SwampFox

What is it about, "It's a marathon, not a sprint" that you don't understand?

Submitted by: John Warner on Oct 06, 2010 at 12:52 am Tagged with: Higher Education Source: Swamp Fox

It was inevitable this would happen. In fact those of us involved in creating a more prosperous South Carolina have been anticipating it. What we have been most concerned about is whether we can sustain the momentum of growing a creative economy long enough to achieve our aspirations.

We even have a rallying cry to describe our concern. It's a marathon not a sprint. We have said it so often that some think it has become trite. We'll it's no longer trite.

We have made incredible progress in recent years, yet we have a long way to go. The level of an individual's or a community's income is highly correlated with the level of education. You can't increase prosperity in South Carolina without increasing the level of education. If average income in South Carolina was at the national average there would be $35 billion more personal income in South Carolina. What would we do to attract a company that had a $35 billion impact on South Carolina's economy? We threw more than half a billion dollars at Boeing, so it would be something considerably north of that. Why aren't we willing to make a similar investment in Education = Prosperity to realize a $35 Billion Education Dividend.

Instead, the forces of the status quo are pushing back ferociously. Can we sustain forward pressure to ensure we break through this and continue to make progress? I don't know. I am very concerned, and you should be too. This summer the governor vetoed, and the House sustained, the budget for the NanoCenter at USC to reach out to industry in South Carolina to help make us more globally competitive. Recently the South Carolina Budget Control Board placed a moratorium on university construction, saying, in effect, that we don't want to make investments in bold visions for how the state's citizens can be leaders in major global market opportunities, like CU-ICAR.

For years, the South Carolina Legislature has been changing how higher education is funded from direct appropriations to indirect funding of Life and Palmetto scholarships. There have been positives and negatives to this. The best and brightest high school graduates who get the largest Life and Palmetto scholarships have stayed in South Carolina to attend college, stemming the brain drain. Their cost of attending college has gone down dramatically. Students who do not receive a Life and Palmetto scholarship have seen the cost of attending college increase dramatically, sometimes prohibitively. There are crucial public policy discussions we must have about how higher education is funded, but whether to make investments in enhancing higher education shouldn't be open for much debate.

But that is precisely where we are headed. The budget during the upcoming legislative session will be draconian, because the legislature needs to fill a billion dollar hole when Federal stimulus money runs out. Decisions will be made that will impact the prosperity of the state for a generation or more.