DeKalb Times

While high tuition and pension costs are a factor in why Illinois' college-age students are leaving the state, the entire story behind that flight is far more complicated, state Rep. Bob Pritchard (R-Hinckley) said during a recent interview.

"If you look at the numbers, we've been drastically increasing our pension payments so that our overall education funding is holding about flat," Pritchard said during a telephone interview with the DeKalb Times. "In essence, what that's saying is there is less money that the universities get for operation. Pensions, obviously, is the big issue but it goes back to the policy of our state over the last 50 to 100 years."

The policy of Illinois in those decades was to provide pensions to state employees and those pensions have been allowed to grow "and we have to pay for them," Pritchard said. "We haven't been paying for them. So is the problem the pension or the fact that the state has poor policies relating to pensions and we haven't made pension payments?"

Illinois State House Rep. Bob Pritchard (R-Hinckley)

The solution to that problem is even more complex, Pritchard said. "The Constitution of 1970 says we can't diminish benefits for our pensions and the courts have upheld that," he said.

"We've tried several different ways to reform pensions," Pritchard said. None of those reform efforts have succeeded, he said.

Pritchard has represented Illinois State House 70th District since 2003. The 70th District includes portions of DeKalb, Boone, and Kane counties

Pension issues appear to be at the heart of Illinois' higher education woes and college students are fleeing the state in search of lower-priced tuition elsewhere. However, Pritchard said the situation is far more complex than those two facts would indicate and that high tuition costs in Illinois are not the only reasons students are leaving the state. After all, tuition costs are rising across the nation, not just in Illinois, Pritchard said.

"It's more expensive to go to college," he said. "We ask the fundamental questions of what's driving up costs and are those higher costs being spent in ways that help students get through, get a degree and then go on to be more successful? And I think the answer to all of that is, yes, we need to focus on administration, we need to focus on student support and counseling. We need to help counsel students about debt and about whether they start at a community college and then go to a four-year or if an associate's degree is sufficient for their career aspirations."

Leaving students to figure that out on their own isn't working, Pritchard said. "There are a lot of students who don't understand the costs and the decisions they are making about higher education," he said. "So there needs to be conversations there as well."

However, Pritchard said he feared that Illinois universities, in an attempt to deal with so many financial woes, are cutting back on student counseling and guidance, which can only add to the problem of students not making informed decisions about their futures.

Meanwhile, Illinois students who may be leaving the state over tuition costs also are being lured out of the state. "Illinois costs seem to be higher than at our peer institutions for a number of reasons," Pritchard said.

"Other states have been aggressive about recruiting students. So you go to all the states around us, you'll see they're offering in-state tuition for Illinois students and they're offering extra scholarships for Illinois students. So the cost of going out of state are not higher and that's a lot of the reason that students are going out of state."