Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

UTEP students rush to class.

LAST month, a curious team made its way to the Chronicle editorial board. It was a confab of leaders from University of Texas at Austin and Texas A & M University: educational players better known for staring each other down across stadiums. The officials had formed a team and taken it on the road to argue that their universities both deserve better state funding.

They're right, they do. So do higher education institutions in less central places such as Brownsville, where low-income students might not be able to move to College Station or Austin, yet still urgently need a college education. Also, Texas needs those students to get educated, if it's to compete against other states and countries economically.

To evaluate such funding requests, the 2007 Legislature should ask two questions. How much does a university's performance bring Texas? And how well does a university draw local students into the profit, rather the debit, column of Texas' future?

Any institution that scores well on either question needs better support. Projects that don't answer a documented demand or aren't prioritized by the state's coordinating board for higher education, must be bypassed.

The National Conference of State Legislatures confirms this calculus, with a report released around the same time the UT-Austin and A&M scrum came to Houston. While colleges and universities "get short shrift in tough budget times," the panel observed, state lawmakers still need to inject funds to keep these institutions vital.

Raising money via tuition - instead of state dollars - only guarantees that less affluent students get shut out. Meanwhile, India, China and others eager to compete with United States surely won't be waiting for state budgets to grow. Texas has to fund higher education better, and do it now.

A&M and UT-Austin, as flagship schools, are making their case for more funding. Relative to most other public universities here, these are wealthy schools. State funding delivers less than a quarter of the funding of each: Like private schools, they're able to bring in additional funding from tuition, grants and alumni gifts.

Neither school plans for major student body expansion, even though Texas' funding formula rewards universities for growth. Instead, these flagship schools need help keeping their standards - standards that bring considerable economic and intellectual gains to the state. Combined, they have brought Texas an annual economic harvest of $9 billion, a return on only $500 million in state appropriations.

The schools also enrich Texas with intellectual capital. Among their other offerings, they generate medical and scientific discoveries, patents, space science breakthroughs and training for tens of thousands of state teachers. The Legislature should indeed reward this performance. With more help, the universities could hire and keep more of the faculty that keep their level of achievement so high.

These are lean times, as the National Conference observed: not just for higher education, but for health care, secondary education, rehabilitation for prison inmates and the environment. Yet when it comes to universities, legislators have not done due diligence to save money. A 2005 Austin American-Statesman story presented a shocking catalogue of unjustified, politically motivated projects that sucked millions away from institutions that really deserved them.

Texas cannot afford this kind of poor judgment from this year's Legislature. Schools with lively enrollment, motivated low-income students and flagship faculties need financial injections. Vanity projects and unmerited building campaigns must stop. Starve deserving universities, and both they and the state will eventually land on the sidelines, as other region's economies thunder past to success.