Kansas News Service: "THE INSIDER" May 17, 2019

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A degree of inflation For those of us lucky enough to even imagine college, the cost looms seemingly forever. When you’re a student and the bills keep coming. When you’re a graduate and the debt payments hound you. When you’re a parent saving for a child’s tuition, fee, room and board (and when debts from your own schooling might still hover). In one recent 20-year stretch, tuition and fees alone shot up by 110 percent. In the most recent decade, those costs topped ordinary inflation by more than 3% per year. Even the big shots at the Kansas Board of Regents get it. This week, the ruling body for public higher education looked at tuition increases on the table for state schools and said, whoa. Really? Must you? Even though the proposed tuition rates run behind the hikes of recent years, the regents pushed campus bosses to see if something less might work. The higher ed crowd didn’t get as much as it wanted from the Legislature — does it ever? — but taxpayers will be sending $30 million more. The regents had promised to keep tuition hikes at bay if they’d gotten the $50 million extra they asked for. The latest hikes offer reminders about rethinking the whole four-year college scenario. And surely tempts more people to start at a community college (but collect those cheaper credit hours carefully and make sure they’ll transfer to the right places) or pile up some college classes while still in high school. The knee-buckling costs of school also suggest more of us might want to look at whether tech school makes more sense. Taxpayer subsidies for public colleges run north of a half-billion dollars. State spending shrunk over the last decade — partly because of damage done by the Great Recession, and partly because of budget-and-tax cuts during Sam Brownback’s time as governor. University brass contend their costs have only gone up, much just to keep pace with the expense of giving university employees ever-more-expensive health insurance. Cashing in the extra money from the Legislature whileraising tuition won’t likely go over well in Topeka. That, in turn, could make lawmakers less generous in the future and make the tuition algebra all the more difficult.          — Scott Canon, Kansas News Service managing editor "Maybe Kansas will come around." — Former prosecutor Brian Leininger on marijuana legalization   A matter of representation Through our Kansas Matters forum (do you have a question that might launch a story?), a reader asked: “With so much diversity in Southwest Kansas, why is local government not representative of the population?” Our reporter in Garden City took a look and confirmed that even though Hispanic residents make up the majority in the southwest corner of Kansas, they’re mostly absent from public office. The reasons are myriad. Share Tweet Forward A state surrounded Kansas finds itself increasingly surrounded by states that have loosened their marijuana laws. Colorado notably made recreational cannabis legal five years ago. Missouri and Oklahoma have begun to make it legal for medical use. But here, a push for legalizing medical marijuana lacks any serious momentum. The Legislature gave one proposal a committee hearing this year, but no vote. The main opposition: law enforcement. Yet police in the state don’t collect much data on problems they attribute to cannabis. Here’s the situation. Share Tweet Forward A deal that wasn't The sort-of deal to grease the skids for Medicaid expansion in Kansas nextyear appears to have crumbled apart. Or maybe it never existed. Some lawmakers thought they’d left Topeka with a bargain to get Republican and Democratic legislators in the House, where an expansion plan passed this year, together with those in the Senate who’d blocked a vote. Now a key Senate player insists no such promise existed. Here’s an explanation of the busted backroom bargain. Share Tweet