A common theme in college life is how to make do with little money. Whether it’s having your food pyramid consist of ramen and instant coffee or never washing your clothes, we’re all trying to save what little cash we have. However, MU’s wallet just got a whole lot thinner, and students may have to be the ones to fill it back up.
On Feb. 2, Gov. Eric Greitens announced a cut of $159 million to the higher education budget, with $40 million of that coming from the UM System. Greitens partly blames “decades of insiders, special interests, and lobbyists…protect[ing] their pet projects and their slice of pie.” That must have been a big slice of pie.
Greitens’ budget has made reductions of more than $572 million across the state government. Over a quarter of all the statewide reductions came from higher education. I get trimming the fat, but this is like throwing out the whole cow. Cutting the budget of a state university is just screwing over the future generations of your state.
The reason you should care about these budget cuts is because it means one of two things will happen. Either the cost of tuition will rise again or the quality of education will decrease. More than likely, both of those will happen to some extent. With $40 million coming out of the total UM System budget, $13.7 million of that will come from MU. This is bad. But what is worse is the fact that last year, Mizzou faced a budget cut of $32 million and a decrease in enrollment of over a thousand incoming students. If you need proof of the effects, you have your choice of looking at any one of the empty residence halls on campus. Another blow like this is going to be detrimental to the school.
In past years, budget cuts haven’t really affected in-state students, thanks to a law put into effect in 2007 by then-Gov. Matt Blunt. That law capped increases for in-state tuition at the consumer price index, so it went up about 2.1% last year. This made most of the tuition increases fall on out-of-state students. The cap may not survive this budget cut, and we would all find ourselves facing steep increases in tuition. Greitens believes that schools can manage without making students pay for it, claiming they only need to “tighten their belts.” But Wesley Payne, the president of Three Rivers College in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, told the Associated Press, “I think there has to be awareness that after you cut so much, you can’t tighten that belt without strangling yourself.”
A 10 percent cut to the higher education budget is going to require more than just tightening our belt. Odds are that students, who are already neck-deep in loans, are going to end up being the ones having to finance this cut.
