Governor's "tortured" math on higher education and prisons misleading

Governor Schwarzenegger delivering his 2010 State of the State address

Listening to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's State of the State speech to the people of California on January 6th, I was surprised to learn California spends more money on prisons than it does on higher education. In fact, Governor Schwarzenneger said he was so concerned about this that he was going to draft a constitutional amendment so that never again would California spend more money on prisons than it spends on higher education. To help reduce prison costs, the Governor said he was going to push to privatize the prisons in the state.

So what exactly are the numbers? I decided to do some research to find out how much of California's general fund dollars goes to prisons and how much goes to higher education. I started by going to the website of the state's Legislative Analyst's Office. The LAO serves as the "eyes and ears" for the Legislature to ensure that the executive branch is implementing legislative policy in a cost efficient and effective manner. According to the LAO's chart listing the actual general fund expenditures for the 2009-10 fiscal year, the state spent 17% more of the general fund dollars on higher education than on prisons, parole and criminal justice.

I needed to check the LAO's numbers. First I telephoned the LAO's office of Criminal Justice. Yes, according to Paul Golaszewski, LAO's Senior Fiscal and Policy Analyst, in Fiscal Year 2009-10, California spent $8,954,730,000 on all of Criminal Justice and of that total expenditure, $8,760,192,000 general fund dollars were spent on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation - its prisons and parole.

I called Steve Boilard, Director of Higher Education for the Legislative Analyst's Office. Boilard confirmed in FY 2009-10, the state of California spent $10,513,056,000 on Higher Education. That meant the state spent 17% less on the entire Criminal Justice Department including prisons and parole than it did on the state's Department of Higher Education (which includes but is not limited to the University of California, the California State System, California Community Colleges, Hastings College of Law, and the Student Aid Commission which funds the Cal Grant Programs.)

Boilard said, "there's a number of different ways to parce prison spending and higher education spending and the governor has chosen one particular way which is probably pretty tortured by any reasonable assessment. Yes, if you look at general fund support which is what the Governor is focused on, the main source of state funding, then higher education would include nine or ten billion dollars that is being spent. So if the Governor just looks at the UC and CSU parts of that, almost no one would call that a higher education system."

At about the same time Governor Schwarzenegger was presenting his interpretation of the budget to the people of California in his state of the state address, he was also presenting a draft constitutional amendment to the legislature so that in the future, the state would spend more on "universities" than on prisons. Boilard says the problem with that is the governor is recommending spending more on only the UC and Cal State Universities and that creates, "a lot of problems in the world of higher education. If just a subset of it is segmenting off into this little silo that says we need to spend at least 10% of the state general fund on this part of higher education and the rest of higher education isn't under that control, it's dividing up the higher education system, it's segmenting it into pieces that will be subject to different kinds of spending limits and one of the big problems there is it prevents any real cohesive comprehensive approach to funding higher education."

Boilard says, "If you really tried to pin the governor down, at least I hope he would acknowledge, or his Department of Finance would acknowledge, that ok well, we're not really talking about higher education, we're talking about universities (and not Hastings College of Law, community colleges, the Student Aid Commission and Cal Grants.)  So if you could pin him down on that, then the question becomes a different one. It's not are you telling the truth but is what you're proposing going to make any sense?"

You can hear my interview with Steve Boilard, Director of Higher Education with the State Legislative Analyst's Office by going to this link.

Transcript of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2010 State of the State Address