Officials, students testify on college funding decline - Patrick Malone, CSU-Pueblo Chieftan

Colorado’s funding for colleges has been in steady decline since 2008. But what if it went away altogether three years from now? The Joint Budget Committee posed that question to every state-supported college in the state. The answers that came back on Monday were universal: tuition would double, administrative and academic departments would be eliminated, college employees would lose their jobs and students without the means to pay higher tuition out-of-pocket would never get in the doors. Already, colleges in Southern Colorado and elsewhere are deferring necessary maintenance, replacing full-time instructors with less costly adjunct faculty who have less time with students and increasingly relying on online courses that demand less overhead than their brick-and-mortar counterparts.