By: Doug

Doug
Mon, 27 Apr 2015 16:34:27 +0000

Welcome to the real world professors. I am on my local school board where my neighbors and I govern a district roughly 5-7% the size of the college you are attempting to manage. Your organization is 15-20x as big yet your projected deficit is only 5-10x as big as ours. Thanks in part to an excellent STEM degree, I know that those figures don’t line up like they should. Reducing expenses a few million dollars should be easy for an organization so large. We’ve closed $2 million dollar gaps in the past. We’ll be able to deal with our problem. You should have little problem dealing with yours.

We already expect the state will be giving us less money next year (before and after inflation) than we received this year. Unlike higher ed, we can’t charge tuition. We are required to educate children with what we are given by the state, all while the universities and colleges simply raise the price to cover gaps. Our state’s constitution (I live in TSUN) mandates free K-12. We can’t ask our students to buy the 9th edition of a $150-$250 textbook, one that includes little not contained in the 2nd and 3rd editions. Physics 131, German 104, and Econ 200 could all be taught with the same books I used, but I doubt they are.

Thirty four years ago my first OSU tuition check was ~$525 which should have risen to $1356 today. That’s about the cost of one 3 hour class this summer, not a full load which costs more than $5000. Inflation should have raised that tuition by 158%, but it has actually gone up 858%. How can you justify the difference?

Mel might be on to something. Dr. Mandersheid has been distracted for quite some time trying to help OSU keep its story straight.