Nevada’s System
of Higher Exploitation
It’s no accident that Millennium Scholars do so badly
By Steven
Miller
After the 2005
Legislature, Chancellor Jim Rogers and other officials
of the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) were exultant.
The 2005 Legislature had given them a huge wad of Nevada
taxpayers’ dollars—at least $1.65 billion for the next two
years, not counting tens of millions for new buildings. Not
merely was the operating budget over 20 percent above what the
state higher ed system had ever received; it was more, even,
than had been requested. Thus, according to minutes, Rogers
told regents that the session had been “incredibly positive.”
And in a remark that stands as a classic expression of
insatiable government bureaucracy, he thanked Vice Chancellor
Dan Klaich for leading the effort “to secure all that we could
as a System.”
Is getting all you can out of taxpayers the appropriate goal
of a public education system? Do not simple equity and an
economical relationship of means to ends deserve higher
priority? In Nevada’s System of Higher Education, those are
notably not the case.
Point #1:
Even before the wasteful 2005 Nevada Legislature, Silver State
taxpayers already were shouldering a much larger share of
per-student costs at the state’s universities than do
taxpayers at virtually any other public college in the
country.
According to numbers gathered by the College Board for the
2004-2005 school year, the University of Nevada, Reno charges
in-state students the lowest tuition and fees of any
four-year undergraduate college or university in the country!
And—among the more than 600 such public institutions—the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas was tenth from lowest
in such tuition and fees.
It is Nevada taxpayers who pick up the rest of the tab—which
runs about $12,000 per student per year. This subsidy
sabotages the educational atmosphere at Nevada’s “flagship”
universities by populating the campuses with unserious,
marginal students. It is also unfair to working citizens of
the state, since it encourages unserious students to continue
goofing off on the basis of someone else’s dime. Which brings
us to another serious inequity.
Point #2:
Nevada lawmakers and NSHE administrators—for all their
habitual curtseying before the totems of political
correctness—have become invested in an ongoing economic
assault on the working poor.
Because low-income Nevadans tend to go into trades and crafts
that don’t require an academic degree, they are less likely to
attend NSHE institutions—which studiously avoid technical
education. This means that the state’s higher ed system today
effectively functions as a wealth-transfer scheme—taking taxes
paid by working-class and low-income Nevadans and using those
funds to subsidize a middle-class education entitlement for
the well-off.
Moreover, that class of subsidized and privileged Nevadans
extends well beyond the middle-income demographic that
educates their kids on the backs of the working poor. It
includes the hundreds of NSHE administrators and faculty
members whose annual salaries top $100,000. These are the
dominant stakeholders in the huge socialist edu-government
enterprise. Since they profit whenever higher-ed socialism
expands, they lobby and campaign for wasteful programs that
bloat Nevada universities with unmotivated, marginal
students—wonderful for coaxing an abjectly submissive
Legislature to route you ever bigger rivers of taxpayer
dollars.
Point #3:
A major element in this wealth-transfer system is Nevada’s
Millennium Scholarship program. Politically popular with
middle-income and wealthy parents who love the idea of using
Other People’s Money to fund their kids’ college education,
the scholarships are increasingly recognizable as a classic
boondoggle. That is, they redistribute taxpayer moneys to
special interest groups notwithstanding the lack of
cost-effective benefit for Silver State citizens in general.
Giving the game away are extremely low standards that
“qualify” our badly misnamed Millennium “scholars.” In March
NSHE lobbyists gave a report to state senators that tells the
story: Over the past five years the scholarship’s eligibility
requirements were so undemanding as to be met by 56 percent
of high school graduates. Ever wonder why, once in
college, 40 percent of Millennium Scholars require remedial
training in basic English and math? Ever wonder why one-third
of Millennium “Scholars” flunk out, unable to achieve
even the minimum grade average of a mere C+?
Now you know: The extremely low standards are no accident. The
scheme is simply to get lots of bodies into UNLV and UNR. Even
if they’re merely marginal students, not ready for college,
each one is a walking promissory note from the Legislature,
worth $12,000 a year.
The welfare of the kids?—or Nevada taxpayers?
Irrelevant. Milking them both for the benefit of academic and
administrative empire-builders is NSHE’s real priority.
<750 words>
Steven Miller is editor of BusinessNevada and policy
director for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.
