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Nevada undercuts its future with budget cuts in higher education
Sunday, March 14, 2010 | 3 a.m.
When the special session of the Nevada Legislature ended two weeks ago, the budget for the Nevada System of Higher Education was reduced by another 7 percent. Before our faculty and students had time to express our appreciation that the cuts were not much worse, we began to learn exactly which colleges, programs and positions were slated for elimination, and it took our breath away.
At UNR, our total operating budget has been reduced by 13 percent over the past two years, while our enrollments continued to rise. The first two rounds of our cuts applied to administrative and support functions, and now we are weighing proposals to close the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources, shrink the College of Education, eliminate the French, German and Italian programs, and end many graduate degrees, among other things. These proposals must be reviewed by the faculty and approved by the president; however, if they aren’t implemented, other cuts will be proposed.
UNLV, College of Southern Nevada and other institutions have taken similar reductions and will be making similar decisions. The state’s contribution to the Nevada System of Higher Education budget has fallen by a third over the past two years. Increased student tuition and federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money have filled about half that hole.
There has been much hardship in Nevada and around the globe as a result of this recession (which I have argued elsewhere is technically a depression). After rising by an annual average of 9 percent over the previous 15 years, personal income in Nevada has dropped by 6 percent since the end of 2007, more than twice the decline of any other state.
Good people have lost their jobs as people have stopped spending, unemployment remains high, and the bad effects cascade. The Legislature did the best it could in a bad situation, and nobody thinks the state should be immune from cuts.
Before you assume I am just whining, let me explain that although I feel terrible for my colleagues, I am more concerned for the rest of us, and for our state. Our faculty are smart, productive people, and most of those whose departments are eliminated will land on their feet. In fact, some of them, especially those who bring considerable research money into Nevada, are being recruited by universities in other states.
So why do we need public universities in the first place? Free markets are wonderful at giving more to those who already have, and private universities such as Harvard and Stanford are among the best in the world. But as my colleague Maureen Kilkenny, a respected economist in a department slated for elimination, says, “markets can do nothing for people with nothing.” For those who lack education, skills or family wealth, the free market offers little hope for improvement. By paying taxes to provide education, we help to level the playing field.
Universities provide the best education to students because most of their faculty actually create knowledge. The more people learn, the more capable they are to make good decisions and find good jobs, and the easier it becomes to turn hard work into a better life. Those who become educated usually earn more, and contribute in turn to the revenue necessary to run the state and educate others.
Other states have a large number of private universities, which on average pay their faculty roughly 20 percent more than public ones, spend significantly more per student, and serve a larger share of those who already have. These same states make more significant investment in their public universities.
As a share of national income, higher education spending in the United States tripled from 1960 to 2005, rising to 2.9 percent of our total national income. Higher educational enrollments rose almost as fast. The number of degrees conferred grew almost fourfold, relative to population, and the share of graduate degrees doubled. This accumulation of human capital is one of the reasons our national economy has done so well over the long run.
How does Nevada compare? In 1985, the total Nevada System of Higher Education operating budget was about 0.63 percent of our gross state product. By 2008 B.C. (before the cuts), this ratio peaked at 0.65 percent, still the lowest share for higher education in the country.
When these cuts go into effect, this ratio will be at its lowest level in several decades. College enrollments have been a flat share of Nevada’s population over the past couple of decades, while the share of college enrollments increased for the country as a whole. The lead that other states have over us is widening.
It takes money to make money, but in the midst of this budget crisis, we are not making good investments. We are cutting colleges, classes, positions and salaries. It will hardly be a surprise when we discover our most productive people have gone elsewhere, and our students have received a poorer education.
Unless they have little need for skilled labor, businesses that may have considered moving to Nevada will surely change their minds, because a good education system is an essential component of their quality of life.
Elliott Parker is professor of economics and chairman of the Faculty Senate at UNR. This commentary is adapted from a version that appeared in the Nevada Appeal.
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Actually the budget was reduced by much less than that. The state's general fund appropriation is only half of all state appropriations to higher education. State appropriations to higher education make up about half of all revenues for UNLV and UNR.
As it turns out, this is the first year in many years in which NSHE has taken an actual budget cut - meaning they'll have less to spend this biennium than in the last. Nevertheless, they still have more money than they did in 2005-07 during the height of our boom - a time when UNLV was spending over $16,000 per pupil (about $9600 going toward student related expenses) and UNR spend over $30,000 per pupil (about $15,000 going to student related expenses) and neither university was able to graduate more than 50% of its students after 6 years.
Obviously the spend more money policy hasn't worked.
And who cares if higher ed spending is a small portion of the GSP - that is a red herring. Nevada ended up as one of the wealthiest, fastest growing states, with one of the lowest poverty rates.
I also take issue with the view that markets do nothing for people with nothing. This is a nonsensical view. We only need to look at countries that started out with nothing and ended up with something and compare those to countries that started out with nothing and ended up with nothing.
Countries that have little to nothing today don't have a real market based economy based in sound property rights and the rule of law. Dr. Parker knows this, or at least he should.
The problem is that higher education is unresponsive to the market - it is a bureaucratic mess that is resistant to some much needed change.
If anything, higher education is great at giving those with something MORE. Not only do we have to look at the research professor pay but we can also look at the low-income student graduation rate. Higher education has become a wealth transfer scheme - we rob the poor to pay the PhD.
Markets in education work Dr. Parker, just check out the work of Dr. James Tooley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Toole...
He's found that in some of the world's poorest nations poor parents are paying to send their kids to private schools. Private schools that are mostly shacks compared to the public schools and those private schools are doing a better job educating kids than the public schools.
Markets work.
Watch this video about Dr. Tooley's latest book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c57DXtbb...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b1JbOYqf...
Hey look! Patrick is working on a Sunday. Does that count as overtime? 3 cut and paste posts = ?? $
How about we leave the forums for concerned citizens rather than paid lobbyists?
Unlike government employees I don't get paid overtime. Nor do I get paid to do this. I do this because I believe people should be informed by proper information. Frankly, I'd do this regardless of who employed me - it is fun.
Next time, try engaging the arguements. We need more civil discussion and less partisan wing-nuttery in Nevada.
As Nevada has killed the worthwhile high tech jobs offered, we need to pare back higher education and push beter highschool so the children in school now can get a job making up beds in the hotels if the economy ever comes back.
So let me see. According to Patrick Gibbons, Nevada has been throwing money at education. It seems that he also believes that high pay to university professors is somewhat a source of our state educational dilemma. To prove that we spend too much on our higher education system in Nevada, he compares it to devastated third world countries whose only direction can be up, instead of to other public university systems in our own country.
I understand that the news article, which is the focus of his statements, is about higher education, and that it was written by a university professor. Admittedly, k-12 education is a whole different thing than university education, but that 6.9% cut effects both. Just before this cut (last week) we were ranked 49th of 51 states [They include Washington D.C. as a state] in k-12 student spending. Only Utah and Arizona spend less on their students than we do. Let's take a look 9 months down the road. Speculation is that Nevada will be looking at another 50% statewide shortfall by February. I don't have much doubt that we will become 51 of 51. So lets test Mr. Gibbons' theory. When that 50% cut comes up, lets just pull all budgeting from education to fix the state's problem. Lets make public education a thing of the past, and put it on the backs of our citizens to pay their kids' way through school. Don't forget now, we have almost no poverty in Nevada because, according to Mr. Gibbons, we are one of the richest states in the union.
Pause. Deep sigh. Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that there isn't any fat to cut in our state education system. But, until Nevada separates higher education budgeting from K-12 budgeting in a real way, then k-12 and higher education will continue to fight this battle on the same playing field. Frankly, teachers are one of the lowest paid and least respected professionals in our country. If he wants to say that Dr. Parker is overpaid, then he should limit his beef to just that. Maybe he would change his tune if he spent a year in the shoes of a teacher. K-12 is where we try to get our kids ready for not just college, but the workforce as well. When there aren't any colleges in Nevada we will watch those who want a college education migrate to other states for their sheepskins. Maybe they will go off to one of Mr. Gibbons' successful third world countries to get their quality education.
My take on Gibbon's commentary is that it is just another statement about how overpaid and underworked we educators are in Nevada, trying to use his version of "marketing" success stories from impoverished countries as proof. I take his comments as another slap in the face to all who work in our schools, colleges and universities.
Patrick:
I am sure your employer is relieved that he is not paying time and a half for this. The market couldn't bear it.
Dr. Parker--
It does indeed take money to make money.
I agree that education is an investment, but not all dollars spent bring the same return. The expansion of the university system in Nevada is not sustainable. The good programs must be bolstered and the lesser programs tossed.
This is a small state. A quality system of higher education is an asset. A system that is large for the sake of being large is not a necessarily a better system and may prove a liability.
Skills,
I'm not sure where you get your number but the 48th or 49th ranking is often repeated and it is a mistake (in fact another 6 or so states share that same rank).
Looking at US Department of Education figures shows a different result: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/t...
And when you take it by total spending rather than current spending you get yet another rank.
And when you take either figure by the number of residents you get another rank.
Looking at Federal government numbers (and not numbers ginned up by think tanks and unions) you find that Nevada can rank anywhere from 26th to 47th in spending. Broken down further we rank as high as 1st in our debt ratio and 3rd for capital expenses.
On to the next point.
As for my comparison, I was not comparing higher ed to poverty stricken countries and their K-12 education. In fact I was devastating the main point of Dr. Parker - so it seems you missed this.
He claims that markets don't work in education and that is why we need government to provide higher education. Without this the poor suffer. But higher education only works if you first have a system of K-12 education.
Dr. Parker's point can only be true if the poor suffer when there is no government run education and the private sector cannot pick up the slack. Thus there is no better place to turn than the third world which shows Dr. Parker and Dr. Kilkenny are completly wrong. The private sector not only provides for the poor it does a better job than the public sector.
Imagine if he's wrong on something like this in the third world, it is very likely a MUCH WEALTHIER nation can do the same. In fact we already do.
Still, I'm not advocating the end of public education. Quite the contrary. Such a move would not be politically possible. That is why I advocate vouchers, tax credits, school decentralization and charter schools - aka adding market forces to a stale, backward, centralized bureaucratically controlled soviet-style command economy we call public schools.
That said, higher education will never be THAT much better if we don't first provide a better system of K-12.
Of course, higher education will NEVER get better if schools like UNR and UNLV are trying to be like everyone else which is trying to be like Harvard and MIT - schools for overwhelmingly rich and elite people.
Higher ed needs to reform to serve the needs of the people, not the needs of the PhD. It won't reform the way it is structured now as it is simply a self serving special interest group at the moment (albeit one that is altruistic in its endeavor to serve others).
Finally,
I said nothing of overpaid professors though certainly some are. The problem with education is that the special interest groups have made this labor intensive when that is completely unnecessary (it has become a jobs program for adults, rather than an institution of learning and education of students).
As for being in a teachers shoes - I was a teacher, high school history and special education.
By the way, the average teacher pay and benefits in Nevada comes to $72,000 for the year (salary is $53,000). I hardly call that underpaid. See for yourself, http://www.doe.nv.gov/SchoolFunding/DSA_...
Turi,
The problem is that some investments yield no more returns the more money you put into them. We may have already reached that point with education. its not about spending more money but using the money we already spend more effectively.
In fact, that is why Dr. Richard Vedder of the University of Ohio has found a statistical relationship between high spending on higher education and low economic growth - if there is a causal relationship it means that spending more money on higher education is a worse investment than letting the money work its way through the private sector - it means we don't get any extra benefit from the investment but it does mean we kill jobs and wealth.
I am sorry not to have enough time to respond to each and every point Mr. Gibbons has made. I am glad he enjoys his job so much he is willing to spend most of his Sundays blogging. I was watching my daughter play LL baseball.
The state-funded operating budget for UNR peaked at $197 million in the 2008-2009 fiscal year, including student tuition and other sources in the total appropriation. This fell to $172 million for FY2011, including federal stimulus money and increased tuition, a 13% drop.
The state's portion fell by 19%, from $144 to $116 million. For all of NSHE, it fell from $684 million to $466 million, a decline of 32%. Adding back in student tuition and federal stimulus money, it fell from $886 to $779 million, about 12%.
Our student FTE was 12,500 (and our headcount closer to 16,000). Divide this into $197 million, and you will get a number half of what Mr. Gibbons reports. Of course, you could double it by using the biennial amount, or you could toss in the Medical School, Cooperative Extension, and everything else the university does. Heck, you could even toss in the externally-funded grants we work on, the patients the Med School sees, the cost of residential halls and other self-funded budgets, and our capital construction budget, and you can make it look really big. But it wouldn't be any more accurate.
Finally, does Mr. Gibbons really mean to argue that public higher education is a bad investment? Wow.
Higher ed isn't necessarily a bad investment but it looks like spending more money on higher ed is a bad investment. Just look at the growth of NSHE's budget in the last few years. In the first 8 years of the decade it grew at a rate that was 3 times higher than inflation.
What were the results? If you are spending more money and producing nothing extra that isn't a good investment.
More importantly, ask the students.
The cuts are for the remainder of the biennium so taking it as a biennial budget, or a budget for the next 16 or 17 months is appropriate. I'm glad you didn't forget the big federal stimulus program.
I hope you enjoyed your little league, I know I had fun coaching my nephew's football team.
PS, I think it is more accurate. If you are going to complain about budget cuts that MAY threaten grant funding you simply can't divorce grant funding from your budget when it suites a political need. It gives the appearance that you (or others) want to make the budget cuts look bigger than they really are.
Dear Patrick,
Glad you got out yesterday. I was just amazed at how many posts you made on my column, and wondered where you found the time. My daughter's team won, but she was 0-for-3 and not a happy 8-year-old even though she did well at pitcher and first base.
The budget cuts are not hypothetical, and there is no need to make them look bigger. But your $30,000 per student number obviously has some sort of kitchen sink thrown in. I know that you have included grant funds in the past, to make the Governor's proposed cuts seem smaller, so I was guessing you might be including them again.
Yes, of course the rise in higher education budget was faster than inflation, especially from 2003 to 2008, but our enrollments grew pretty fast in the years prior, and there is a lag effect, as our next budget is built on our past enrollments. If you look over the long-term, however, and don't just pick your starting year strategically, the trend is very different, especially if you remember that we compete with other universities across the country, and when incomes goes up, we have pay more too to get good people.
Your comparison of public vs. private education in less-developed countries is nagging at me, because I think you may be confusing cause and effect. These countries are poor, in part, because they have weak public education systems, and weak government in general.
Successful economies depend predominantly on private markets, but in all successful economies the private sector requires an underpinning provided by the public sector. Somalia is the archetype of a pure free market economy. Markets work best when government works too.
Yes, too much government can be bad, but Nevada is so far away from that amount it is not even worth debating.
Could we do things to make public education more efficient? Sure, though it is harder than you think. But how to you get from there to becoming an apologist for dramatic cuts to education?
Elliott Parker
One fallacy is that we need higher education to keep people "in our state". Boston has 35 colleges within commuting distance of downtown. Not ITT Tech schools, real schools.
I found that they were filled with out of state students, many from the New York/New Jersey area. Do you think they'll end up in Massachusetts after graduation? No, the loudmouth know-it-alls will go back to their nests. Good, go back.
My point is that even if we funded UNLV and UNR fully, there is a thing called "finding a job". And there are few jobs here. The graduates will have to relocate to survive. No jobs in the Silver State unless you're a busty cocktail waitress or like parking cars.
"And that's the way it is". RIP Walter Cronkite.
Dr. Parker,
I don't want to sound rude but your comments sound more like hyperbole than fact. Somalia is not a free market economy; it is a failed state - a failed socialist state I might add. Please do not characterize free markets this way (I'd like to think you're more rational than Krugman or Stiglitz - two other people who should know better).
As for UNR, the cuts were a portion of a portion of a portion of overall spending and were in no way devastating -- especially since higher-ed has grown 3 times faster than the rate of inflation during a decade when we made dramatic technological advancements in delivering low-cost education online. Yes enrollments grew but 1) why should this increase costs when labor saving technology can lower costs and 2) the biggest growth was actually in the lower cost community colleges.
UNR spent over $30,000 per pupil. About $14,900 was student related and only about $11,600 was instructional related. You can check the data here; http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.a...
I think your assertion about the importance of the public sector is overstated -- this might be because you see market externalities everywhere. Government has its role, certainly, but it is outperformed by extremely low-cost private schools because there are government externalities too. The reason is that these government schools are bureaucratic, centrally controlled, and unresponsive to market accountability.
Instead of having a soviet command economy for public education, why not run public schools like entrepreneurial shops? Give them control over their own funds and make them compete for students by allowing parents to choose the school (and thus where the funding goes).
There is a big reason why India has remained so poor for so long. Big bureaucracies strangled economic growth and the result was to keep poor people poor. The reality is, if you have nothing, the then the free market and property rights is exactly what you need to give you a chance to get out of poverty. A bureaucratic government isn't going to help -- never has. (Those African countries also have poor property rights and no matter how much education you give them, they won't succeed without real meaningful property rights).
PS, leaving K-12 education with millions more than the last biennium is hardly a dramatic cut. Reducing higher-ed funding levels to 2005-07 isn't dramatic either. The reason it seems dramatic might be because education hasn't had to face any real cuts at all and therefore have had no incentive to make adult decisions on how best to use the scarce resources that are available to us all.
To make a long story short, Dr. Parker, you said, "For those who lack education, skills or family wealth, the free market offers little hope for improvement." This is either true or it is not.
I turned to the poorest place on the planet where your point, if correct, should have been easily proven. These people are so poor, we should assume, that they couldn't possibl afford a private education. Thus, as your theory suggests, the public school would be the great equalizer. Your statement is not correct because as you can see, the free market is actually providing and doing a better job than the free public schools -- sometimes for as little as $1 a week.
Even turning to America, how well are our public schools doing? We have 180% more money per pupil today than 50 years ago but less than half of our low-income kids can read at grade level in the fourth grade.
The free public school is failing the poor - and its not from lack of spending. It fails because it has a distinct lack of market based incentives to keep it efficient and hold it accountable.
A wonderful article by Dr. Peterson of Harvard: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...
Twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter saw it another way. In his view, it is in the nature of markets that middling firms are "creatively" destroyed by good firms, which are themselves eventually eliminated by still better competitors. Ignoring this basic economic principle, critics of charter schools and other forms of school choice see no hope for competition in education. These critics ask us to leave public schools alone apart from creating voluntary national standards--speed zones without traffic tickets, as it were.
Yet few doubt that public schools today are troubled, as the president noted on Saturday. What the president left out is that the performance of American high school students has hardly budged over the past 40 years, while the per-pupil cost of operating the schools they attend has increased threefold in real dollar terms. If school districts were firms operating in the market place, many would quickly fall victim to Schumpeter's law of creative destruction.
Blah blah blah
Get rid of tenure
Get rid of professors who do not teach
Get rid of the write for money scheme that is the textbook sabbatical money machine
I could reform education in 5 minutes by simply firing all the soft arts professors and sending all basic courses to Phoenix University on line....
The university needs to teach hard science and get rid of all athletic and soft subject professors......
You want to be an artist? Learn engineering and learn artistry skills on your own time.....classic artists were mostly engineers who dabbled in other things....that is why they did not turn out useless crap like we see today...
THEN
Sell off the land and buildings
Dear Patrick,
A failed state is, by definition, one without a functioning government, which should be libertarian nirvana, as I remember my Nozick. Once you need a state to define and enforce private property rights, you admit the need for a legal system, courts, police, and even national defense. Private markets cannot provide this because it is a classic free-rider problem: the person who benefits most from catching a crook is the next victim, not the last one.
But now you are on an ideological slippery slope, because you are admitting the potential existence of externalities and public goods. What about roads, technological infrastructure, education, banking regulation, vaccination, or social insurance? Private interests don't always align with public ones, and one doesn't have to be a loony-tunes Marxist to admit that the state can actually benefit us, though one could not work for the NPRI.
You speak of bureaucracy and the misincentives of those spending other people's money, and of course you are right that the state has these problems. But the private sector has these problems too. What caused the financial crisis but too-big-to-fail private bankers spending other people's money for their own benefit?
Do I think externalities and other market failures are common? Absolutely. But I think in most cases they are outweighed by public failure, the problem of having government come up with better outcomes. I am a pro-market economist. The difference between you and me is that I would use the word "most" while you would say "all." Inefficiency is present in most human organizations, and sometimes the inefficiencies of the private sector outweigh the inefficiencies of the public sector.
[to be continued]
[continued from prior post]
Markets are systems of exchange. Mark 4:25 says "For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away." Nowhere does this apply better than to market economies. People without education, skills, property, family, or luck can work very hard for many years and make scant progress. If we can help level the playing field, we help more people compete in a market economy by giving them something of value to sell to employers.
I believe in public universities. You obviously do not.
You use the word "elitist" to describe universities, but what is more elitist than not funding public education? Wealthy students go to private schools, while most of our students come to us because they cannot afford to go where the rich go. We try to provide them with a good education nonetheless, one they can be proud of and one that makes them more likely to stay in Nevada.
Could public education be better? Of course! Could we use private incentives to help improve it? Great idea! But it still needs public funding, regardless of how we provide it. I would support meaningful reforms, and an experimental approach that encourages Schumpeterian creative destruction (an area of my research), but your solution of cut, cut, cut does not get us where we need to be, and it makes you seem less the objective analyst and more the ideological hired gun for those who don't want to pay state taxes.
Sincerely,
Professor Elliott Parker
Dr. Parker--
I am a little confused about your vision. Can the state sustain its commitment to higher education in its current form, given the current downturn and long-term prospects for growth?
The answer is no. His idealism is obvious. His business is pushing theories. By using my tax dollar to fuel the engine of knowledge, on people who may graduate or not. It's 50/50 there.
Dr. Parker,
You've neutered the meaning of a free market. If we have can make free market so meaningless to apply it to a failed socialist state then why not apply it to the plains Indians of North America? Why not any aboriginal tribe for that matter - the very people left-wing anthropologists turn to try and prove communal societies work therefore communism can work. Thus we end up in a situation where communism is free market. You are building a straw man when you define free market.
No one here, is arguing for the absence of government or an authority to set rules for people to play by, enforce contracts, etc. I've never denied the existence of free rider problems and I never say all. You are building more straw men. Nevertheless, needing the government regulations of the commons (such as public parks or surface streets) does not give us free range to have government everywhere all the time. You and I both know the private sector can more than adequately provide rail, air, and highway transportation.
The Bible also recommends not loaning money to people to earn an interest and I believe it also talks about wage and price controls in the Old Testament -- this doesn't exactly make the Bible an authority on proper economics. Let's keep the subject on economics not religion.
Dr. Parker that is great we can send poor kids to schools. Just like in Africa and India. Poor kids are going to free public schools. But these free public schools are failing kids in Africa. They are failing kids in India, and they are failing kids here in America too. That is why less than half of low-income kids in Nevada can read at grade level according to the NAEP 4th grade reading exam. Sending kids to free schools is not the end goal -- educating them is. And frankly, how well does UNR do at graduating low-income kids? How many low income kids graduate from UNR and end up with jobs they would not have otherwise been able to get? I'm not looking for anecdotes, I want raw numbers please.
Simply put, having a big heart and wanting to help people isn't good enough. You've got to look at outcomes, something you'd rather not do because it seems you'll put ideological preferences ahead of them.
As for even suggesting I'm a hired gun is the type of comment I'd expect from someone in a soft science from a qualitative academic department or some constructivist or a left-wing nut, not from you. That is a logical fallacy to the core and you know that. Attacking people's motives does not dismiss any point I've made and frankly I can make the same accusation against you or anyone else -- paid government worker looking out for his own job and not the best interest of his students. True or not, that wouldn't get us anywhere.
My point is not just to cut (suggesting that is all I advocate is yet another straw man) but reform. We've drastically increased spending across all fronts in education. There is no reason to believe that with the proper incentives we can do more with less. If UNLV and UNR can't take a 3 percent reduction in spending and do just as good a job or better then that says a lot about the competence of the leadership in Nevada's system of higher education.
Simply put, having a big heart and wanting to help people isn't good enough. You've got to look at outcomes, something you'd rather not do because it seems you'll put ideological preferences ahead of them.
As for even suggesting I'm a hired gun is the type of comment I'd expect from someone in a soft science from a qualitative academic department or some constructivist or a left-wing nut, not from you. That is a logical fallacy to the core and you know that. Attacking people's motives does not dismiss any point I've made and frankly I can make the same accusation against you or anyone else -- paid government worker looking out for his own job and not the best interest of his students. True or not, that wouldn't get us anywhere.
My point is not just to cut (suggesting that is all I advocate is yet another straw man) but reform. We've drastically increased spending across all fronts in education. There is no reason to believe that with the proper incentives we can do more with less. If UNLV and UNR can't take a 3 percent reduction in spending and do just as good a job or better then that says a lot about the competence of the leadership in Nevada's system of higher education.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQoSoFD5b...
The University of California at Irvine was awarded $42 million in stimulus money to fund different research projects and, in one case, $2 million to "stimulate student interest in mathematics and computer science." Was that a good use of scarce public dollars?
To learn more, Reason.tv's Paul Feine spoke with UC-Irvine economist Richard McKenzie who, a year ago, predicted that the stimulus package wouldn't work.
(why? We rob the productive sector of the economy to pay the less productive - including robbing the poor to pay the PhD).
Why is it that no one here grasps that higher education is not education
It is a waste of resources and time for the unfortunates we send to these mills
It promises things it can never deliver
"The first two rounds of our cuts applied to administrative and support functions, and now we are weighing proposals to close the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources, shrink the College of Education, eliminate the French, German and Italian programs, and end many graduate degrees, among other things." -- With the possible exception of the ABNR college, the programs listed don't seem to be that big of a loss, though you didn't specify which graduate programs would be affected. This would be especially true if UNLV has them covered.