The Higher Education Conference Committee needs to hear your voice as they reconcile the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill that funds higher ed.

The house bill contains $68.4 million in campus support, but it also includes an unfunded tuition freeze for both years of the biennium.

The senate side only includes $23 million in campus funding, while mandating a 5% reduction in tuition without covering the cost of that reduction. This will result in an estimated $71 million loss from our campuses.

Although one bill is markedly better than the other, both continue the decades-long trend of the legislature underfunding public higher education. We have to tell our legislators to do better.

We know what underfunding higher education means. It means reduced support services for students, reductions in course offerings, possible program cuts or closures, threats of increased class sizes, the loss of faculty positions, the inability to fairly compensate employees for the incredible work they do, and the continuation of the education debt crisis.

One-time federal dollars intended to help plug gaps in the budget from COVID19 are just that: one-time dollars that we cannot build a sustainable budget on.

Will you please take a moment and share your concerns about the continual underfunding of our system with the conferees? We’ve created a few writing prompts and the start to a letter that you can send to the conferees—just click the “Start Writing” button to get going.