Washington State Senator Wants to Lower College Costs
For Pam Roach, the steep cost of higher education is more than just a policy issue.
Ms. Roach, a Republican who has represented Washington’s 31st Senate District, just southeast of Seattle, since 1990, was the first in her family to attend college, paying her own way and earning a bachelor’s degree and teaching certificate at Brigham Young University in the early 1970s. Since then she has helped foot the cost of BYU degrees for four of her five children.
Ms. Roach, who does not have another job outside of her legislative duties, and whose husband works as a postal carrier, says her family’s background has made her a strong advocate for keeping the state’s universities affordable for middle-class families.
“When costs go up, the rich can handle it and many poor students receive grants to cover their expenses,” she says. “But for middle-class families like my own, it makes a huge difference.”
Her own children used a combination of part-time jobs and family savings to pay their yearly $4,000 tuition and graduate without debt, but Ms. Roach says other families in her state will not be so fortunate.
Last month she voted against a bill to transfer control of tuition costs from the Legislature to the regents of individual universities in the state system. She was concerned that the colleges would increase student costs to generate additional revenue. The bill has become law.
“I think the biggest gift I could give my children is an education,” Ms. Roach says. “But even if I had no children at all, I wouldn’t want to make it more difficult for the average family to give their kids a chance at a college degree.”
‘Self Taught’ Lawmaker Says College Isn’t for Everyone
“Higher education? I think I can give you a unique perspective on that, since I never even finished high school.”
So says Daniel W. Thatcher, a self-taught electrical contractor and freshman state senator in Utah who sits on the state’s Senate Education Committee.
Not that Mr. Thatcher, a Republican, is uneducated. At age 6, he says, he started obsessing over circuit boards. Anything that piqued his interest in the classroom sent him hurrying to the library to read as much as he could on a subject—but he was utterly bored in class.
He thought college would be different. He got a GED after leaving high school, but when he began his college courses, he found his classroom experience no different. Within a few months, he’d dropped out.
“My personal opinion,” he says, “is that higher education is absolutely necessary for some professions, and it’s completely and totally useless for others.”
“You go to college, you take a foreign language, and all these ridiculous diversity requirements—how does that help you become a better welder?” he adds. “Why is it that we’re telling kids, ‘You can get any degree you want, and you’ll make all this money,’ when they won’t?”
His outlook has led him to believe that it’s time for his state to rethink the way it approaches higher education. Utah has the largest family sizes in the country, and historically its lawmakers have reacted by using state funds to keep college tuition much lower than national averages. But with Utah’s legislature straining to budget for other areas, like elementary and secondary education and other public infrastructure, and less than 50 percent of Utah college students completing their degrees, Mr. Thatcher no longer sees that arrangement as sustainable.
“When more than half of students just dink around and don’t finish their degrees, why are we paying for that?” he asks. “I think that raising tuition is a totally appropriate response.”
Going forward, Mr. Thatcher says, Utah legislators have a choice to make. “You have to find a balance between keeping higher education affordable and strengthening K-12,” he says. “And here, you really have to pick between one or the other.”
Early Regard for Education Led Speaker of Nevada Assembly to Several Degrees
John W. Oceguera, a Democrat and speaker of the Nevada Assembly, gained an early appreciation for the value of higher education.
He was raised in Fallon, Nev., by his single mother, who’d given birth to him as a teenager. She drove more than 60 miles each way to complete a teaching degree at the University of Nevada at Reno and became a schoolteacher.
Mr. Oceguera, an assistant fire chief in North Las Vegas, says he comes from a long line of educators.
“I was the black sheep who went to the fire department,” he says.
His belief in the value of higher education has led him to obtain several degrees, including a bachelor’s degree in fire administration from Cogswell Polytechnical College and both a master’s degree in public administration and a law degree from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
Those graduate degrees have proved particularly valuable in his political career.
He says the public-administration degree, which he earned before running for office, was as important for the classmates he met as for the material he learned.
“It gave me a network of people to talk with about issues related to government,” he says.
The law degree, obtained in 2003, has proved valuable in helping him understand and craft legislation.
Nevada’s budget, passed June 1, cuts higher-education funds by 15 percent, according to the Associated Press, and Mr. Oceguera successfully introduced legislation that calls for leaner state universities producing degrees more in line with the needs of industry in the state. But Mr. Oceguera hopes public higher education will ultimately emerge stronger for it in Nevada.
He’s got money riding on it.
He and his wife, Janie, have already fully paid for a Nevada Prepaid Tuition plan for their 18-month-old son, Jackson.
A Veteran Lawmaker With No Degree Makes Higher Education a Priority
Jack Kibbie has served in the Iowa Legislature over five decades, starting in 1960 and then from 1988 to the present.
It was during his initial years in the state’s House of Representatives that Mr. Kibbie, who never attended a day of college, helped lay the foundation for Iowa’s community-college system, working closely with Harold Hughes, the state’s former governor.
In 1965, when Mr. Kibbie was chair of the Senate Education Committee, he represented rural counties with junior colleges—those that taught the liberal arts—and was looking for a way to broaden the tax base for the colleges. Gov. Hughes had campaigned on having more vocational-technology schools in Iowa. Together, the two men helped combine and grow the two systems. Today, the state’s community-college system serves 106,000 students, and every corner of the state has an outpost.
Mr. Kibbie says he didn’t go to college because he grew up on a farm and had to help his family keep it up. “I was the only boy,” he says. “And there was work to be done on the farm and nobody else to do it.”
He was also drafted into the Army and served a tour in Korea as a tank commander. Now 82, he still grows corn and soybeans, much as he did when he returned from the war.
Although it’s never bothered him that he doesn’t have a degree, he admits to having faced some challenges without one. “It is hard to get recognized in higher education when you don’t have a laundry list of degrees after your name,” he says.
Maine Lawmaker Bridges Gap Between Politicians and Professors
Emily Ann Cain, a member of Maine’s House of Representatives, is not only one of the state’s most accomplished legislators but also one of its most educated. The fourth-term legislator, a Democrat and minority leader in the House, has a master’s degree in higher education from Harvard University and is working on a Ph.D. at the University of Maine, where she works part time as an administrator.
Ms. Cain, 30, says her background gives her insight into a world too often misunderstood by other legislators. The biggest misconception, she says, is the image of professors as lazy and out of touch, taking summers off and hoarding state funds for irrelevant projects.
“The stereotype is that faculty members are aloof, ivory-tower people who work on problems that don’t concern average people in Maine,” she says.
But she doesn’t have a bias against representatives without degrees. In fact, she says, state legislatures ought to comprise members with a wide array of backgrounds—small-business owners, millworkers, union leaders—including people from fields or career paths that may not require education beyond high school.
Ms. Cain believes the distrust harbored by some of her colleagues toward academe could be mitigated if legislators with expertise in the field reached out to their colleagues. Last year, for instance, a Maine legislator was pressuring public universities to get rid of gender-studies programs. She sent him literature on the importance of the field, and he was won over, she says. She believes lawmakers of any education level can see the value in publicly supported research if given enough information.
“People like me get frustrated that [other lawmakers] don’t automatically love higher ed as much as we do or value it the same way,” she says. “We don’t take the time to have those personal conversations to share what we know.”
Home-Schooled Legislator Juggles Graveyard Shift and Online Classes
Displeased with her own public education, Laura Jones wanted something better for her children. After 16 years of home-schooling under her watch, and a handful of online college courses, her son, Kyle, became one of the youngest state representatives in New Hampshire history last year, at age 19.
He began his career in state politics as his mother’s campaign manager, running her bid to become a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. However, after attending a candidate-training class with her, he decided to join her on the ticket, campaigning for another open seat in Rochester. They both won.
When Mr. Jones isn’t sitting in on legislative meetings from January to June, he manages the graveyard shift at a Burger King in Rochester, his hometown, Thursdays through Sundays. He scrapped his Monday shift when it began to interfere with his legislative duties.
“I kind of fell asleep during committee meetings, and that’s not a good idea,” he said.
College isn’t a priority for Mr. Jones at the moment. Even though he has taken a handful of online courses through Granite State College, a small liberal-arts institution in the University System of New Hampshire, his aspirations are unclear. He still lives in his boyhood room at his parents’ house and says he hopes to start a fast-food franchise one day.
He believes that higher education can help secure jobs: “If you have a degree, you’re going to have a better job.”
Ms. Jones, a graduate of California State University at Fullerton who has a degree in business administration, wants her son to continue his education. “I would prefer he pursue a bachelor’s degree, but he is an adult and can make his own decision.”