State must stop gutting Missouri’s universities - Editorial: Kansas City Star

Gov. Jay Nixon’s budget for next year calls for a devastating 12.5 percent cut in higher education funding. The governor lectured the schools in his state-of-the-state address to “run smarter, more efficient operations.” That talk is a transparent attempt to deflect the blame for inevitable tuition increases. The schools should continue searching for ways to save money. But the irresponsible player is the state of Missouri. Naturally, tuition increases are back on the table. The University of Missouri curators are mulling increases ranging from 9 percent at Missouri Science and Technology in Rolla to 3 percent at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Other public colleges and universities are calculating how much more they can reasonably ask students to pay. The answer: Not very much. Tuition at many Missouri universities is higher than what families pay in states such as Kansas. Students take on unacceptably high debt loads to go to school. There is no way Missouri’s universities can ask students to make up for the level of cuts that Nixon is proposing.