With the first full week of this year’s General Assembly session behind us, spurring job creation and strengthening Virginia’s economy continue to be bipartisan priorities. Fortunately, Virginia has a tried and true model for economic success that positioned the Commonwealth to weather the Great Recession far better than most: Invest in people and infrastructure. Unfortunately, the General Assembly’s failure to take a balanced approach to state finances is causing that proven model to unravel. On the infrastructure front, much has been written and reported about the General Assembly’s ongoing failure to come up with the $1 billion per year for the next 25 years necessary for transportation to protect and improve quality of life and business. However, there has been less discussion about the threats to public schools and our colleges and universities, which are our primary investments in people.
While Virginia’s “cuts only” approach to balancing the budget has largely — although not entirely — spared massive cuts to public schools, Virginia’s higher education system has borne disproportionate cuts, forcing schools to hike tuition and enroll fewer in-state students. This threatens the pipeline of highly educated employees needed to grow our economy. In response, the Virginia Business Higher Education Council announced its “Grow by Degrees” campaign to improve access to higher education and ensure Virginians can earn 100,000 additional high-quality degrees over the next 15 years. This has near unanimous bipartisan support in the General Assembly and Congress, and Governor McDonnell’s budget this year includes a $50 million down payment to help restore a small piece of past cuts to higher education.
However, at the same time he is taking a small step in the right direction on higher education, Governor McDonnell has proposed major steps backward that would undermine Virginia’s public schools. First he proposed taking $150 million from the general fund — money that currently goes to education, public safety, and human services — for a plan that includes a taxpayer-funded bailout of private corporations that failed to secure Wall Street financing for the I-95/395 HOT Lanes project. Then he proposed diverting a portion of sales tax revenue from public education to paving roads. Now he is compounding these attacks on public education with a plan to give tax breaks for businesses that invest in private schools. To be clear, I have nothing against the private and religious schools that provide a great education to many in our community. However, this proposal would very directly divert tax dollars from public schools to private schools, undermining Virginia’s primary investment in our people.
Despite the evidence that our economy and our entire society benefits when we have a world-class education system, the cold reality is that die-hard anti-taxers who control the Republican majority in the House of Delegates make strengthening our public investment in education very difficult. However, my proposal to expand access to college through a Commonwealth Scholars Program and Investment Fund is gaining some traction, even among staunch conservative Republicans. Under this innovative plan, money from private investors would create a fund to offer full-tuition college scholarships. Scholarship recipients would agree to pay back into the fund a small, fixed percentage of their annual income, however high or low that income may be, for a fixed number of years after graduation. The strong and predictable average income growth that results from a college degree would produce growth in the fund, some of which would be returned to the investors, and some of which would expand the number of scholarships over time. Unless the General Assembly is willing to make massive, sustained investments in higher education, it will be next to impossible to achieve 100,000 additional high-quality college degrees over the next 15 years without this kind of innovative approach.
As the General Assembly session progresses, I will continue working to protect our existing investments in people and infrastructure, and I will continue working on innovative ways to strengthen those investments for the future. If you have any feedback on these ideas, or any other legislation before the General Assembly, please contact me at vog.ainigriv.esuohnull@nilgnEDleD or 703-549-3203. Thanks for the opportunity to serve.