Even by the standards of the 2010 governor's race, in which we've grown accustomed to each candidate claiming that whatever the other one did was wrong, former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s contention that Gov. Martin O'Malley's success in freezing public university tuition for four years has been a bad thing sounds pretty odd, especially coming from a guy who oversaw a 40 percent increase in tuition in three years. But it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.
Mr. Ehrlich's view of the situation is that many Maryland families can, relatively easily, pay the full freight for in-state students at the University System of Maryland's schools, which top out at $6,763 at the flagship campus in College Park. Some could probably pay more, and by holding tuition down, the idea goes, the state is subsidizing the tuition of the well-to-do just as much as it is the tuition of those who can't afford it.
Mr. Ehrlich says allowing tuition to go up but pouring more money into need-based financial aid is the better approach. That may sound a bit like socialism — taking from the rich to benefit the poor — but it makes some sense. Mr. Ehrlich points proudly to having doubled need-based financial aid during his tenure.
That claim is true, given some slightly generous rounding; state need-based financial aid for Maryland students was $43 million in former Gov. Parris N. Glendening's last year in office, and it grew to nearly $84 million by Mr. Ehrlich's last. In total, his increases in need-based aid amounted to $79,746,000 during his four years. Need-based aid programs at the university system campuses also increased under Mr. Ehrlich's term, bringing the total addition during those years to about $100 million.
The problem is, undergraduate tuition increases at the university system's campuses amounted to some $403 million in just the first three years of his term. Before Mr. Ehrlich took office, 22 percent of University of Maryland students had to borrow money at some point in their college careers; by his last year in office, the figure stood at 47 percent. The year before Mr. Ehrlich took office, parents of College Park students borrowed $14 million to help their children attend school. In his last year, they borrowed about $24 million.
Whatever help Mr. Ehrlich's increases in need-based aid provided, they clearly left out many families. University officials said at the time that students from families that earned between $40,000 and $60,000 a year were most at risk for missing out on higher education because they had less access to financial aid but also insufficient resources to afford college on their own.
By the fourth year of Mr. Ehrlich's term, with the election just around the corner, public university tuition had become a major political issue and a centerpiece of Mr. O'Malley's claim that the Republican's policies weren't good for middle-class Marylanders. He called for a tuition freeze, and his allies in the General Assembly — chiefly Senate president and College Park alum Thomas V. Mike Miller — worked to make it happen through some fancy legislative maneuvering.
Mr. Ehrlich, who had put a record funding increase for the university system in his budget, enough that the regents planned to hold tuition to a 4.5 percent increase for the following year. He initially opposed the tuition freeze, calling it an election-year gimmick. But a day after the Senate gave preliminary approval to the tuition freeze, Mr. Ehrlich reversed course and issued a supplemental budget with money to freeze tuition.
In a bit of political inconvenience for Mr. O'Malley, the four-year tuition freeze he's trumpeting on the campaign trail actually started under Mr. Ehrlich and ended this year, with a planned 3 percent tuition increase in the fall. Still, the effect of Mr. O'Malley's efforts has been significant. Maryland's public university system was sixth most expensive in the nation at the end of Mr. Ehrlich's term and now ranks 21st.
The tuition increases under Mr. Ehrlich were largely a product of cuts in state support for higher education made during the early years of his term, when he grappled with significant budget shortfalls. Mr. Ehrlich reduced the general fund appropriation for the university system by a total of $100 million in his first two budgets, despite growing enrollment. The university system saw large bumps in funding in Mr. Ehrlich's last year and Mr. O'Malley's first, and it has remained relatively stagnant since then — though at a rate about $250 million a year higher than its nadir in 2004 and in spite of a budget crisis even worse than the one Mr. Ehrlich faced.
But funding the tuition freeze has meant less money for other things, even in the realm of higher education. Community college funding under Mr. O'Malley has fallen well short of the benchmarks established under state law — this was also true during the Ehrlich administration — and per-pupil state support for community college students is now slightly below where it was in Mr. Glendening's last year in office. Tuition and fees for full-time community college students went up 8 percent total during Mr. O'Malley's first three years in office — though, again, this is better than the Ehrlich years, when tuition and fees increased by 21 percent.
The most grumbling about Mr. O'Malley's tuition freeze has actually come from Maryland's higher education community. The determination to keep it up so long has come from Mr. O'Malley, not the Board of Regents, which actually sets tuition rates but which is not apt to buck the governor that appoints its members. Still, some have at least privately made the case that the tuition freeze has hampered the system's ability to improve its academic and research offerings or to expand to meet the need of a bumper crop of college-bound high school graduates. After all, if keeping tuition cheap means there won't be enough seats for all the qualified Maryland students who want to attend a state university, they're being left out all the same. And although funding was higher during Mr. O'Malley's term, the University System was not immune to budget cuts and saw its reserve funds raided to help balance the state budget. Critics of the freeze argue that the system should have allowed some modest tuition increases, dedicating part of the money to need-based aid and part to institutional advancement, but politics trumped that idea.
Any analysis of who made a greater priority of ensuring affordable access to higher education has to give the edge to Mr. O'Malley. Mr. Ehrlich's idea of higher tuition but more generous need-based aid is good in theory, but he did not devote the money necessary to make it work in practice. Still, it's time we moved beyond the tuition freeze as a political issue and onto a discussion of what combination of state aid and tuition increases is sustainable. Bringing tuition down relative to competitor states was important after the Ehrlich years, but the situation now calls for a more balanced approach to meet our goals of excellent, affordable and accessible higher education.