It is time to make difficult, unpleasant and unpopular choices. Last week, the Vanguard reported that Portland State needs to cut $25 million from its budget this upcoming school year. The fact that we are saving money is good, but the fact that this may cost 68 positions is bad. And even worse, I don’t think there is a way around this.
Currently, the money which funds PSU is coming mainly from the students and, as much as I would like to say that the way we can save these 68 positions is by educating people about the importance of college and enrolling more students that could potentially create more money, it is unrealistic, and here is why.
The people who know about the importance of college are already here, and many of them probably have money to afford it. The people who will want to come to college after being told they should come will probably have to apply for scholarships, and the outcome will result in more people competing for the same scholarships. The students who rely on these scholarships every year will either keep them or lose them, so in fact it doesn’t do any good. We will be replacing the incoming students with the old students who end up without any means to fund their college education. Then students end up looking for jobs. But employment is a lose-lose situation too, because people are much more educated than those who lost their jobs, and are now competing for the same jobs high school students had a few summers ago.
For example, an article in the Portland Tribune on July 2 stated, “Every summer, the Oregon Zoo hires about 150 summer employees, most part-time … And every summer the zoo gets more applicants than the year before … This year, more than 7,000 have applied for the no-benefits, minimum-wage jobs. But the growing number of people applying for summer zoo jobs isn’t what most startled zoo officials, who figured the Portland area’s high unemployment rate would have some effect. What zoo officials weren’t prepared for was having adult applicants outnumber kids this year by a ratio of 9-to-1.”
What we should do is look at what other universities did about the same disaster. An article from www.mindingthecampus.com titled “The Trouble With Cutting College Costs” stated in March, “The University of California’s Berkeley campus … decided that one way to cope with a projected reduction of $65 million to $75 million in subsidies from the nearly insolvent state of California would be to halve the size of its physical education program, which offers academic credit to students who enroll in such courses as team sports, aquatics and dance. Since educating minds, not bodies, is presumably the primary mission of a university.”
Any position being cut is bound to be controversial. But, a university is “educating minds and not bodies” so perhaps cutting positions from the physical education department may be the smartest. If not, I disagree that CLAS should lose the most jobs. It is not fair, and we should think about cutting positions evenly amongst the eight different colleges.
No matter the decision, it is likely we will follow the same pattern as most universities across the country.