It's sitting on Gov. Bill Owens' desk and could change the way college students get funding to go to Colorado's colleges and universities.
It's Senate Bill 189 (SB 189) and Owens' signature has been all but guaranteed. Owens' stamp on the legislation that passed in the House last week would provide college students with stipends to spend throughout Colorado's higher education system.
Students would receive vouchers of $2,400 for each school year to use for attending public colleges or universities in Colorado and $1,200 towards a private school in the state such as the University of Denver. If Owens does sign the bill into law, the stipends would be available to students for the 2005-06 school year.
The bill will give Colorado's colleges and universities some breathing room and the leeway to raise tuition, something TABOR (Colorado's taxpayer's bill of rights) has limited. Now with money coming from a different stream - from the state, to the student and then to the school - schools will have the flexibility to raise tuition and fees, providing them with the ability to reach enterprise status.
"It (SB 189) provides the University of Colorado with the flexibility it needs to weather future and current economic storms," said Michele Ames, public information officer for the Department of Media Relations at CU-Denver.
Proponents of SB 189, such as the bill's sponsor, Sen. Norma Anderson, R-Lakewood, say the bill has "dual importance." Not only will the bill provide colleges and universities with flexibility, it will encourage high school students to move on to college. But Anderson admits SB 189 doesn't solve all of Colorado's higher education funding problems.
"I see it as half the fix, not the total fix," she said. "The other half is fixing TABOR."
But Sen. Ron Tupa, D-Boulder, doesn't see duality in the bill. "The only benefit goes to the university, who's being able to raise tuition and fees," he said.
Tupa says the bill is also going to make TABOR reform more difficult. "Senate Bill 189 is a complex funding scheme for higher education designed to bypass TABOR," he said. "It undermines our efforts to get real TABOR reform in the field; it puts a band-aid on a huge problem so it's going to make people believe that we have done something about the funding situation for higher education when, in fact, we haven't."
Tupa says students will lose with SB 189 because the stipend is actually just money they were getting already. Now, students will just see the money in the form of a voucher
instead of the university getting money from the state directly.
"The students don't gain anything from the bill; in fact, the students are the big losers," he said. According to Tupa, universities will now raise tuition so the stipends will make it more expensive to go to school.
"It might lull people into thinking we've done something when, in fact, we haven't done anything but make the students pay more," he said.
Ames sees it differently; she said SB 189 is good for UCD, higher education and students. "There's no money being taken away from any students and it's changing with the hope that more students will see the potential for them to go to college," she said.
With Colorado's public colleges and universities lacking the state funding they need, the possibility of steep tuition increases across the board have gone from being a possibility to reality. "The problem is you either are going to start closing schools or you need to increase tuition, whether we have 189 or not," Anderson said.
"Will tuition go up? Yes of course it will, but there's nothing in this bill that changes the process with CCHE (Colorado Commission on Higher Education) and the Legislature," she said. CCHE and the Colorado Legislature still have the final say on how much Colorado's schools can actually raise tuition.
But according to Tupa, the bill is "a short-term fix for a long-term problem."
"It's going to mask the problem and the problem is we don't have enough revenue coming into the state to fund these colleges and universities."
Be the first to comment on this article!