As President Bush works to cut the federal deficit in half by
2009, recently released budget documents project a trend of deep
funding reductions for many domestic programs “”mdash; for higher
education.
The 673-page budget document released by the White House last
week sets out a blueprint for spending levels for the next five
years. The documents suggest there will be increases for homeland
security and defense programs through 2011, while domestic programs
face deep decreases as soon as 2007.
“We’re facing a very tight budget environment for
domestic programs and will … for a number of years,” said
Barry Toiv, a spokesman for the Association of American
Universities.
Higher education will likely take a particularly hard hit.
The documents reveal a drop in student financial aid from its
current level of $19.2 billion to $13.8 billion in 2010. This
reduction in financial aid will likely be coupled with rising
tuition, which a Department of Education report shows has nearly
doubled over the last decade.
Funding for the postsecondary division in the Department of
Education, which consists of programs that help low-income high
school students get into college, is being split nearly in half
from $2 billion to $1.1 billion.
Individual schools, UCLA among them, have taken steps to
accommodate for the decrease in funding.
“(UCLA has) changed the financial-aid structure a bit to
provide additional resources through the university’s own
system of collecting and dispersing fees, but it can’t begin
to offset what federal student aid has provided,” said
Jeannie Oakes, professor of urban schooling at the UCLA Graduate
School of Education and Information Studies.
The spending figures projected in the documents do not take
inflation into account, which will make cuts feel far deeper than
they may appear on the page.
The proposed budget is only the first step in the process, said
James Geoffrey, spokesman for Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif. After the
president proposes his numbers, McKeon’s office will
determine which aspects of the proposal make sense to them and then
give recommendations to the president.
One area of education that will not suffer financially is math
and sciences. In Bush’s 2006 State of the Union Address on
Jan. 31, he proposed doubling the federal commitment to “the
most critical basic research programs” in the physical
sciences over the next 10 years.
He proposed making the research and development tax credit
permanent, which would make it more lucrative for private companies
to fund research.
Susanne Lohmann, a professor of political science who studies
the history of research universities, said she was concerned with
privately funded university research.
“(It) basically will push the system into the direction of
commercializing research with the prospect that incentives might
make professors work harder to create useful research,”
Lohmann said.
“But the serious downside is research is no longer free to
everybody,” she said. “Research can no longer be
thoroughly checked by other professors to see if it’s wrong
or could be improved upon.”