By Lindsay Street, Statehouse correspondent | A statewide campaign intended shed light on the state’s rising college costs could fall on deaf ears in the S.C. House, according to two top lawmakers.
The issue of whether the state should provide more subsidies for tuition and fees for its 33 public colleges is ramping up to be a loud, long public battle. Lawmakers and the state’s college oversight agency say the issue will likely remain unsolved this legislative session as attention is diverted to other issues.
CHE has town halls to draw attention to finding
In the meantime, the Commission on Higher Education says it has set out on a fact-finding mission intended to draw attention to the issue.
“We believe that before you can address these issues — these problems, you got to recognize you have (a problem),” CHE Chair Tim Hofferth of Chapin said in an interview. “I’m not sure all leaders believe we have a problem … Somebody needs to begin the painstaking process of coming up with recommendations to treat the problem.”
The commission has hosted three of eight planned town halls around the state, gaining headlines like “Why colleges and their state oversight agency are clashing” and “Higher ed commission predicts ‘financial knife fight.’” At the town halls, the commission is taking this message to the people: attending public college in South Carolina has become too pricey and the state’s public institutions could be on the verge of collapse, unless they curb spending. It’s a message that has put it at odds with many public colleges around the state.
The goal is to help inform future action for the commission and the state, CHE interim president Jeff Schilz told Statehouse Report Thursday.
“We hear these stories from people all the time as I talk to legislators; they hear these stories as well,” he said. “We thought it would be a good opportunity to go around the state and go out and hear what the people are really dealing with.”
South Carolina’s public colleges have some of the most expensive tuition and fees in the nation, according to a 2018 state-by-state comparison from Simple Thrifty Living. In the last 10 years since the Great Recession, state dollars for those colleges have dropped 33 percent — or about $225 million, according to an August report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. South Carolina funds less than 6 percent of college revenues, while some neighboring universities get up to one-fifth of their funding from public tax dollars, according to S.C. House Ways and Means Chair Rep. Brian White, R-Anderson.
For CHE, the town halls and the tough stance on college spending are needed to begin addressing the problem of rising tuitions and fees.
CHE playing with fire?
But the town halls and the related attention-grabbing headlines have some lawmakers questioning the CHE’s role. For 50 years, the CHE has acted as the General Assembly’s oversight agency and an advocate for higher education.
“(Colleges are) having to get more and more and more from mom and dad than they are from the state of South Carolina,” White said. “CHE is beating that drum, ‘Well they’re charging too much, charging too much.’ Well, part of your job is to say, ‘Hey, they need more money from the state so they don’t have to charge more in tuition,’ but they’re not doing that.”
White said he takes issue that the CHE is not asking for more state funds but instead choosing to question spending by colleges. He said the commission isn’t in the classrooms, and that in 10 years, he hasn’t seen the commission advocate on behalf of the colleges to get more state dollars.
Ways and Means Vice Chair Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, said the town halls aren’t doing CHE any favors in winning support from lawmakers or the colleges. Cobb-Hunter said there’s a talk of commission overreach but she said she supports the CHE’s town halls.
“I can see the case that they see (the town halls) as part of their roles. They see it as stepping into a vacuum, meaning who else is doing it?” Cobb-Hunter said.
A disconnect between colleges and CHE
Where she and others have a problem is with the warring information between CHE and the public colleges.
“There may be an issue with the information they are providing and I’ve heard disagreement from the universities on how that information is both captured and presented, but that’s separate from whether CHE ought to be doing it,” Cobb-Hunter said.
She said the town halls may have been more effective if CHE involved the universities and lawmakers.
“I’d be very surprised if the town halls had the effect on the legislature that CHE seems to think they will have,” she said, adding there would be “even less” of an effect for university leaders.
White said CHE has been a poor advocate for the state’s public colleges and should be pushing for more state money to help students. But Hofferth said before CHE can advocate for more funds, there should be an examination of costs.
“We have to get our hands around these skyrocketing costs,” Hofferth said.
He bristled at the suggestion that CHE is not advocating for public colleges.
“Nobody appreciates our higher ed institutions more than the commission and our staff,” Hofferth said. “We want to make sure they’re healthy … Right now, they don’t need another cheerleader.”
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