COLUMN: Students, leaders need to fight for higher education
As many of you know, the Utah Legislature is over halfway through its general session. The legislators have been working on the budget for the 2003-04 academic year.
They have been meeting in sub-committees until recently. These sub-committees are responsible for different areas of the budget. There are two main sub-committees that deal directly with Higher Education (that is us) issues.
One is the Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee (they work on issues dealing with all of the state institutions in Utah, i.e. tuition/financial aid/higher education budget/waivers/etc).
And the other is the Capital Facilities Subcommittee, which funds buildings in the state like some of the ones on our campus. Currently, the process is at the end of the subcommittee meetings and now recommendations are being sent to the Executive Appropriations Committee. In that committee, they decide where the state tax dollars will go.
Then the budget goes to the House and Senate, to be voted on by the entire Legislature.
I know that many students do not have a lot of time to continually stay tuned and updated with everything that is going on statewide. The best place to go for information about the government in Utah is www.utah.gov.
From here, you can learn about what is going on in the state. The most important thing to do after getting this information is to apply it. It is important for students to know who their legislators are, especially the ones from their home towns.
I bet there is a student at Utah State from every district, and if those students communicated with the legislators from their districts, this would help tremendously.
It would be even better if parents got involved in this process. Legislators tend to listen most carefully to the people in their districts and people who are potential voters.
The Utah Council of Student Body Presidents that leads the Utah Student Association (all the students of higher education in Utah), has been lobbying three main issues this year. This is a tough year to lobby because there is no money.
The students are basically begging the Legislature to keep funding higher education.
As students, we recognize the difficulty of budgeting in a recession time, but we also understand the role that higher education has on economic recovery and continued vitality for this state. We ask that legislators keep the future in mind as they fund higher education.
Our second issue is curbing tuition hikes. Tuition increases have been drastic during the past few years in response to the budget crisis. We do not want students priced out from dramatically increasing tuition. This weakens the educated workforce and citizenry that our state has long prided itself in.
Second-tier tuition is a different issue, because the separate institutions get to keep those tuition dollars on their own campus to do what they need to. Students agree with second-tier tuition increases as long as they are applied in collaboration with student input and administrative accountability.
The third issue is the Amendment of House Bill 331 or HB 331. That’s the bill that passed in the last legislative session, which drastically changed the residency requirements in Utah. This made it twice as hard to attain residency and drove many out-of-state students from college in Utah.
After a year of implementation, the bill has proven to be cost-ineffective, costing the state close to $5 million. We are urging the Legislature to reconsider this bill and amend HB 331 to alleviate the problems it created and will create.
We urge all students throughout the state to help us help them. Please contact legislators in your districts.
Have your parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and friends contact their legislators, and let them know that these issues are important.
The Utah Student Association is made up of 140,000 students statewide. With more students showing support on these issues, it could make a world of difference. To learn more about the Utah Student Association please go to www.utahstudents.org.
Celestial Bybee is the ASUSU president. Comments can be sent to celestial@cc.usu.edu.