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Higher ed in jeopardy, Ritter says at summit

Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 9, 2007 at midnight

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Seven years of lean state support has placed Colorado's higher-education system "in serious jeopardy," with rising tuition driving out disadvantaged students, Gov. Bill Ritter warned Friday.

Tuition accounts for 60 percent of revenue at Colorado colleges, far above the national average of 33 percent, Ritter said.

"I'm concerned about the lack of public funding and what it's doing to the quality of instruction," Ritter said.

Ritter spoke on the first day of a "higher-education summit" that he organized to help put higher education on secure financial footing.

The summit brought 40 higher-education leaders to a Colorado Springs resort, including the presidents and board chairmen of most of the institutions.

Before adjourning today, they will try to come up with a long-range funding plan.

Colorado colleges saw sharp funding cuts in the earlier part of the decade, when the state economy went sour. The colleges made up for lost revenue by raising tuition.

Ritter stopped short Friday of identifying a possible source of additional funding for higher education. He did not use the words tax increase.

But he emphasized the public will not approve additional funding for colleges unless they are convinced that the schools are being run efficiently. And change probably will come over several years.

"We can't make it up in a day; we can't make it up in a year," he said.

Some of the college and university officials agreed during discussions Friday that the public doesn't understand how little money higher education realized as a result of a 2005 referendum that suspended state spending caps.

Lena Elliot, who chairs the board of Mesa State College in Grand Junction, said, "The perception out there is we got an awful lot of money, and we don't need any more."

Referendum C allowed the state to keep $1.1 billion that would have been refunded during the 2005-06 fiscal year. Higher education was supposed to get $334 million of the money.

But higher education saw only about $76 million of new money that year.

"We have a little challenge (to explain where the money went)," said University of Colorado President Hank Brown.