"When I wrote this column for Newsweek a couple of weeks ago about the University of California tuition crisis, condemning California as the worst-governed state in the nation seemed like a pretty safe bet. But now I see that Arizona legislators have also embraced the strategy of cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from public universities, forcing tuition up 24 percent from last year and,according to UA President Robert Shelton, another 34 percent over the next two years.
Putting aside the essential cowardice of eschewing broadly-shared budget-balancing tax increases for equivalent tuition hikes that hurt poor and middle-class students, you’d think that state lawmakers in a budget crisis would look askance at a program that primarily benefits rich people, cost nearly $400 million over the last decade, and has been rife with illegality and self-dealing, i.e. Arizona’s notorious private school tuition tax credit program, the details of which you can read about here. Instead, a panel of lawmakers voted on Friday to expand the program while rejecting proposals to curb abuses such as private school parents forming cabals to donate dollar-for-dollar tax credits on behalf of each other’s children and refusing to give the state resources to audit the non-profit organizations that adminster the credits and pay their executives lucrative salaries to do so. This may, possibly, have something to with the fact that some of those executives are the state lawmakers who sponsored the legislation in the first place.
The Arizona Republic endorsed expanding this massive boondogle in the teeth of a fiscal crisis, despite admitting that, when it was first proposed twelve years ago,