By Chris Powell
What a silly spectacle was last week’s hearing of the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee on the budget of the state colleges and universities system. Chancellor Terrence Cheng, whose annual salary and benefits exceed $450,000, not counting whatever he can sneak onto his expense account, again pleaded poverty on behalf of his empire.
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Sitting near him were assistants whose annual compensation far exceeds $200,000.
With federal government epidemic emergency money evaporating and Governor Lamont insisting that higher education save money, Cheng insisted, “There is not much more we can cut without cutting into bone.”
Legislators from the Republican minority snorted at that, and even a big-spending Democrat, New Haven Sen. Gary Winfield, rebuked the college administrators: “The biggest, shiniest thing that you can cut is you.”
That is: Cut the boneheads, not the bone.
Cheng says the college system aims to eliminate management positions. But this may reduce management, of which there already is little in state government’s overly unionized environment. What needs to be reduced is payroll generally. Could the colleges and universities system not find adequate managers at, say, $150,000 a year?
So what if course offerings had to be reduced and professors laid off? In his state budget address three weeks ago Governor Lamont noted that most students in the colleges and universities system don’t graduate, a statistic implying that half the system is unnecessary, except for the people it employs.
In any case Connecticut’s educational problem is not higher education but lower education, where nearly all students now graduate from high school even though most never master basic skills, standards having been abolished. State government doesn’t dare impose a proficiency test for graduation or promotion from grade to grade lest people discover that their Lake Wobegon impression of education in Connecticut — that everyone is above average — is actually a joke.
What if state legislators ever thought seriously about a system of higher education from which most students drop out even while its chief executive is paid close to a half-million dollars a year? What if some embarrassment ever sunk in?
Would legislators lose their reluctance to shrink the system? Or would they arrange to extend lower education’s fraudulent practices to higher education and award diplomas to everyone regardless of academic performance and even attendance? Indeed, why not just distribute high school and college diplomas with birth certificates? Connecticut wouldn’t need too many more chancellors for that.
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How much is illegal immigration costing Connecticut?
In a television interview last week the president of the Yankee Institute, Carol Platt Liebau, charged that state government is spending more than a billion dollars annually on education, medical care, general welfare expenses, and incarceration for the state’s estimated more than 120,000 immigration law violators. The cost estimate came from an advocacy group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Of course some illegal immigrants pay sales and other taxes, but because of their poverty the taxes they pay are almost certainly not coming close to offsetting their expense to the state.
Governor Lamont dismissed the billion-dollar figure as “totally fanciful” but admitted he didn’t know the cost and invited journalists to seek answers from his administration. Risking politically incorrect journalism, Mike Cerulli of WTHN-TV8 in New Haven queried the governor’s budget office and the state Education Department and predictably enough got nowhere. The budget office said it doesn’t know what illegal immigrants cost the state and just calculating the cost would be too expensive.
The annual cost must be at least several hundred millions of dollars, for that is state government’s estimate just for extending Medicaid to illegal immigrant children 16 and older. (Younger illegal immigrant children are already covered.) Because of their inability to speak English and their lack of previous education, the cost of educating such children is far higher than it is for ordinary students.
But the most important point here is that the governor and Democratic legislators simply don’t want to know, and don’t want the public to know, the cost of their policy of making Connecticut a “sanctuary state.”
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 