Since 2002, a state program introduced by the Illinois General Assembly that offers financial aid to veterans of the armed forces and National Guard has been largely underfunded, placing a significant financial burden on public universities, community colleges and veterans alike. The programs include the Illinois Veteran Grant, Illinois National Guard and Naval Militia Grant and MIA/POW Scholarship Program.

These three grants, under state law, require all public universities and community colleges to waive the tuition and fees for all applicants that meet the requirements, regardless of available funding from the state government. Since the program’s inception five years ago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has absorbed approximately $10.7 million in costs – a significant sum that could have been used effectively, although this is only a small percentage of the campus budget. This is just another example of the state government’s willingness to pass politically popular measures related to higher education that it has no intention of fully paying for.

But the biggest victims of the short-changing will be the smaller schools and community colleges with fewer resources and smaller budgets that cannot absorb even a fraction of the costs incurred to this University.

Lake Land Community College in Mattoon, which provides education and training to 7,400 students from East Central Illinois, recently shut down its training and certification program for truck drivers because of the financial burdens caused by the underfunded programs – ironic, because the program offered a popular and viable career path for many veterans. But the college simply could not handle the $1.3 million in debt it accrued over a five-year period. If current conditions persist, more universities and community colleges will be forced to cut costs to meet the needs of this program.

Consequences of such cuts will be felt throughout the state, and they will be more than just a decline in availability of affordable education for Illinoisans. Now more than ever, the community college system serves an incredibly important function in Illinois’s economy by re-focusing and re-educating the workforce at a time of economic transition. It is even more vital to the long term economic growth of the Midwest, where thousands of industrial jobs have been lost to outsourcing, making a liquid workforce, one that can quickly be trained to become competent employees for a variety of fields, an important asset.

As budget proposals are submitted and debated in Springfield, it is important that state politicians keep in mind the implications grant programs have on the state’s education and economic future. It is time for the state to finally provide funds to the schools under its watch for grant programs that its legislature passed into law. These grant programs are ultimately its fiscal responsibilities – one they must own up to.