Chuck Annal of Concord is vice-chancellor emeritus of CCSNH.
Kudos to Mark Rubinstein, chancellor of the Community College System of New Hampshire (CCSNH), for his recent My Turn (Monitor, 7/2). The chancellor does an excellent job responding to a New Hampshire Fiscal Policy report that identifies New Hampshire as being at the bottom of all states when it comes to state appropriation support for public higher education.
As someone who spent over 40 years in the CCSNH, beginning as an English teacher and ending as the vice-chancellor of the system, I’m familiar with the tightrope that CCSNH chancellors have to walk in balancing the need for more funding from the state legislature, while not being critical of the body that provides that funding. The chancellor does an admirable job of walking that tightrope — make your case but don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
That said, let me say what he cannot say, and, let me be clear, I am speaking for myself only and not the chancellor.
Quite simply, being the state with the lowest level of financial support for its community colleges is embarrassing. The inevitable result is high tuition and an inability to invest for the future in things that matter for students — programs, facilities, advising, and technology, which is not stagnant.
Without a concurrent increase in funds to keep pace with the increased cost of running colleges, CCSNH has no choice but to pass costs on to students through tuition increases. The chancellor is correct in saying that tuition has increased in the CCSNH by only 2.5% over the last decade, but ten years ago CCSNH still had the highest tuition in the country. Even a modest 2.5% increase over the decade still puts New Hampshire with the highest tuition rate in the country.
I believe that people invest in what they value, with both their time and dollars. If we value family, we do all we can to keep the family safe, to look to its needs, and provide a good education for the children, positioning them to be successful financially and contributors to their communities.
The NH legislature’s record is writ large in how it values the education of its citizens. Witness the still unresolved Claremont lawsuit from 20 years ago and its recent reappearance in the spotlight. Equally alarming is the position CCSNH has been put in by a legislature that neglects the increasingly high cost of higher education, forcing potential students to go out of state where tuition is less.
More damaging is the prospect of those students never returning to New Hampshire and becoming significant contributors to their new communities, instead of enriching communities in their home state.
Our own son is a case in point. A 1996 graduate of Concord High, he was in the top 10% of his class. When he applied to UNH, he was offered no financial assistance, other than work-study. This, coupled with the high tuition (even then), prompted my wife and me to look out of state.
In 2000, our son graduated from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, having financial assistance along the way that made it less expensive to attend Bowling Green as an out-of-state student than to attend UNH as an in-state student. He is now the director of the Bird Program at the Cincinnati Zoo with no intention of coming back to New Hampshire to work.
I have met Chancellor Rubinstein and have a great deal of respect for him. I’m convinced he will do all he can to ensure the financial stability of CCSNH, but he cannot do it alone. He needs the help of a legislature that has chronically underfunded the seven community colleges around the state.
But it’s time for the legislature to view higher education in this state, not as a cost, but as an investment in the state’s social and economic development down the road. Not doing so jeopardizes the community colleges’ ability to continually produce graduates who are essential to driving a healthy state economy.
It’s time for leadership in the governor’s office and the state house to stop treating CCSNH as some kind of pesky relative who keeps asking, hat in hand, for money they grudgingly dole out, while still expecting the colleges to continue to do essential and important work.
In many ways the community colleges are like Oliver Twist, stuck in a workhouse as a child and getting an inadequate daily food allowance, prompting him to ask the cook one day, “Please sir, can I have some more?”
Surely, we can do better than this.