As the campaign season heats up we thought it would be good to give voters and taxpayers a comparison on how state funding for Iowa’s community colleges has been provided versus local school districts, other public and private four-year colleges and why now more than ever Iowa’s community colleges deserve to be funded at a more realistic level.

Had the state of Iowa funded our Iowa community college state general fund aid at a minimum increase based on the changes in the Consumer Price Index over the last 10 years, our total funding level would have been increased over that 10 years by an additional $19.5 million or $206 more per student then what we receive today. That increase would have been just to keep up with inflation not adding funds to operate the college and update it.

Besides that shortfall in state funding, the community colleges have done their best to offer much lower cost tuition and meet the workforce training needs of our state. During that same time frame the Legislature has funded specific workforce training programs that have been invaluable for our students and regional workers, but those funds don’t allow us to use them for operating costs of the college. While we appreciated the very modest net increase of $124,368 in state support during the last legislative session, it did not come even close to address the increase cost of wages and benefits for full-time employees at the college of approximately $840,000.

In fact, the only other way for us to handle our operating revenue shortfall is to cut programs and staff and raise tuition. We unfortunately have had to do both, reducing staff and programs and raise tuition $9/credit hour for this academic year.

When the Iowa community college system was formed 50 years ago under the leadership of state Sen. Jack Kibbie, the funding balance for this system was supposed to be split 33 percent state general aid support, 33 percent from local property tax support, and 33 percent from student tuition.

Today, that funding balance is totally out of whack: 61 percent comes from student tuition and fees, 4.15 percent from local property tax support, 32 percent from state general aid. The remainder is from other sources.

We have been discussing this funding imbalance with the Governor and our area legislators and they have been willing to consider working with us to find alternative ways to provide funding for our community colleges.

We have been saying it is not that we are not spending enough money on education in Iowa but how do we invest it better? As you can see from the accompanying chart, Iowa’s community colleges are funded at drastically lower levels per student by the state of Iowa than the other education entities in the state.

We work well with our K-12 and regent and private colleges and want to continue to do so. They also have very tight budgets and have been forced to raise tuition to meet their needs, but we can’t just keep raising tuition to meet our education and training needs.

Therefore, we will focus on asking for an increase of $19.5 million in total state general aid for Iowa community colleges, just to catch us up to the actual CPI increase we have lost over the past 10 years.

We will also work with our K-12 partners to implement the recently approved Career Technical Education reforms and to find alternative funding from the local level, so we can continue to educate our students and train our very productive workforce for the jobs available today all across the state of Iowa.

I believe together we can continue to look at ways to better use our K-16 education funding from our local, state and federal sources while delivering the education and training our students and workers deserve. The Iowa and American taxpayer deserve our willingness to implement true education reform with less state and federal government rules, regulations and mandates.

Jim Kersten is vice president of external affairs and government relations at Iowa Central Community College.