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Just about every time I pick up the paper, I read that higher education in Colorado faces a financial crisis. On account of TABOR, the state legislature can't raise taxes to provide more funds for state colleges and universities. On account of Amendment 23, the General Assembly can't shift K-12 money to post-secondary education, no matter how great the need. On account of the governor's veto pen, colleges can't increase tuition by a significant amount, and they say they've already cut all the fat from their budgets and are now looking at muscle and bone.
So, what's to be done?
Try this thought experiment. Suppose we were starting from scratch, that we didn't have a huge investment in academic facilities. What institutions would Colorado need?
In the 19th century, when Colorado was starting from scratch, the needs were obvious. Mining was one pillar of the economy, and the need for trained specialists became apparent in 1867 after the miners of Gilpin County encountered refractory ores whose processing was beyond their competence.
The concentrated ore had to be shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to Swansea, Wales, the closest place with expertise. Colorado's founding fathers realized that if the territory was going to have a mining industry, it would need to develop its own professionals, and thus Colorado School of Mines was founded in 1874.
Agriculture was the other economic pillar then. With our high elevation and low precipitation, seeds and cultivation practices that work elsewhere may not work here. Thus another specialized institution, the Agricultural College of Colorado, which was founded in 1870 and has since evolved into Colorado State University -- still governed by the State Board of Agriculture.
But agriculture now accounts for less than 5 percent of Colorado's economic activity, and underground metal mining is almost extinct here.
What do we need now? Our growth sectors, like prison
guards, don't demand much from colleges. The hospitality
industry
conducts its own training sessions to teach
those sincere smiles we expect from lift attendants, river
guides and resort-town bartenders.
Where does the public sector fit? That is, what sorts of educated people do we need, whose education could not reasonably be provided by the private sector?
For instance, our constitution and laws are unique to Colorado, so we would need a law school. But the private sector has provided one at the University of Denver, so does the public sector also need to build and operate one at the University of Colorado?
All that leaps readily to mind is the training of
teachers, which used to be handled by two-year institutions
known as normal schools.
My maternal grandmother,
Flora Boydston Wollen, went to one in Nebraska, then went
on to teach at one-room eight-grade schoolhouses in places
like Dull Center, Wyo.
When I was little, I thought that normal schools were
where they sent eccentric people (among her other
peculiarities, Grandma Wollen kept every newspaper she
received) to learn how to be normal, and that the school
had failed utterly in her case. I have since learned that
the term came from the French ecole normale,
which
meant something like serving as a model for other
schools.
In junior high, I had one teacher who had begun her career in Masonville, northwest of Loveland. It started the fall after she had completed eighth grade -- the local school board hired her after the previous schoolmarm got married and quit.
So, we could solve that problem by returning the educational requirements to their traditional levels. We could take it a step further, and amend the law to forbid discrimination based on educational attainment.
There's another possibility, one that Colorado is already a leader in. We are among the top states in the percentage of residents who have college degrees. But we're only 27th in sending our own high-school students to college.
In other words, we out-source
college education.
It costs a lot of money to run colleges, so we let other
states do that, then import their graduates to be
tax-paying productive citizens here.
Thus in the long run, the legislature might best serve state taxpayers by accelerating the current out-sourcing process. Continue to starve Colorado colleges and let them close if necessary. That saves money and cuts taxes, which should make Colorado all the more appealing to graduates from the states which weren't smart enough to realize that they didn't need to operate colleges.
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