Budgets as Politics

"Budgetary transparency" hasn't been one of the great political slogans in world history, but better late than never.  We have a whole section on this blog about stories of UC decline, which continued this week in the New York Times and elsewhere, but UC is on the rise around general awareness of budget politics.

Budgets don't normally make good politics.  I've learned this the hard way trying to get folks interested in budget stories. But the sheer scale of the crisis and the sense of the undemocracy of this budgeting might make things different this time around.

The "failed state" of California is the US emblem of what happens when budgets are so non-transparent that even hard-core financial journalists can't figure out who is getting cut by how much, and then resort to "he said she said" coverage that makes everyone fall asleep.  Witness this confused account of California's budget in the Wall Street Journal. The only sure thing in the piece is that the full cuts will stick in one budget category, higher education.

The current budget trap was built carefully in a collaboration between politicians and higher education leaders - a marriage of selfishness and fear - following a homegrown version of the "Monnet method," named after one of the architects of the European Union.  Monnet convinced a lot of people that you had to build the entire EU infrastructure underwater, where the public wouldn't notice, with "small, apparently technical, steps focusing on economic issues."  By the time the apparatus appeared above the waterline, its foundations would be set in stone.

The EU is largely unaccountable but better than what was there before.  US higher ed's new structure made it worse:  an overly complicated funding hybrid that was excessively reliant on tuition-paying students, meaning that the entire social contribution of higher education - including scientific research - increasingly depended on the ability and willingness to pay of any given year's actual students. 

Diverse distresses may converge: 1) ever-higher fees; 2) pay cuts and declining quality of both teaching and research; 3  the US's declining status in higher ed. Policy people may not care about 1 and 2 but they care a lot about 3.  They now wake up to echoes of World War II headlines with a whiff of the yellow peril, like this week's Chronicle of Higher Education cover that screams "As U.S. Retrenches, Asia Drives Growth Through Higher Education.": "America Falling: Longtime Dominance in Education Erodes."; "Asia Rising: Countires Funnel Billions Into Universities."  This week another in a series of pieces on US research decline also appeared, this one on "human capital leapfrogging" in the Asian countries that are making major public investments in higher ed.

What the US is losing is the sheer scale of high-level attainment that it needs to keep moving ahead.  That was the magic of US public higher ed.  That was the magic eroded by the private hybrid. 
Every constituency may finally be equally upset.