Via Kate Clancy on Twitter, a news story about how one Illinois legislator wants to save his state some money. As reported in The News-Gazette
State law allows employees who have worked for one of the Illinois’ public universities for seven or more years to receive a 50 percent waiver of their children’s tuition costs.
Employees would lose that benefit if legislation (HB 4706) introduced earlier this month by state Rep. Dave Winters, R-Rockford, is eventually signed into law.
“I think a lot of the universities have been using this as part of their compensation package,” said state Rep. Naomi Jakobsson, D-Urbana. “Taking away a part of their offer is not something I can support.”
Randy Kangas, director of the UI system’s office for planning and budgeting, said 942 of these tuition waivers were issued in fiscal 2009, totaling $3,981,600 of revenue the university never realized.
Most of those, 722 waivers, were issued for students at the Urbana-Champaign campus, erasing $3,254,800 that would have been added to the campus’ budget.
UI officials are saying they will need time to discuss the bill with state representatives before they develop any particular position.
Some universities (public ones and private ones) offer tuition waivers to family members of their employees. Where they are offered, tuition waivers are a part of the compensation package that is usually meant to be a counterweight to a salary that is lower than one might have liked. Health insurance and pensions (where they exist) work this way, too. If the benefit is not offered as part of the compensation package, the potential hire might (or should) sit down and calculate what those additional costs (to buy insurance, save for retirement, pay for a child’s college education) will be, and whether it is plausible to cover them on the salary being offered.
Tuition waivers may not be a big deal for potential employees who have no children (and have no intention of having children), but for those who do, they may be part of the calculation of whether one offer of employment is better or worse than another. They might also be a data point in sussing out whether a university is a family friendly work environment.
Of course, tuition is money into a university’s coffers, which means you can view tuition waivers as lost money (as apparently Rep. Winters is wont to do). But I think it’s a fair question whether the 942 children of University of Illinois employees would have paid any tuition to the University of Illinois without the waivers. Without a 50% break on the tuition, they might have taken their educational dollars to other colleges, which would have been a loss of $3,981,600 in revenue for the university.
Maybe other students are clamoring to fill those slots at the full-tuition rate. Maybe those 942 children of University of Illinois employees weren’t adding anything special to the student population or the classroom environment. I’m guessing someone at the University of Illinois system has some data on each of these issues, though, and I reckon that it might be worth taking it into account when setting policy, given that there are lots of ways to save money and really throw things into disarray as a result.
And if those 50% tuition waivers make employees’ kids leeches on the system, perhaps there are other leeches the people of Illinois might shake loose:
Jakobsson said there might be a better way if it is a budget issue.
“If we stop giving legislative scholarships, it would add more than” the $4 million, Jakobsson said.
Every year, each of the state’s 177 legislators are permitted to issue up to eight years’ worth of full tuition waivers to students wishing to attend any of the state’s universities. The only prerequisite is that the student live in the legislator’s district.
The program has drawn scrutiny over the years – from The News-Gazette and other news organizations – after some legislators were found to have been giving the scholarships to children of political contributors. A bill introduced by Jakobsson to kill the program was defeated in 2003.
Let’s see, 177 times 8 is 1416 student-years of full tuition. Compare that to the 942 waivers issued in fiscal 2009 to children of university employees, each good for 50% tuition, for 471 student-years. That’s less than half the financial impact of the legislator-issued tuitions.
Would the Illinois legislature risk losing its best state representatives if the ability to give scholarships to the children of political contributors were not part of the legislature’s “compensation package”?
Would it be a bad thing if they did?
As might be expected, some folks at the university seem to have an understanding of tuition waivers that’s more nuanced than just seeing them as a line in the budget:
UI spokesman Tom Hardy said the tuition waiver is an important tool to recruit and retain faculty and staff. And the financial relief is a tool to keep students in Illinois.
“It’s an incentive to keep bright students in state to go to college,” Hardy said. “And we know that typically where people go to college and graduate from, they tend to stay there.”
I think Hardy’s comments suggest some questions that legislatures and the people they represent (voters, tax payers, citizens of a state) would do well to ask when in the heat of a budget crisis:
What might it cost us down the road to eliminate this piece of spending? Do we want to cut our budget to the point that we can’t attract the best candidates to fill faculty and staff jobs at our state’s public universities? Are we confident that the education we’re able to provide under those conditions will be what we owe our state’s children — or that it will provide the skilled workforce that will attract employers to the state or keep them here? Are we OK letting lots of our state’s best high school graduates flee the state for their college education, knowing that this decreases the chances that they will return to become part of our workforce or tax base? Were Illinois high school teachers really busting their butts to make things better for the state of Massachusetts?
None of these budgets in crisis come down to simple balancing acts. There are lots of moving parts, connected in complex ways. I think it might benefit the legislators who are struggling to fix their budgets to spend some time talking with the people who know about downstream effects of particular pieces of spending. Undoubtedly there will be pain, but shortsighted cuts can result in a lot of pain that’s self-inflicted.
These tuition waivers are grossly unfair to faculty without children, particularly when–as at many private universities–their equivalent dollar value can be used for tuition at *any* college or university, not just the one that the faculty member is employed at.
I’m not convinced that they are — they might be, but I think I need to see an argument to convince me. Else we’d have to say family leave policies are unfair to the unmarried childless orphans a university employs, dental benefits are unfair to toothless employees, health care policies that cover OB/GYN services are unfair to male employees, etc.
Females take more sick leave CPP.
Should we therefore reduce female salaries to compensate you? Maybe you should make use of the subsidy? Adopt a 17 year old kid who wouldn’t otherwise be able to go to college in order to get him/her this sweet deal.
Secondly, the marginal cost of 1 additional student to the University is essentially zero. Luckily academia is not subject to very much in the way of market economics so they can cut benefits without increases in renumeration.
(1) How many unmarried childless orphans do you think a typical university employs?
(2) Toothless employees need dentists, for dentures and so forth.
(3) Male employees get health care policies that cover their dicks and balls, which female employees don’t have.
(4) It is trivial to make tuition remission benefits fair, by allowing each faculty member a set number of remissions–one or two seems reasonable–that they can grant to whoever the fuck they want, not just a child.
Janet, thanks so much for covering my tweet and for covering this story! It needs a wider audience and you helped make that happen.
CPP, I’m fine with folks being able to use the waivers however they want — a niece, nephew, friend, whoever. But I don’t think that’s the issue at stake here. The issue is that Illinois employees count on this waiver to get their kids through college, many of whom didn’t get to go to college themselves. This is also a pretty standard part of a recruiting package to get folks to work at a public university.
My worry is that this was a university-initiated legislation that certain politicians were happy to run with, but that it was first thought of as a cost-saving measure. What continues to boggle my mind is that even though public universities obviously get government funding, that funding is small compared to the overhead faculty bring in from grants. So shouldn’t faculty have a bit more say in the introduction of legislation (not to mention the conditions of our work) that directly affects them?
Ping.
I like the idea of getting rid of the state reps’ tuition waivers. Sauce for the goose…
I have expressed no opinion whatsoever on the fairness of the process or outcome by which the settled expectation of faculty that they would be entitled to this perk has been abrogated.
Hello ethics lady. I’d say the less students receiving paradigm-enforcing science education, the better.
As for your questions, I don’t think making school cheaper means making students dumber. The brightest students don’t need laptops, tuition wavers, and dorms. Anyone who has ever taught at community colleges like me knows what I mean. If Universities cute all of their special programs, and just use blackboards and chalk, and regular tests, then no one will need waivers, because college will be so cheap.
Thank me later,
NS
Most universities up here in Canada have the same policy. It available to ALL employees not just faculty members. Actually faculty members make up a small small % of people who count on the this. It makes a HUGE difference to the individual lower down on the pay scale. The cafeteria workers, janitorial staff, security, the gardeners, the daycare staff.
LOON ALERT!!!11!1!
I don’t think your generic loon alert warning does this one credit CPP. You may need to create something much more alarming…
Are we OK letting lots of our state’s best high school graduates flee the state for their college education, knowing that this decreases the chances that they will return to become part of our workforce or tax base? Welcome to the State of Hawaii….
I have a daughter who is a freshman in high school, this would effect us dramatically. First, I took a $10,000 dollar cut to work at the local University to acquire such benefits. So yes, this was a HUGE selling point to come to work at the University. For those who do not have children, I think there should be consideration given however, those bitter because of that factor should not be jealous and vendictive, rather be working on ways to balance the system. There are plenty of policies within the state that seem unfair.
Start with your politicans benefit package. Our state would not be in the situation its in if they would make cuts to alot of the pork.