Office Hours with President Mark Emmert
2009 Legislative Session


Welcome to the spring edition of office hours. After I 
left the University of Washington in 1975, my wife and I 
had an opportunity to do what we have always  called 
our lap of America, circling  around the United States, 
working and  living in 6 other states and having a 
chance to see how the  see how the rest of the United 
States works. And in every place we went, I loved to tell 
the stories of the city of Seattle and the state of 
Washington, how Washington State had emerged as an 
incredibly vibrant, innovative culture, how the business 
and industry here was becoming diversified and 
completely unlike what it was in 1975. It was a huge 
source of pride to me and my family to watch what was 
going on here in our beloved Northwest. And its 
watching that and knowing that history that is so 
frustrating to me right now as we see what is going on 
in the state legislature and how the state has decided to 
treat higher education. As everyone watching this 
knows, to have an innovative economy, to have an 
economy that moves the state forward, to provide 
opportunities for our citizens of all walks of life, higher 
education and the entire system of higher education is 
absolutely essential. You simply cannot in the 21st 
century, grow an economy, provide ladders to 
economic success, provide the kinds of opportunities 
that our citizens always have if you do things like [those 
that] are being proposed in the state legislative  budget 
right now. Indeed the states budgets as its being 
proposed by the senate and the house would eliminate 
10,000 slots across all of higher education every year. 
Think about that for a minute. 10, 000 students and 
their families who would not have an opportunity to go 
to college, what would that look like year in and year 
out if those cuts stayed in place. The state would see 
10,000 families that don’t have in the midst of them, a 
college educated person in the workforce. They would 
see all of the attended advantages of a higher education 
degree not available to them. Every year, 10,000 
families. If you looked here at the University of 
Washington, the impact of probably 22 to 2500 
students that wouldn’t be coming here to our 3 
campuses. If you looked at the time of degree being 
stretched out so that students had to stay here for 1 or 
2 or 3 more quarters to get the classes that they 
needed, the impact that has on those individuals and 
their families and the workforce around them. These 
kinds of proposals are not anything like the Washington 
that I grew up in. The Washington I grew up in valued 
those kinds of opportunities for life, it valued the 
creation of innovation, it valued the kinds of 
experiences that we all know the University of 
Washington and our other universities in the state 
provide. This is really a complete shift in the thinking of 
what the State of Washington is all about and it is most 
ascertainably not the Washington way as I know it

The State of Washington has, in the last few decades, 
produced an economy that is amazingly vibrant. It is 
also more dependent upon science and technology and 
an educated workforce than any other state in the 
union. Indeed the State of Washington employs on a 
per capita basis more recipients of bachelors and 
graduate degrees in science, engineering and 
technological fields than any other state. But there is a 
huge problem with all of that; we also are in fact one of 
the worse producers of people with those degrees. We 
rank near the bottom of all states in the percentage of 
our students and our citizenry who get degrees at the 4 
year level and especially in science and engineering and 
technical fields. What that means is the businesses of 
the state of Washington have to go outside of 
Washington to recruit into the state people who have 
those technical skills. I love to say in front of a variety of 
editorial boards and audiences that Washington State 
runs the very real risk of having the great jobs in the 
state go to people that we import while the sons and 
daughters of Washington wind up washing their cars. 
That is not exactly the scenario you want for a state. 
You want to have Washington young people and not-so 
young people fill in all those great jobs and not having 
to go to California or Michigan or Bangalore to find 
people who are going to take the jobs in Washington. 
We simply must do that work here. That is why having a 
vibrant funding model for higher education is so 
essential and that’s what we are working on.

What we know today sitting here the week of April 6th is 
that the state legislature has proposed the deepest cuts 
into higher education in the United States. While there 
are other states that have worse financial states, 
California with the largest deficits, Michigan with the 
highest unemployment rates, Florida with all the 
problems it has with real estate and tourism, its only in 
Washington where we have proposed having deep deep 
cuts that would take so many thousands of students out 
of the higher education system. This is, of course, a very 
very problematic circumstance, it means that our 
students will have to stay in school longer as I have 
already mentioned, they will have to look further to find 
educational opportunities perhaps even leave the state 
of Washington and incur the costs that go along with 
that. It will make it harder and harder for our students 
to get access to the programs they need, it will cause 
increases in class size and a shortage of available 
courses. These are things that we simply cannot 
tolerate. So what are we doing about it? Well, first of 
all, we are working with the legislative leaders and the 
governor’s office to make sure they understand the 
implications of what has been proposed by the 
legislature. The legislative leaders themselves 
understand that they have a very very difficult problem 
on their hands and we need to be sympathetic with that 
problem. They’re not doing these things because they 
want to; they are doing these things because they think 
they have to. We have to help them see some other 
options that are available and find ways to solve this 
very difficult financial situation that we all find 
ourselves in. We’re trying to get more state general 
funds put back in the budget, we’re trying to get more 
federal funds from the stimulus package put back in the 
higher education budget. And yes, even though we 
don’t like it, we are also encouraging them to increase 
tuition. Now the tuition story is one that we all worry 
about. We pride ourselves at the University of 
Washington in the economic diversity of all of our 
students. In fact, we have one of the most economically 
diverse student bodies of any University of our kind in 
the country. We are deeply committed to maintaining 
that. We are never going to find ourselves in a position 
where your income level or who your families are or 
your station in life is going to be a determinant of 
whether or not you are a UW student. That’s not who 
we are, that’s not what we stand for. We are, in fact, 
proposing significant tuition increases of about 14% at 
the University of Washington for our undergraduate 
resident students.  What we would do though, is we’d 
provide as much financial aid as humanly possible to 
mitigate the impacts of those increases on our students.  
A 14% increase for next year would be about 875 
dollars, a lot of money to be sure. But at the same time, 
we’ve seen increases in the Pell Grant program at the 
federal level, increases in the state need base grant 
program, and increases in the federal tuition tax credits, 
the so-called Hope Tax Credit program that for families 
who make less than 160,000 dollars a year, those funds 
together would mean that very very few, if any, 
students under $160,000 would have greater out of 
pocket expenses. Indeed, we may find ourselves in the 
situation where some of those students are actually in a 
better position than they are right now because of those 
new aid programs and that is a great thing. Students 
whose families make over $160,000 dollars, they 
unfortunately are going to have to pay these increases, 
but we think that’s still a great investment in their 
future and well worth spending the money on.

It’s always been the role of the University of Washington 
to provide our citizens with access to the highest quality 
educational experience possible. And that’s what we are 
going to do, not just now but well into the future. We’re 
going to have to work hard at it, we’re going to have to 
make sure that every dollar we have is spent as wisely 
and as successfully as we know how. We’re going to 
have to try some new innovations, some new 
approaches to things to make sure that we can get 
through this period and come out the other end the 
great University that we are today for 5, 10, 20, and 50 
years going into the future. I need to work with you on 
those issues; you need to help us find solutions to those 
kinds of problems. We’ve also always been a fabulous 
value, we’re one of the lowest tuition universities of our 
kind in the entire country. Even after the 14% tuition 
increase, for example, we’d still have the lowest tuition 
rate of any of our peer universities around the United 
States but we have to make sure that students also get 
their money’s worth. When they pay more tuition, we 
need to make sure they get a great education and we’re 
going to do that but we have to do it all together. It’s 
going to be challenging, it’s not going to be easy, but 
the University of Washington is going to persevere and 
continue to be the great university for the state of 
Washington that it always has been.

As always, I’d really like to hear your feedback 
especially right now during these very challenging 
times. Your thoughts and opinions are very, very 
important to me, none of us has the wisdom to do all of 
this on our own, and we need lots of thoughts, lots of 
ideas, lots of innovation to be successful. So please 
share those ideas with me. You can always go to my 
website at washington.edu/president and post your 
comments. I look forward to reading them. And thanks 
again for taking time to look at this edition of Office 
Hours.