On Thursday, March 26 student trustee Tom Ng and I were invited to testify before the Assembly Budget Committee's public hearing in Trenton. Below, please find the remarks I delivered to Chair Greenwald, Vice-Chair Schaer and the rest of the Assembly Budget Committee on the impact of this year's proposed budget and the need for reinvestment in public higher education.
REMARKS TO THE ASSEMBLY BUDGET COMMITTEE
March 26, 2009
Dr. Peter P. Mercer, President
Ramapo College of New Jersey
Chair Greenwald and Vice-Chair Schaer and members of the Assembly Budget Committee, good morning and thank you for granting me this opportunity to address you on the Fiscal Year 2010 State Budget.
I am now in my fourth year as President of Ramapo College of New Jersey, and I am accompanied this morning by Ramapo’s student trustee Thomas Ng who will be addressing you shortly. Tom grew up in Oradell, is a junior at Ramapo and, as a Presidential Scholar, carries a 3.98 GPA. He is also an accomplished musician, an Eagle Scout and a black belt in Tae Kwan Do. I try to take him with me wherever I go.
At the risk of embarrassing him, Thomas Ng, and the thousands of superb young men and women like him, is the reason I am here. As a college President, I am above all a futurist. Institutionally, this means that I need to be aware of diverse emerging global trends, potential political and social scenarios, market opportunities and risks to be managed. But at a personal level, I get to talk to students and their families and prospective students and their families about what their individual futures may hold. Make the right choices, I want to say to them, and the prospects should be virtually limitless.
Each of you as state legislators is a futurist too, although your canvas is much larger than mine. You must concern yourselves with the future of the State of New Jersey and, in fashioning the Fiscal Year 2010 State Budget, you have some very difficult decisions to make. The budget proposed by our Governor equally reflected some tough choices and it is gratifying to see that the cuts to higher education are less than they might have been. In these times that is the right emphasis – the right choice. And while I welcome any development that holds out the prospect of renewed emphasis on the goal of educating New Jersey students, I confess to a high degree of frustration.
I arrived at Ramapo College as President in 2005. My previous experience at a large Canadian research university included six years as Dean of a Law School and eight years concurrently as General Counsel and as Vice-President Administration and Finance. I am used to the ups and downs of public funding but, I have to tell you, since I arrived in New Jersey it has been mostly ebb and little flow.
I don’t intend to whine about this – I was hired to manage and I will manage the 5% cut proposed for public higher education in 2010. But I was also hired to look to the future and if one accepts that past behavior is the best predictor of the future then that future has a large question mark hanging over it.
I grew up in fishing villages on the east coast of Canada and my family eventually moved a couple of thousand miles to be near a good university in Ontario. My parents, who were not people of means, did that because they wanted what was best for me and my brothers. I see that impulse as quintessentially American: the idea that individuals can, if given the opportunity, improve their lives and the lives of their families and fellow citizens through education. There is concrete evidence that this promise is increasingly unfulfilled. If one looks at the percentage of the population age 35 to 64 with a college degree, the United States ranks second. However, if one focuses on those whose ages are between 25 and 34, the United States falls to 10th. This does not happen by accident; it happens as a result of public policy choices.
Let me give you one example. The Governor’s proposed budget would set state appropriation per student at Ramapo College at an amount that is 44% lower than it was in 2000. Together with the other state colleges we have significantly increased enrolment and we have also significantly improved our retention and graduation rates. However there is a limit to what we can do and to what our students and their families can do. Many of my students need to work during the school year to help pay their tuition and fees. That makes it a lot harder for them to graduate in four years.
At Ramapo College, which was founded only 39 years ago, the decline in operating support has happened over a period when we have made significant capital investment on our own and without state contribution. As you know, there has not been a bond issue in support of capital construction at New Jersey’s public colleges and universities since 1988. In response to overwhelming demand from New Jersey students and their families, Ramapo College has built dormitories and student facilities and transformed itself from a commuter campus to a residential one. In doing so, however, it has accumulated debt whose service cost consumes 13 percent of the operating budget.
We need basic capital improvements at Ramapo – a new roof on our main academic building and refurbishing of our science laboratories for example – and held out some hope that federal stabilization funds might be deployed for such purposes in the manner being discussed in other states, I do not hear similar discussions in New Jersey, which is very much to be lamented.
Higher education – especially public higher education – is vital to the economic and social well being of any modern society. It is particularly important in difficult times to stay focused on that overriding reality. Thank you for listening to me and for your own commitment to advancing the interests of the state of New Jersey and its people.
