BY JACOB A. BENNETT 

Results from a survey of University of New Hampshire undergraduate students were discussed at the April 2020 meetings of the University System of New Hampshire Board of Trustees, indicating that only “30% of students felt they continue[d] to learn effectively” after the abrupt and necessary shift to remote learning this past spring, and that only “50% felt that they were being sufficiently prepared to continue” their educations. A surprising “74% of students said they were less likely to explore distance education in the future.” In that context, last month’s announcement that the fall 2020 term will be conducted in person across New Hampshire’s public colleges and universities—as is also the case at a significant number of colleges and universities—strikes me as a strategy for securing enrollments and deposits. It also strikes me as a terrible risk to take given modeling on COVID-19 spread on a residential college campus. I’m not saying that the health of students, staff, and faculty are not top of mind for each and every administrator and trustee; I know many of the people making these decisions in New Hampshire, and I know they are worried for everyone’s safety. But I am definitely saying that those concerns will be undermined by the reality of the budget, which in New Hampshire was abysmal before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19 or coronavirus.

To place the situation in New Hampshire into broader context, consider some national trends: it was just three years ago that more than half of the states reported that more than half of their public higher education financing arrived in the form of student tuition and fees. This is old news in New Hampshire, where the state government has not once since 1980 provided more than 47 percent of overall funding, according to data reported by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO). Treating a degree as a limited private benefit that only the degree-holder enjoys, despite evidence that every dollar of appropriated funds garners a $2.35 return on the investment for society, shifts the ever greater burden of funding a bona fide public good onto the backs of students and their families. High tuition and a lack of state aid mean more student debt, which has risen to more than $1.6 trillion across the country. And that debt burden, like so many of our country’s social ills, disproportionately affects students identifying as Black or as women.

The work of the board of trustees of the University System of New Hampshire, which also oversees Granite State College, Keene State College, and Plymouth State University, is “conducted on behalf of the people of New Hampshire.” But the people of New Hampshire are merely bit players in the predictable appropriations tragedy that befalls the state’s public higher education systems each budget cycle. In the latest grim reporting from SHEEO, New Hampshire is once again at the bottom of most metrics of financial provision. In 2019:

• New Hampshire taxpayers chipped in $1.50 for each $1,000 of personal income, behind all other states and about a quarter of the national average;
• higher education support per capita, a measure dividing total appropriations by a state’s total population, was $94 in New Hampshire, lowest among all states again and less than a third of the national average;
• only 1.9% of taxes collected by the state go toward public higher education, once more dead last and one-third the national average; and
• expenditures per full-time enrollment (FTE) totaled $2,871, a little more than one-third the national average and—say it with me now—last in the nation.

Some other key points in the SHEEO report include the fact that New Hampshire is the only state with no public financial aid system; that student tuition and fees, the “student share,” make up 78.3 percent of revenues for these public institutions; and that 90 percent of revenues go to general operations, rather than, say, funding state financial aid for students. Permanent austerity in New Hampshire, where four of every five dollars spent on public higher education is coming out of students’ wallets, means that decisions about opening for in-person classes in the fall have been and will continue to be guided by bottom-line considerations.

If there is a silver lining to the privatization of public higher education, a phenomenon that is not unique to New Hampshire but takes one of its purest forms here, it is that folks can brag of administrative efficiencies. And USNH can and does crow that it is “the Most Administratively Efficient System in the Northeast,” spending less per FTE student than any public four-year institution in any New England state and less than any private four-year institution in New Hampshire. The curse of that silver lining, the risk of pride in those efficiencies, is that our elected officials in the legislature and the governor won’t hear requests for more money with any urgency. And even if they do hear and wish to heed those requests, the lack of a broad-based revenue stream for the state’s coffers means there is little room to increase funding in order to cut student costs and, while we’re at it, pay graduate assistants and part-time faculty livable wages in a harsh housing market where a high cost of living and expensive childcare can be financially debilitating.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis unlike anything any of us have faced or read about before, so let’s get to work shaping the future we want and not the one we fear. What that has meant for me is attending a variety of webinars focused on online teaching and labor organizing, especially in the context of an ongoing global pandemic. But it is also time to look harder at legislative processes and priorities, since that is where public college and university budgets begin. The question should not be whether but where and how fiercely you will focus your energies during this great reorganization of higher education.

Guest blogger Jacob A. Bennett is a recent graduate of the University of New Hampshire’s Leadership and Policy Studies doctoral program, concentrating on faculty labor and related issues. He is also serving his final week as a two-term nonvoting graduate student representative to the University System of New Hampshire Board of Trustees. The opinions expressed below are his alone.