Cash for Class

Presidents at our state's universities have said that tuition hikes are likely if state lawmakers approve the proposed 2011-2012 budget, which cuts their state funding by 5.8 percent.

David Boren and Burns Hargis, presidents of the state's two largest schools, said they will work to try to keep the percentage of increase in the single digits, but it will be difficult because more people want to enroll in college. Perhaps those two gentlemen might audit a math class or two, or maybe I should, because according to my rudimentary arithmetic more than four percentage points buffer the amount of cuts from the dreaded double-digit territory. One of us added wrong.

Last week, President Boren's school okayed a $2-million-plus per year contract for its men's basketball coach, an amount the university refused to disclose until the regents meeting that approved it. Boren himself earns north of a half a million, not counting benefits and his retirement income from his days as a U.S. Senator and governor of Oklahoma. Like students, he lives in university housing, but unlike them, he doesn't have to pay room and board.

Hargis, not having served his school as long as Boren has, doesn't match those compensation figures, nor do the coaches at his school match the figures (or longterm success) of the coaches at Boren's. My point, though, is that there are a number of areas where these schools spend lavishly, while they proclaim they walk a razor-thin line of poverty that means cuts in their state funds -- heck, even a failure to increase their state funds by as much as they ask for -- have to be passed on to students.

Salaries have to increase, budgets have to increase, so tuition has to increase. No other option presents itself, ever.

Maybe it's not only my math that's off.