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I was recently appointed to the Lane Community College Budget Committee, though late enough in the year that I only participated in the final three meetings. Still, for me, three meetings were enough to reveal a much larger story hiding beneath the spreadsheets.
Here’s what I think I know.
Oregon community college budget committees are composed of elected college board members and an equal number of appointed citizens. Their charge is to review the proposed budget, hear public comment, examine the assumptions behind the numbers and recommend it to the full board.
This year’s discussions were unusually prolonged and, while mostly civil, occasionally bordered on contentious. LCC’s proposed budget for the 2027 fiscal year comes on the heels of midyear class cancellations, a mitigation plan involving program closures and broader concerns about the institution’s long-term financial condition. One recurring issue involved tuition.
Earlier this academic year, the board approved a tuition increase of just 1.2%. Then, during the final night of deliberations on May 27, Trustee Zach Mulholland proposed revisiting that decision and raising the increase to 2.1% to help offset future shortfalls.
I seconded the motion, not because I supported it, but because I believed the issue deserved public discussion.
Ultimately, the motion failed overwhelmingly. I voted against it myself.
But what stayed with me afterward was not the outcome. It was the realization that a very important part of the conversation had gone largely unspoken, and that I had failed to voice it myself. We discussed tuition levels, budget pressures and projected shortfalls almost entirely in the language of present-day necessity. There was no acknowledgment that Oregon’s higher education funding problems have been shaped by political and economic choices stretching back decades.
To understand why tuition debates at Oregon colleges now carry such weight, we have to go back to Ballot Measure 5.
Passed by voters in 1990, Measure 5 dramatically limited property taxes in Oregon. In many respects it mirrored California’s Proposition 13, reflecting the anti-tax politics of the late 1970s and 1980s. Supporters argued that homeowners, particularly retirees on fixed incomes, needed protection from rising property taxes. That concern was understandable, but the long-term consequences for public education proved immense.
Before Measure 5, local property taxes played a major role in supporting schools and community colleges. Once those revenues were capped, the state assumed far greater responsibility for financing K-12 education. The state’s general fund, however, has never been sufficient to maintain both K-12 and higher education at their previous levels.
Over time, political pressure favored protecting primary and secondary education, while colleges and universities were increasingly expected to generate revenue elsewhere. That meant tuition.
The shift happened gradually enough that people barely noticed it at first. One tuition increase did not fundamentally change the system. Neither did the next. But over time, the cumulative effect has been profound. Public higher education slowly evolved from a broadly funded public good into something increasingly financed by students.
When I first entered higher education, many years ago now, the dominant philosophy was that colleges served a broad public interest. An educated population strengthened communities, employers, civic institutions and democracy itself. Students benefited personally from earning degrees and improving their employment opportunities, but society benefited as well. The costs, therefore, were understood as something to be shared collectively.
Over time, however, higher education came to be framed less as a public investment and more as a private consumer commodity. If students would eventually earn more because of their education, then they should bear most of the financial responsibility for obtaining it.
At face value, this argument has an appealing logic. Students absolutely do benefit from higher education. But it overlooks the larger public decisions that constrained educational funding in the first place. We taxpayers and voters, collectively, chose to shrink the revenue source that once supported public colleges and universities, then gradually shifted more of the burden onto students and their families.
That reality sat quietly underneath the LCC Budget Committee discussions, even though no one in the room acknowledged it.
During public comment, students understandably argued against tuition increases. Many are already balancing work, rent, food insecurity, housing insecurity, childcare, transportation costs and debt. Even modest tuition increases can feel overwhelming when they are already living close to the financial edge.
At the same time, the institution faces legitimate fiscal pressures involving bargaining agreements, deferred maintenance, enrollment shifts, program sustainability and a looming demographic cliff. The math driving these discussions is real.
But arithmetic alone does not explain why Oregon students now shoulder so much of the cost of public higher education. That outcome reflects a deeper and largely unspoken decision about who benefits from higher education and who should pay for it.
For decades, Oregon has largely answered that question by shifting more of the responsibility onto students themselves. The budget-development process and board decision-making at LCC did not create this reality.
In the end, tuition debates are never simply about percentages. They are arguments about public priorities, generational obligations and the extent to which society still views higher education as a shared public good rather than merely a private economic transaction.
Of course, these issues are larger than any budget committee can resolve in a single year. If ever. But they are questions worth acknowledging explicitly, especially when the bill increasingly arrives in the hands of students.
