Testimony for the Joint House and Senate Ways & Means Committees
Subcommittees on Education
Proposed Budget for Fiscal Year 2005
February 2, 2004
Cambridge City Hall

Chairman Panagiotakas, Chairwoman Wolf and members of the Committee, for the record my name is Patricia Markunas. I am the president of the Massachusetts State College Association. We represent the 2500 faculty and librarians at the nine state colleges. I am pleased that members of both legislative houses are represented here today. It signifies the commitment that legislators have to support education in Massachusetts.

Members of the Committee, your historical support for our mission has never been more important than it is today. Although the governor’s proposed budget for higher education is an improvement over last year’s devastating proposals, there is still a long way to go to restore the system’s financial health and stability. Further, the governor’s proposals concerning changes in the state employee pension system and the state’s collective bargaining law have serious negative consequences for the faculty and librarians who educate our students.

As you can see from the attached table, Massachusetts was the only state among all 50 states to show a net decrease in the state’s appropriation to public higher education over the past 10 years. The governor’s modest proposed increase in funds for higher education will not even restore the appropriations that existed ten years ago. This loss of financial support has resulted in dramatic increases in student fees and tuition, increased class sizes and decreased course availability, faculty and staff positions not being replaced, and libraries decimated in terms of their collections and services.

Substantial support will be needed to reverse the impact of these cuts to higher education over the past decade. At the direction of the Legislature, the Board of Higher Education has developed a formula by which state appropriations should be awarded to the state’s colleges and universities. By the reckoning of the BHE’s own formula, public higher education in Massachusetts was underfunded by $111,000,000 last year. The increase proposed by the governor does not come close to meeting this recommended level of funding. As the Legislature mandated a formula-based funding model for higher education, it has a responsibility to provide the funds as required by the formula developed.