State Rep. Fred Durhal, whose Detroit district includes lots of people without the means to pay college tuition, announced a big idea this week to cover college costs for any college-bound student who’s lived here five years.
Call it the Durhal Promise — sort of like the Kalamazoo Promise. Durhal’s high-minded plan would raise $1.7 billion through special lotteries and other tactics designed to avoid a general tax increase.
Its chances of passage? Just about zero.
Or, just about the same chance as another free tuition plan pitched earlier this year by State Rep. Alma Wheeler-Smith. Dubbed “MI Future,” Smith’s plan would raise $2 billion through a sales tax increase and limit annual state university tuition increases to the rate of inflation provided state funding for universities increased at the rate of inflation.
Problem is, the crucial need to develop, attract, and maintain a world-class workforce — and the role of university educations in that tax — seems almost completely overshadowed in the day-to-day budget negotiations in Lansing. In this era of deep cuts and gap-filling there is almost no clear problem-solving on key investment issues like this one.
Yet the sad fact remains… Students at Michigan’s 15 public universities last year took out more than $1.1 billion in student loans.
Sooner or later, Lansing will have to address the skyrocketing costs of college education, which the governor and Legislature have exacerbated through years of funding cuts. There’s plenty of scrutiny to go ’round — including on the campuses which are largely constitutionally protected from Lansing’s fiscal meddling.
So it is especially encouraging to see Michigan State University leaders taking a bare-knuckled approach to transformation across campus. Through a new initiative called “Shaping the Future,” MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon announced this month that she will cut the MSU general fund budget by 10 percent over the next two years while rethinking all campus operations and academic offerings, benchmarking many MSU operations against peer campuses, and emerging with a clearer, more tightly focused university to endure tough economic times.
Kudos to Reps. Durhal and Smith and MSU for bringing attention a crucial issue — Michigan’s future workforce talent and the costs of grooming that talent — well before most of the rest of Lansing’s leadership is ready to deal with it.
