Travis Wilson is a well-rounded student. He’s involved in numerous organizations on campus, including the Student Government Association, is informed on campus events and was a HOPE scholarship recipient until this semester.
Wilson maxed out his scholarship by taking too many credit hours, leaving him about $2,000 short for the fall semester.
Wilson had no choice but to raise the money himself or leave school. Determined to stay at UT, he created a GoFundMe (http://www.gofundme.com/xz2jwjyg) page and solicited donations from his friends to cover his tuition.
Fortunately, the page was an immediate success with Wilson raising all the funds in just two days. While Wilson is still in $23,000 of college debt, for the moment, he is safe.
But crowdsourcing tuition money from friends and strangers online? What brought us to this point?
Unlike most states, Tennessee raises most of its revenue through a high sales tax instead of a state income tax. While this gives us a lower cost of living, one result is less money for higher education in lean years, which is a lower budget priority than K-12 education and prison.
Before the recession, the majority of the cost of putting a student through UT was provided by the state, with the rest through tuition. However, that trend has since been reversed.
The percent of the state budget going to higher education dropped from 53 percent to 39 percent from 2001 to 2015, with schools like UT Knoxville raising tuition just to keep up, and passing the hurt on to Wilson and thousands of students like him.
Tuition at UT has more than doubled just from 2008. Back then, freshmen were paying just $5,428 annually, while freshmen for fall 2015 pay $12,436 (http://onestop.utk.edu/your-money/tuition-fees/) annually. While UT may still be considered a “best value” school, at this rate what happens in the next seven years? Or 10 or 15?
However, the tuition problem and the 51 percent of students that graduate from the UT system with debt cannot entirely blame their troubles on the administrative Board of Trustees.
With a sales tax instead of an income tax, most of the state government’s revenue comes from goods, rather than services. Items like gasoline and beer are more heavily taxed in proportion to services such as lawyer fees.
Unfortunately, it is the service sector of the economy that is growing the fastest and can provide a more stable source of taxes revenue, while the goods section cannot. Just to continue to provide basic state services, the state government has to raise taxes.
Essentially, Tennessee’s tax code, the state’s ability to fund itself, is woefully inadequate.
This is not a new idea or some socialist scheme to hurt business. This is a real problem that the state government has known about for more than 30 years and done nothing to fix.
In 1984, Lewis Donelson, Tennessee’s commissioner for finance and administration from 1979-81, predicted the state government would soon create an income tax to compensate for ever-increasing costs and prevent inequality in the tax code, according to a Daily Beacon article from April 18, 1984.
“It seems to me that our (tax) system fails to meet the fairness requirements,” Donelson said in the article.
Donelson added that then-Gov. Lamar Alexander assured him that an income tax bill passed by the General Assembly would be signed into law.
Quite the opposite happened. Tennessee failed to pass an income tax, and just passed a state constitutional amendment against the idea.
Despite this defeat, Donelson is right. Tennessee has a broken tax system which hurts working class families.
This is not to say that the state government doesn’t care about providing affordable college education to its future leaders. But it is clear politics has come before practicality.
By relying on a sales tax, costs for state services like higher education are unfairly spread to students.
“At some point you just stop looking at what the loans are,” Wilson said. “You just click the accept [button] because you know you need it.
“I’ve never had a year where I didn’t take out loans, that’s been an intrinsic part of college.”
While UT’s graduates average about $22,100 in loans (nationally, students average $29,400), this amount is still unfair to young Tennesseans.
As the first state with free community college through the Tennessee Promise, and a self-imposed goal of 55 percent of residents holding a post-high school degree by 2025, Tennessee should be at the forefront of innovating college education. This means making all higher education in the state affordable, not just community college, and promising students like Wilson that they won’t graduate into mountains of debt.
The state of Tennessee has a responsibility to take immediate, concrete steps to better fund its four-year schools if it expects its graduates to be competitive in the economy.
More than new buildings and winning football teams, UT needs a sustainable tuition model that is fair to all students and doesn’t send us into the real world crippled by debt.
McCord Pagan is a fifth-year senior in journalism and electronic media. He can be reached at [email protected].
