UMD professor Richard Green writes his views on UMD's budget shortfall:
I want to make two points:
- I think that resident tuition is too high at the University of Minnesota.
- I think that UMD is being short-changed by the University. It does not get its fair share of state money.
I was born and raised in Duluth and attended UMD. By the time tuition was frozen a few years ago, tuition was 55 times as high as when I was a student. Part of the increase was due to inflation, but adjusted for inflation, tuition is seven times as high as when I was a student.
There are two bad consequences of high tuition. One consequence is that potential students with poorer parents are less likely to attend, and those who do attend are less likely to graduate. The other consequence is that many students are left with unmanageable loan debt.
A recent study showed that the chance of getting a four-year degree by the age of 24 is 73 percent for students whose family income is in the top quartile, but is only 8 percent for students whose families are in the bottom quartile.
A large fraction of University of Minnesota students graduate with loan debt, and that loan debt averages about $30,000.
I think that UMD is being short-changed by the University. That is, I think that UMD gets a smaller share of the state appropriation than it should. It is difficult compare the Twin Cities campus with UMD, and it seems that administrators want to keep it that way. One way of comparing the campuses shows that UMD gets about $40 million less than it should, while another way shows only a $6-7 million shortfall. In either case, the shortfall is greater than the current deficit that is causing headaches at UMD. Our administrators (President Kaler and Chancellor Black) do not want to compare funding for the Twin Cities campus and UMD, saying that is like comparing “apples and oranges.” I do not think that it is impossible to look at funding and decide what is fair. I think that the administrators do not want to look at funding because they do not want it to become clear that resource allocation is unfair.
-Richard Green