Because the State is wasting the taxpayers’ money on other things. UO will get about $65M from the state next year. In comparison, Governor Kulongoski blew about $200M on green energy schemes. How did subsidies for corporate wind farms and solar panels for McMansions become more important than accessible education for the middle class?
Governor Kitzhaber and Cylvia Hayes kept serving up the green pork, and he also wasted ~$300M on his failed Cover Oregon website. $300M for a broken website? The lawyers are dining well off that. And now the Register Guard, which deserves a medal for its coverage of Trillium, has detailed how the Oregon Health Plan is wasting tens of millions more:
Too many patients covered by Trillium Community Health Plan are being treated at emergency rooms instead of at doctors’ offices; too few are being screened for colon cancer; too few are receiving follow-up care after being hospitalized for mental illness and not enough are satisfied with the care they’re getting from Trillium, according to Trillium’s latest state performance report.
However, the state didn’t penalize Trillium for these shortcomings. Instead, it gave Trillium an incentive payment of about $17.5 million for meeting expectations on a dozen other quality measures.
Check their sidebar for their many other stories on this. The Oregon Health Plan was Kitzhaber’s signature achievement. He let it become a feeding trough. What will our new politicians do about it these scandals, besides making it ever more more difficult for reporters to get the public records they need to tell us about them?
UO has its problems, but follow the money. Paying $327K to keep a failed business school dean from teaching is, roughly, 1/10th of one percent of Oregon’s problems.
oregon is hardly alone in this. Similar declines began in almost every state beginning in the mid 1970s, Pell grants began about the same time. coincidence? The Cornell study below says no. States apparently liked the idea of giving money directly to voting students and parents (instead of public colleges) so much that they began cutting college budgets to fund direct state aid to students, triggering the high tuition/aid system students and colleges suffer under now.
http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=student