Utah lawmakers gave final approval Thursday to the anticipated $60 million cut to Utah’s higher education instruction budget — with one senator casting the lone dissenting vote.
Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, has been vocal in her opposition to HB1, the higher education base budget bill this year, standing against it in the Senate’s 21-1 vote that took place under suspended rules.
The measure passed in the House earlier this week 73-0. It now moves forward to the governor to be signed.
Base budget bills are typically a simple approval of the previous fiscal year’s budget for an area of the state operations, such as higher education, and can be added to with new appropriations for programs or proposals. But this year, legislative leaders pushed for $60 million to be shifted away from Utah’s eight public colleges and universities.
In the budget, they moved that money — a 10% cut to the funds for classroom instruction — to a separate line item called “strategic reinvestment.”
Schools will have to petition the Utah Board of Higher Education for their share of the money back only after showing that it will be reallocated for high-demand and high-wage majors. The state defined those programs in a recent audit that also instructed university presidents to cut “inefficient” programs with low enrollment and little impact on the state’s workforce.
“I am concerned about that reallocation,” Riebe told The Salt Lake Tribune after the vote.
The budget changes have sparked fears among higher education faculty that the state’s liberal arts programs will be the first on the chopping block, because they won’t be able to measure up with metrics focused on salaries.
A complementing bill, HB265, tasks the governing Utah Board of Higher Education with coming up with the specific criteria for how to make the cuts and reallocations; that’s slated for a first committee hearing Friday.
Geoff Landward, Utah’s commissioner over higher education, said he wants to ensure the decisions take into account several measurements, including salaries but also community impact. He doesn’t want to see the humanities or social sciences diminished or targeted, he has said, and those will always remain in the required general education classes students take.
Still, Riebe, who works in K-12 education, echoed the faculty concerns last week during an initial debate about the higher education budget. The state, she said, needs teachers and social workers that aren’t always highly paid.
“It shouldn’t all be about the dollars and the cents,” the senator said. “There are a lot of jobs out there that are important to our community but don’t pay a lot.”
She also said she was “disheartened” that the talk had focused on wages instead of passion.
Riebe was joined in speaking out against the cuts by Republican Sen. John Johnson and Evan Vickers, but both supported the final budget measure Thursday. The three senators spoke about how the liberal arts create better citizens who can think critically, collaborate and adapt — and therefore are better workers, too.
“Johnson, Vickers and I all were concerned about creating a better workforce with critical thinkers,” Riebe added Thursday.
Sen. Ann Millner, R-Ogden, is the Senate sponsor of HB1 and the previous president of Weber State University. She has said that the reallocation will help reduce redundancies with programs offered at multiple institutions that don’t attract a lot of students and end up not using state funding as well as she would like to see.
She also pushed back Thursday about the measure being labeled a cut when talking about the bill before the vote.
“It’s still in this budget,” Millner said. “It’s just moved to the Board of Higher Education.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sen. Ann Millner, R-Ogden, speaks to the resolution in the Senate on Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024.
Overall, the higher education base budget also includes a $2.93 billion allocation from the general fund in income taxes for operating and capital expenses. And there’s $71.5 million from the general fund for performance funding for schools, based on how many students they enroll and graduate.
The total operating budget, for all of higher education in the state, including money collected through tuition and other revenue streams, is $12.84 billion, according to HB1.
Millner said she anticipates adjustments, through separate bills, as the session moves forward.
