some strong support.

That’s right. Washington Learns recently proposed a plan to bring our per-student funding to the 60th percentile of our peers within the next 10 years. We’re fine with that approach, provided we try as hard as we can to reach the peer average within the next three budget cycles. The governor also proposed capping undergraduate tuition increases at 7 percent and to make up the remaining balance with state appropriations, which, as I mentioned, is our preferred solution. This is really an exciting development. We want to do everything we can to help get this plan enacted during the 2007 session.

What about low-income students?

One of the things that is important for our alumni to recognize is that the University of Washington has a remarkable record in accessibility to people from modest financial backgrounds. The Chronicle of Higher Education says we are third in America among similar institutions in the percentage of our students that receive Pell Grants. Pell Grants are only available to people from working-class and lower-income families. So that means that we’re third—only behind Cincinnati and UCLA—in the economic diversity of our student body. We’re proud of that and we always want to maintain this level of accessibility. We always want the UW to be available to people who come from modest backgrounds. That’s how I went to the University of Washington. This is a very personal issue with me.

In October, you announced Husky Promise, which guarantees that resident undergraduates from low-income and some middle-income families can attend the UW tuition free. It uses the same criteria as the State Need Grant program. For a family of four, if your income is $46,500 or less, you qualify.

If you come from those economic brackets, no student will have to pay tuition and fees here—ever. This is a very simple statement and commitment to the citizens of Washington that the University of Washington will always be accessible to them, regardless of their financial circumstances. I can’t think of a better investment.

If my family earns less than 65 percent of the state’s median income, I qualify. It’s a very generous plan, but does this apply to transfer students too?

Yes, it does, and it covers all three UW campuses. We expect that it will kick in next fall and cover more than 5,000 undergraduates. By the way, none of our peer universities with large percentages of low-income students offers a tuition guarantee. We’re the leader.

By the sixth year of the program, its annual costs will be an additional $1.6 million to $2.8 million. How are you going to pay for it?

It’s a classic public-private partnership, whereby public tax dollars and private gifts to the University combine to make this sort of opportunity available to students who otherwise could not afford to go to college. In the last years of our campaign, our goal is to raise an additional $100 million in endowed private scholarship support. We will be using some University funds to match these gifts as an incentive in a program called Students First. We know that we can get it done.

When you were a student here in the 1970s, the state had a statute that said students pay 25 percent of the cost of their education and we pay the rest.

That’s exactly right.

And now we’re close to, if not over, the point where 50 percent is paid by the student. Some would say that’s crossing the line. In a sense we’re becoming more of a private institution than a public institution.

The public nature of the University of Washington isn’t about where the money comes from. It’s about our mission and who controls our policies. Our mission first and foremost and always is to serve the citizens of Washington. For a university of our kind and our distinction, we have a very high percentage of our students who are from Washington. We have a very small out-of-state enrollment at the undergraduate level and a very small international enrollment. That’s by design. Being public means we serve the public. And then the last piece of it, of course, is we’re controlled by regents who are appointed by the governor of Washington. We are the state’s university. We’re not a private institution and never will be.

Tell me about the accountability steps the UW is willing to take to ensure it is meeting its commitments.

It’s essential that anyone who invests in the University knows that they’re getting a great return on that investment. If the state is willing to provide us more funding, and if tuition increases, then we need to demonstrate where that money went and how it improved the quality of the experience of our students and served the state’s needs. For example, if you look at the economic mix of our campus, we need to be able to say, “We want to continue to have the UW available to kids from all economic backgrounds.” And those are data that we can gather and can track. We can show that we’re not becoming a rich kid’s school. We can point to the ability of our students to get access to classes. We can track the size of the classes that students are in. We can track the amount of advising that students get. We can point to graduation rates and the retention rates to see how students are performing.

This fall we have the most diverse freshman class in years. But for communities of color, if they see tuition going up, aren’t they going to experience sticker shock? Even if there is financial aid, won’t a lot of people just say, “I can’t afford it,” and not even try?

I worry a lot about that. One of the pieces that’s incumbent on us is to make sure that we very aggressively—much better than we’ve done in the past—communicate the financial realities of a UW education. That’s why we launched Husky Promise. We can maintain the affordability of the UW but we’ve got to communicate that to parents and to students. And we have to do it early in their high school or even middle school careers so they know that this opportunity is going to be available to them.

We also know that people already overestimate the costs. When you ask people in surveys what’s the average tuition at a public university in America, four years ago they said it was $10,000 when in fact it was $4,000. So they already think it’s higher than it is. Husky Promise will, for thousands of our students, simply take this issue off the table. Then when we say there are all these other ways in which we can provide you with scholarship aid and financial aid and work-study aid, then students quickly realize they can come to the UW. The piece of it that, frankly, frightens away first-generation students, and especially students of color, is loans. They’re really adverse to taking out student loans. That’s something that we have to minimize.

The legislative session starts in January. What should our alumni do to educate themselves on these issues?

We hope our alumni and friends of the University will communicate to their local legislators and the governor’s office that they want greater support for the UW. This funding gap has to be closed if the UW is going to continue to do the wonderful things that it does for Washington. We need their help.