By ROBERT O’NEIL

Our Montana university system was founded on the idea of a democratic, tuition-free education. That system was instrumental in the enormous growth of our country after World War II.

Several recent speakers have told us that the future is technology manufacturing; however, the Legislature cuts the legs out from under any effort by continually raising and then maintaining college tuition. Imposing tuition on public university students is a slow form of economic suicide. It is hard to understand the mindset that willingly and blithely sends money for excess profits to international megacorps for reinvestment in China but balks at sending money to the state for reinvestment at home.

In the past session the Legislature passed a university budget that includes some $28 million for freezing tuition costs. The governor has asked that the freeze be continued. This is merely a gesture, and more like a punch in the face to future generations. And there is a hook. In the second year of the funding the distribution of the funds must be (what is called) performance-based (rather than enrollment-based) funding.

Performance-based funding has been tried for some years in a number of states. In no state is there a clear case of its having provided the benefits that were proposed, and several states have dropped it.

There is no clear way of defining or measuring performance. Consequently, retention and the amount of time students use to obtain a degree become dominant. Neither is related to quality of education. The major cause for students dropping out and extending their stay is that they can’t afford the tuition. (There follows an explanation of this.)

Over the years, the Legislature has ended our founders’ tradition of tuition-free higher education and reduced funding for the University System. That forced the inception of tuition and, then, regular tuition increases till now the taxpayers fund less than 20 percent of the academic budget.

In short, by cutting funding it is the Legislature that is responsible for poor retention and long stays, and, now, they want the universities to fix it with a competitive race to the bottom. They are asking the U-System to change for the worse a situation over which the universities have no control.

If this very damaging provision must be lived with, two aspects must be added. (1) Each campus must compete only with its own past record, not with other campuses. For example, students on the Missoula campus are more likely to afford tuition than those on the Helena campus. (2) We must stop calculating completion time by calendar year, and, instead, calculate by terms (semesters, quarters) attended. (Not six calendar years but 12 semesters attended.) Our many non-traditional students who have to earn a living while going to school should not be treated like the young kids of the tuition-free days.)

What is the scope of the problem?

A McKinsey Global Institute study projects that in 2020 in the world’s advanced economies the surplus of low-skilled workers will be 35 million and the shortage of medium and high skilled workers will be 18 million. Economists tell us we must have more and more college graduates to remain competitive.

President Obama has asked for 8.2 million additional bachelor and associate degrees by 2020 — an annual increase of 4.2 percent.

This past spring, enrollment at the Missoula campus dropped. (For the first time since WW II?)

The U.S. ranks 15th among industrialized nations for completion rate.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, in the days before tuition, the U.S. had the highest percentage of new college graduates in the world. Today, Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, and South Korea (all with tuition-free higher education) have a higher percentage of degree holders ages 25-34 than the U.S.

According to the China Education Center, the tuition-free Chinese higher education budget increased 45 percent from 2007 to 2011. In 1997 there were 1,022 institutions of higher education in China. In 2010 there were 2,305.

This year 11 million Chinese students will apply for 6.6 million tuition-free places. They will join others to make a total enrollment in higher education of 21.4 million up from 9 million in 2001.

To supply the skilled work force we need, we need to enroll more and more students whose parents did not attend college. Unfortunately, our efforts to get these students into college and keep them there are failing because the burden of financing higher education has fallen on the students, and they can’t afford to pay the tuition and stay.

Here in Montana very few of them have the approximately $24,000 it will cost in tuition for four years on our university campuses. (For a top high school student from a middle- or lower-income family, scholarships make it cheaper to go to Harvard or Stanford than to go to the UM.) So we ask them to borrow money.

The result is that, nationwide, college loan debt is now over $1 trillion (that exceeds credit card debt). In 2011 the U.S. Department of Education spent $1.4 billion on student loan collections and guarantees. A 2011 study by the Washington, D.C., Institute for Higher Education found that 58 percent of the 1.8 million borrowers whose loans became due in 2005 had not received a degree. Because they can’t raise the money, they are dropping out or they are defaulting. Over half of that 58 percent were delinquent. (In Montana they lose their driver’s licenses, so they can’t go to work.)

Continually rising tuition causes students to work long hours which reduces the odds of completing a degree. In 2009 the default rate on student loans for B.A.’s was 3.7 percent; for those with some college but no degree it was 16.8 percent. In October 2012 the unemployment rate for people with a B.A. was 4.1 percent, and for those with some college but no degree it was 9.8 percent. In 2010 the average earnings of Americans ages 25-34 employed full time with a B.A. was $45,000; for those with some college but no degree the average earnings were $32,000.

The result is that one-fifth of the American work force has some college but no degree. Their jobs are going away or have gone away, and those jobs are not coming back. The U.S. economy has lost more jobs to robots than it has to moving jobs overseas. If a robot can do the job, a robot will.

Since WWII the Montana economy has benefited from recent college graduates buying a home with a loan from a local bank. Now, that is no longer possible because the graduates have to use any surplus money to pay off a student loan to a major out-of-state bank

What do we need to do? We need to return our university and community college systems to zero tuition. To do that (for the Montana university system) will require approximately a reduction of $1,000 per student per year for six years or $500 a year for 12 years.

Where to get the money? We need a long-term commitment. Texans created a resource depletion tax on the oil companies to pay the people of Texas for the resource that was being taken away and used it for a university endowment. It became the largest university endowment in the country. We can do it with coal, gas. and oil. We can also restore part of the upper bracket tax cut many of us got a few years ago, earmark funds for tuition reduction, and keep our money here instead of sending it to Wall Street. I’m ready and willing to help.

We would be foolish to neglect development of our natural resources, but in the 21st century the development of renewable human resources will be much more important. Shifting the cost of higher education away from taxpayers (like me) who send surplus money to New York City onto students who have no surplus and have to borrow and, then, haven’t the income to repay, is the same mistake we made with the housing market. We are cutting future generations off from the American dream.

There is another side to this.

A quick (very rough) check, a couple of years ago, showed average salaries across the Missoula campus ranged from $92,000 in law and $87,000 in management to $54,000 in anthropology. And the gap between the professional schools and the arts and sciences continues to widen.

The university is answerable less and less to the people through the Legislature and more and more answerable to corporations. This is not because corporations tell universities what to teach. But they do say that they will finance a building or a faculty position in a specialty they consider relevant to them. They are not going to endow a chair in anthropology or philosophy. There is an irony here. When corporate executives are asked to list the qualifications they desire in a new employee, they list those that come under the headings of ability to adapt quickly to new situations, to have learned how to learn. The irony is that these abilities are learned primarily in the arts and sciences, not in professional schools. But corporate executives, at this point, don’t see the disconnect.

And the university president, caught in the gale-force wind of fund raising, can give only less time and thought to education.

Robert O’Neil is a resident of Kalispell.