UTEP president: Funding for higher education is in a downward spiral

A downward spiral. That is how UTEP President Dr. Diana Natalicio described the decline in state financial support for higher education institutions. It was a sentiment shared by NMSU’s President Dr. Garrey Carruthers at a town hall organized by the El Paso Times that was held on the UTEP campus.

The two panelists were joined by El Paso Community College President Dr. William Serrata and Dr. Richard Lange, president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center – El Paso.

Organizers said the status and future of higher education is an important conversation to have in the middle of a legislative session.

Lawmakers are trying to slash billions of dollars before June amid the prolonged oil price slump that has stung state coffers. Higher education and Medicaid are among the targeted cuts.

“We need the business communities, the chambers of commerce, the volunteer organizations and the people who work with unemployed people and that kind of thing. We need more people to step up to these legislators and say ‘This is the most important function in the world and you need to fund it. And the less you fund it the more you are going to fund prisons and some other things,” Carruthers said.

“So we’ve grown 11,000 students and the state appropriations has fallen almost $2 million to serve that many more students,” Serrata said.

Topics included the rising costs of tuition and fees, and their impact on accessibility to higher education.

An audience was allowed to ask questions of the panelists.

Other topics included the role of higher education in economic development, expansion of health-related education in the region, and the lower levels of higher education attainment in the border region, and how to address that.

All of the panelists talked about the role of higher education in social mobility, particularly in a time of growing wealth disparity.

“This is a downward spiral that we are in as far as I am concerned. Funding for public education at all levels is in a downward spiral. Where is that going to take us in the 21st century? Not any place that I think we are going to be proud of. We are not going to have healthy people, we are not going to have people who are productive and we are not going to have people who can contribute to our collective good,” Natalicio said.

The event was moderated by Bob Moore, the editor of the El Paso Times.