RoguePundit

Random Nature #103

Buying a Stairway to Heaven:  Purchasing carbon offsets is becoming an increasingly popular way for businesses, organizations, and individuals to reduce their carbon footprint--the global warming emissions for which they are responsible.  Many buy these offsets for altruistic reasons.  So why is the song title sometimes attached to this type of purchase?  Well for instance if you drive a Hummer and feel a bit guilty about it, just buy some carbon offsets rather than changing your lifestyle.

There are a number of organizations--mostly non-profits--selling various types of carbon offsets, both retail and wholesale.  And, that's not counting the products that are packaged with carbon credits to make them carbon neutral (like airline tickets and the carbon-free shipping of packages). 

Carbon Offsets:  From Wikipedia...

A carbon offset zeros out (offsets) all or part of the carbon dioxide emissions of a party, by reducing the emissions--or increasing the carbon dioxide absorption--of another party. This reduces net greenhouse gas emissions with the aim of combating global warming. Effectively offsetting the emissions of an activity makes that activity "carbon neutral".

My only nit with this definition is that one's carbon footprint isn't just restricted to carbon dioxide.  For instance, our bodies naturally produce some methane, and it's also common in things like food waste.  Methane is a global warming gas whose molecule contains carbon (CH4). Note though that in many instances, greenhouse gas emissions are referred to in carbon dioxide equivalents to avoid the confusion of multiple categories of gases.

A Virtual Asset:  When you buy the typical carbon offset, you don't gain ownership of anything (other than some sort of proof of purchase--certificate, magnet, etc.).  You're donating money to others, who do the following types of things with it. 

- Pay for the construction of wind farm.  This makes wind energy more affordable, helping to reduce (or prevent the increase of) the use of fossil fuels.  Of course, by not directly investing in the wind farm yourself (or buying stock in a firm which builds and manages them), you lose any shot at the potential profits.

- Pay for the planting of trees that will grow and absorb carbon dioxide for the time contracted.  Some plan to allow the plantations to mature into old growth, while others prefer to develop tree farms to prevent the cutting of existing old growth.  There's profit potential in the latter.

- Purchase tradable offsets generated by a feedlot implementing methane collection and destruction.  The owner might not make the investment--either continuing to operate as is or closing--if not for others buying the offsets.  The new owners gain the right to pollute in the amount purchased.  Buying the offsets helps such investments pay off, and retiring those offsets ensures that they aren't available for others to use. 

- Buy carbon allowances from an exchange and then retire them.  Consider though that EU nations issued an excess of credits when establishing their cap-and-trade system (the emissions trading scheme...previous blogs here and here).  The reductions that the EU proposed and trumpeted yesterday (for only a partial list of EU nations) won't soak up all of that excess.  That's why the price of an allowance dropped upon the news.  Retiring an allowance when there's an excess doesn't accomplish much for the environment...though the purchasing of carbon offsets does help dry up the excess.   

And this brings us to the Chicago Climate Exchange.  If the U.S. enacts emission limits and goes to a cap-and-trade system, this system could become its foundation.  From this link:

Hundreds of corporations, organizations, states, counties and cities have signed legally binding agreements promising to limit their emissions by 2010. Thus, they've created a voluntary cap and trade system that functions the same way a government regulation would.

The Chicago Climate Exchange, or CCX, is regulated by the NASD, the world's largest private body that regulates financial services. Polluters, clean-energy companies and everyone in between can trade carbon offsets and allowances similar to stocks in the stock market.

King County is a member of the CCX, meaning that it has promised to reduce emissions by 6 percent by 2010. If it does, it can sell credits. If it doesn't, it will have to buy allowances. The city of Seattle has not signed on.

Buying such credits is rather speculative at the moment...phase one (a 4 percent emission reduction below the original baseline, 1998-2001), closes out next month.  Thus, it's difficult to assess whether buying a credit will help drive a pollution reduction.

There are many other examples.  But the point is that there are lots of choices when it comes to spending money on carbon offsets.  Some of those choices are better than others, and some are simply value judgments.  And sadly, a number of the organizations selling carbon offsets could use to be more transparent.  It's often hard to tell what you're actually buying and what percentage of your money instead goes towards overhead, profit, etc.  Carbon offsets are relatively new and subject to little oversight and standardization (though that's changing)...so buyer-beware is certainly in order.

To be Continued:  Next week I'll give an overview of a number of the organizations selling carbon offsets (here).

PERS by the Numbers

Earlier this month, Oregon's PERS folks published a new "PERS by the Numbers" study (here).  The following are excerpts from an article which summarizes some of the findings. 

State pensions awarded to new retirees in 2005 fell for the fourth consecutive year, a sign of the toll that pension reforms are taking on Oregon's public employees.

A new Public Employees Retirement System study shows that the average pension granted to last year's crop of retirees was $27,514, the lowest since 1997. That was enough to replace about half of workers' salaries before retirement.

For 2005 retirees logging 30 years in PERS, the average pension was $47,238, the lowest since 1999. That was enough to replace 84 percent of the new retirees' prior salary.

Those still are generous payouts compared with other public pension funds across the country and those granted by the private sector.

Let's examine that toll a bit more closely.  The average employee who retired in 2005 is getting a pension that's 51 percent of his/her former salary...that's below the 1990-2005 average of 55 percent.  The rate rose as high as 68 percent in 2002, reflective of a fact we often heard back then--that government agencies and schools were being hurt by the loss of so many experienced workers.  Meanwhile, 15.4 percent of last year's retirees had 30 years of service as compared to the 1990-2005 average of 11.54 percent.  In other words, while more of last year's retirees gave us at least 30 years of service, the typical worker clearly retired with less time than his/her predecessors.

In other words, it's not apples-to-apples when comparing each year's average pension.  Plus, some of that data is going to change...

PERS pensions skyrocketed from the mid-1990s to the early part of this decade because of several factors. That caused the pension system to rack up a $17 billion long-term shortfall at one point, and the 2003 Legislature responded with a package of pension reforms.

The reforms reduced pensions for recent retirees, clipped the expected pensions of existing workers and created a slimmed-down pension for future hires.

As a result of those reforms and related court cases, many workers who retired between April 2000 and March 2004 face reductions in their pensions. Those reductions, expected during the next 18 months, likely will reduce the average pensions tracked in PERS' new study, Cleary said.

The report states that the average PERS employee retires at the age of 59 with 21.7 years of service, but doesn't note the year(s) to which this data pertains.  The most common retirement age is an enviable 53.  Note though that PERS pensions do not include health insurance.  Employees planning their retirement need to prepare for that bill...or enjoy good health until they're eligible for Medicare.

Most workers do not complete 30 years in PERS-covered jobs. However, 30 years is considered a full career, and benefits granted to 30-year retirees are a widely used benchmark to compare benefits from one plan to another.

From 1990 to 1996, PERS rarely granted pensions that topped workers' salaries, even for those who worked 30 years.

From 1998 through 2003, about 4,000 people -- more than one-seventh of all new PERS retirees -- received monthly pensions topping their final salaries regardless of the number of years worked in PERS. That's more than the approximately 3,300 people who retired after 30 years in PERS.

The 2003 PERS reforms and the early-2000s stock-market downtown caused pensions to drop for new retirees in 2004 and 2005.

During those two years, about 300 people retired with pensions topping their final salary, or one out of 20 retirees. That equals one-third of the 900 people who retired after 30 years in PERS in 2004 and 2005.

Again, those numbers should drop some with the aforementioned recalculations.  But, they're still jaw-dropping.  You sure don't see many of our current or former government officials standing up proudly and saying they helped make that possible.  Thank goodness for the sake of the state's finances that there have been some reforms.  Our new Democratic majority knows that the state will have $40 million per year more to spend because PERS costs are dropping.  That's a number worth remembering when there's talk of proposed tax increases.

FYI, the study also goes into the PERS funding status, contribution rates, side accounts, etc....but that's for another day.

Purchasing Kidneys

Why is it illegal to sell, for instance, a kidney when one can legally sell things like blood and hair?  Well, we can regrow blood and hair, but we can't regrow that "spare" kidney.  Actually though, people in many nations are queasy about the selling of organs based upon one or both of the following reasons:

The first concerns how selling organs leads to the commodification of human bodies and the second concerns the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the rich.

Yet, preventing their sale has led to a chronic shortage of kidneys in most of the world.  Those shortages are a death sentence for patients not high enough on donor lists...for instance in the U.S., six percent of transplant candidates with hepatitis C virus die while awaiting a kidney.  The average waiting time for a kidney here is five years.  Little wonder there's a thriving black market in kidneys.  And, the problem is getting worse.

Kidneys are the subject of a quietly growing global drama. As people in the rich world live longer and grow fatter, queues for kidneys are lengthening fast: at a rate of 7% a year in America, for example, where last year 4,039 people died waiting. Doctors are allowing older and more sluggish kidneys to be transplanted. Ailing, rich patients are buying kidneys from the poor and desperate in burgeoning black markets. One bigwig broker may soon stand trial in South Africa. Clandestine kidney-sellers get little medical follow-up, buyers often catch hepatitis or HIV, and both endure the consequences of slap-dash surgery.

Even nations where organs are harvested based upon "presumed consent" (unless the recently deceased has specified otherwise) have shortages of kidneys.  Some relevant factoids:

...if just 0.06% of healthy Americans aged between 19 and 65 parted with one kidney, the country would have no waiting list.

And:

...transplants make economic sense: the cost of one kidney operation and a lifetime's supply of anti-rejection drugs equals that of three years' dialysis. Kidneys donated by a living person last for a median 22 years in another body; when they are taken from a fresh corpse, the figure is 14 years.

There is a nation that has legalized people selling one of their kidneys...Iran. 

Iran's Association of Kidney Patients, a non-government organisation which obviously enjoys official favour, is responsible for all legal kidney transplants: it insists that commercial deals are the exception, not the rule. For one thing, it says, the religious authorities encourage voluntary gifts: in other words, cases where a patient receives a kidney freely offered by a friend or relative. Pious Muslims may also offer up a kidney to anyone who needs it.

With 27,000 road deaths a year, Iran has a tragically plentiful supply of young corpses, the association adds. “We're against kidney sales, we discourage them,” says Daryush Arman, its deputy head. But in practice, lots of “bargains” take place; in other words, recipients top up the $1,200 that the association pays all donors.

The typical donor receives $2,000-4,000.  From this editorial:

Many people will find the very idea of individuals selling their organs repugnant. Yet an organ market, in body parts of deceased people, already exists. Companies make millions out of it. It seems perverse, then, to exclude individuals. What's more, having a kidney removed is as safe as common elective surgeries and even beauty treatments (it is no more dangerous than liposuction, for example), which sets it apart from other types of living-organ donation. America already lets people buy babies from surrogate mothers, and the risk of dying from renting out your womb is six times higher than from selling your kidney.

With proper regulation, a kidney market would be a big improvement on the current, sorry state of affairs. Sellers could be checked for disease and drug use, and cared for after operations. They could, for instance, receive health insurance as part of their payment—which would be cheap because properly screened donors appear to live longer than the average Joe with two kidneys. Buyers would get better kidneys, faster. Both sellers and buyers would do better than in the illegal market, where much of the money goes to the middleman.

I'd certainly rather have a regulated market for kidneys than the black market sales and thefts we have now.  And, how can we continue to accept the deaths of so many who need kidneys?

Environmental Impacts of a Border Fence

China, India, and Pakistan have long-standing disputes over ownership of the Kashmir region.  India has fought thrice with Pakistan and once with China over some of those lands.  Additionally, India's northern state of Jammu and Kashmir has suffered from an Islamic insurgency.  Some of the rebels have used Pakistan as a base from which to conduct raids into the province.

India recently responded by building a fence along the length of its disputed border with Pakistan. 

A fence along India's disputed border with Pakistan designed to keep out militants is curbing the movement of wild bears and leopards which are now wandering into villages and killing people, officials say.

...

Indian and Pakistani troops halted shelling across the frontier three years ago as part of peace moves. A three-metre (10-feet) high fence along the 742-km (460-mile) Line of Control, a de facto border which divides Kashmir, soon followed.

More than a dozen people have been killed so far this year by wild animals -- five in the past month alone -- and scores of others have been injured, wildlife officials say.

At the weekend, a man was dragged from his mud house in Baramulla district by a leopard as he slept and a woman was mauled by a black bear in the Kupwara region.

The Himalayan black bears in the region typically have a seasonal migration, dropping to lower elevations during the colder months.  Leopards are territorial, though some of their migratory prey have probably been impacted by the fence. 

Leopard and Himalayan black bear populations have increased after a ban on hunting was enforced in Kashmir in 1970, and the loss of pine forests had already increased contact between animals and people.

India now has 8,000 leopards but the number living in Kashmir is uncertain as no wildlife census has been carried out since the revolt began in late 1989. No data was available for black bears, wildlife groups said.

Authorities are now planning to set up control rooms and distribute leaflets urging people living near forests to take precautions to prevent more casualties.

Police say at least six bears and leopards have been killed by villagers and authorities in the last ten months after attacking local people.

Another possible factor not mentioned in the article was a major earthquake near the line of control last fall.  It killed nearly 75,000 people (mostly on the Pakistani side of the border) and left millions homeless.  The quake undoubtedly drove folks into emptier areas in search of food, shelter, supplies to rebuild, etc.  One would certainly expect that this has disrupted and increased pressures upon some of the region's wildlife.

Obviously there are multiple factors behind the increase in bear and leopard attacks.  The fence is easy to blame, and no doubt it bears part of the responsibility...but only part of it.

Perceptions and Meal Sizes

Thanksgiving is a holiday that in some ways seems to celebrate overeating.  With that in mind, here's an article on some recent research into how much we think we eat.

"Scientists, physicians and counselors have often blamed overweight people as trying to fool others -- or themselves -- about how much they are eating," said Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics at Cornell, and author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think." He noted that studies have reported that overweight people underestimate their calorie intake by 40 percent, compared with normal-weight people who underestimate their calorie intake by an average of 20 percent.

"This study, however, shows that it is meal size, not people size, that determines how accurate we will be at estimating the number of calories we have eaten," Wansink said. "That popsicle-stick-skinny person eating a 2,000-calorie Thanksgiving dinner will underestimate how much he has eaten by just as much as the heavy person eating a 2,000-calorie pizza dinner.

"The trouble is that the heavy person tends to eat a whole lot more of these big meals."

The article then went into the methodology of two studies which produced that conclusion.  The results were the same for both men and women.  But, the last paragraph of the article deserves some comment.

Better understanding that overweight people aren't "lying" or are "in denial" about how much they really eat, said Wansink, is important for those helping the overweight change their eating habits.

These studies only addressed perceptions based upon individual meals.  So, some overweight folks could certainly be in denial about the number of large meals they eat, their snacking, etc.  And then there's physical activity, getting enough rest, on and on.

A Thanksgiving Hike

Yesterday, a couple of us decided to work off the turkey dinner before consuming it.  We drove out the Galice Road to the bridge at Grave Creek and hiked alongside the Rogue down past Rainie Falls and back.  The weather was rather rather gray and misty, but a perfect cool temperature for a moderate hike (which my back put up with pretty well).  We had the place almost to ourselves...no rafters (a pleasure of the off-season) and only three pairs of hikers. 

For those of you who haven't seen Rainie Falls, it's really not much of a waterfall (especially with the river up), but it's a wicked little class 5 rapid (the left channel).  More of the Rogue used to be rugged like that until river runners in the '30s and '40s used dynamite supplied by USFS to make the river an easier trip.

With conditions as they were, it was the smaller streams tumbling down towards the Rogue (and sometimes across our trail) that were more photogenic.

The next is one of several that we had to hop across. 

We saw a few blue herons on the river (which didn't photograph well), but most of the wildlife must have been busy elsewhere. 

Hope y'all had a happy Thanksgiving as well.

A West Nile Death

Unfortunately, Oregon has finally had its first resident die of West Nile Virus. 

The Oregon Public Health Division said today that an Eastern Oregon person had died of the disease after a lengthy illness. The public health office did not identify the person or the locale, citing privacy rules.

The person died Nov. 14 in an area where a number of West Nile cases had been reported, said Dr. Susan Allan, state health director.

Although West Nile causes the brain inflammation called encephalitis in about one out of 150 cases, the disease is rarely fatal, Allan said.

"Most cases of West Nile virus infection are mild, but for someone whose health is already fragile, the infection can be too much," she said in a statement.

After just five human cases in Oregon in '04 and eight in '05, this year has seen a spike, but nowhere near what many other states have suffered.  We're fortunate here in Southern Oregon that the only local mosquito capable of carrying the disease (the western encephalitis mosquito) doesn't survive our winters and must spread here from California during warmer weather (previous blog here).

Most were in eastern Oregon. State officials said it appeared that West Nile, which is spread by mosquitoes, was coming from Idaho, which had reported more than 900 cases in the year.

Malheur County, which borders Idaho, had 51 of Oregon's 70 cases. Two other Eastern Oregon counties -- Baker and Harney -- had 15 of the other 19 cases.

...

If the disease follows the same pattern in Oregon that it has established in other states, the number of cases among humans will rise again in 2008 and then fall to a chronic level, perhaps about this year's level, Allan said.

The virus is another introduced species that man accidentally brought to this nation.  It's rather unlikely that we'll ever be rid of it...too many species are susceptible to the virus.

T-day Approaching

Once more I have relatives in-bound, this time for Thanksgiving.  It figures that Wednesday is looking like it will be a lousy travel day around here weather-wise.  Once again, blogging could be intermittent for a few days because I'll be enjoyably distracted.  Then maybe my schedule will finally stabilize for awhile.

Stem Cells, the Root of Cancer?

There's considerable diversity in cancers, and all but a few of them remain stubbornly difficult to effectively treat.  Most surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy kill or remove lots of different types of cells because we lack the tools to take more precise actions and don't necessarily know specifically what to target.  And despite the overkill, a number of cancers keep coming back.  That's part of the reason why the following research is so interesting.

Current therapies treat all cancer cells the same. They're aimed at shrinking tumours on the basis that the various cells within them all have similar powers to spawn new cancers and spread destruction.

But mounting evidence suggests that cancer's real culprits--the roots of perhaps every tumour--are actually a small subset of bad seeds known best to the world as stem cells.

"It is not unreasonable to say that all this time, the 30 or 40 years that chemotherapy and radiation [have] been around, we've been going after the wrong cells," said Alan Bernstein, president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the country's main medical research funding agency. If the theory bears out, he said, "All of our therapies have been targeting and killing the pawns.

"But like chess, you have to kill the king to win the game."

Abnormal stem cells have now been identified as the engines driving certain cancers of the blood, breast, brain, bone and prostate. And today, two research groups -- one in Canada and another in Italy -- report in an advance online publication of the journal Nature that they have pinpointed aberrant stem cells as the source of colon cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths.

Most people have only heard of stem cells as they relate to abortion and possible treatments for some diseases.  But, there are lots of types of stem cells, and some of them aren't desirable. 

Dr. Dick, who discovered the first cancer stem cell in 1994 in leukemia, said the new work shows that while current therapies treat colon cancer as a "homogeneous entity, not every colon cancer cell has the ability to keep that tumour going; only one in 60,000."

New research has repeatedly shown that contrary to conventional wisdom, only abnormal stem cells can sprout and sustain tumours by renewing themselves indefinitely. Without signals from cancer stem cells, ordinary tumour cells seem to stop growing.

What's more, some experiments have found these bad seeds to be highly resistant to standard cancer therapies, including radiation, medicine's nuclear weapon.

The findings may explain why cancers come back even after treatments seem to make tumours disappear. Just a small number of mutant stem cells left behind -- invisible to the naked eye or any scan -- may be enough to spark cancer's regrowth.

There's a lot more to this lengthy, excellent article.  It highlights a few of the many possible ramifications of this research, as well as skepticisms with some facets of it. 

Shrinking SOU

Back in July, the New York Times contained an article entitled "Off the Beaten Track," which gave a write-up on 25 lesser-known universities which provide a quality education.  Here's how the author came up with the list, followed by how it described Southern Oregon University.

The following colleges, compiled with help from a dozen higher education experts and counselors, stress undergraduate teaching, have established or rising scholarship, even if they come up short on standardized test scores, and are alternatives to the usual suspects. They’re not a good fit for everyone, and represent just a small sample of America’s riches.

...

SOUTHERN OREGON UNIVERSITY Ashland

Undergraduates: 4,438

Acceptance rate: 85 percent

The Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland was started in 1935 by a teacher at this public university. The campus and festival are retain strong ties. Students in the theater arts program serve internships with the festival; festival staff members assist in student productions, and guest artists lecture. “The university has an exceptional English and liberal arts curriculum best known for Shakespeare,” says David Longanecker, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Students can minor in Shakespeare studies, which bridges academic study and performance. The summer program in teacher theater training draws educators from around the country. Ashland is hundreds of miles from a big city, but the festival and university seem to thrive thanks to mountainous surroundings that attract tourists and faculty.

One of the things that jumps out of that write-up is that it's pretty easy to get into SOU.  And despite this, students aren't flocking there...which is a part of the reason for the school's financial problems.  Last Monday, the school president started the process of declaring a budget crisis.   

The comment period, which ends Dec. 15, is required by the university's union contract with professors before any employment cuts are made. Soon after the start of winter term Jan. 8, she will decide whether to declare "a condition requiring reduction or elimination of a program" that would prompt an intense planning period to outline cuts.

The declaration would enable the president to terminate contracts with tenured or tenure-track professors, said Jay Kenton, vice chancellor for finance and administration with the Oregon University System.

...

Between 1999 and 2006, expenses grew 30 percent, with significant increases in employee benefits and utility costs, she said. During that period, revenues increased only 23 percent and state support actually decreased 6 percent, making the school more reliant on tuition from students.

While the number of students this fall was up slightly, the full-time equivalent, a measure based on the number of credits they are earning and the one used to distribute state revenue, was down. That number has decreased steadily for several years and is down 615 from fall 1999, (SOU President) Cullinan reported.

PERS, health insurance, and energy...but not wages.  The salaries of professors in our state university system are amongst the very lowest in the nation, and SOU is below average in Oregon.  According to the Oregon University System 2004 Fact Book (it's published every two years), the average salary for an SOU professor was $57,800, associate professor $49,700, assistant professor $40,800, and instructor $33,900 (previous blog here).  For the 2004-05 school year, Jackson County's K-12 teachers earned an average of $51,665, the second highest in the state...and Oregon's average K-12 wage is a bit above the national average. 

Back in the 1987-89 budget, the Oregon University System received 12.2 percent of the state's general fund.  In 2003-05, that was down to 6.1 percent (haven't found the stat for the current budget).  At SOU, tuition and fees have risen faster than inflation, but haven't kept up with the bills.  Note though that the average tuition at public 4-year universities across the nation has gone up 35 percent in the last 5 years...Oregonians certainly aren't alone in lamenting the rapidly-rising cost of a college education.  The average cost of in-state tuition and fees at Oregon's state universities for the 2005-06 school year was $5,360, which is below the national average for in-state tuition of $5,836.  Our non-resident average cost was also slightly below the national average.

What are students getting for their (or whomever's) money here in Oregon?  Well, the following provides a gloomy hint.  Earlier this year, Kiplinger rated 100 of the nation's public universities (including just one from Oregon) on academic quality, cost, and financial aid...and overall the University of Oregon was dead last.  Other overall ratings are less unkind, but our universities tend to fare better when rated on what they're near rather than what they offer.

"As we face this reality, we have concluded that SOU can no longer hope to correct fiscal problems just through higher enrollment," she said. "We must adjust our expenses."

She noted that SOU took temporary budget reductions such as cuts in travel spending, energy savings and vacant positions left unfilled in the last fiscal year, and continued those this year. Still, it spent nearly $1.6 million from its reserve account last year and will spend nearly $960,000 in reserves this year.

By July 2007, SOU's reserves will drop to about 3.3 percent of its revenue, below the 5 percent minimum the state higher education board's policy requires, Kenton and Cullinan both said. At its current spending levels, SOU will deplete its reserves in fiscal 2008, Cullinan said.

Cullinan will make her recommendations in January.  From a Medford Mail Tribune editorial...

That recommendation will coincide with the first few weeks of the 2007 Legislature. You would be hard-pressed to find a legislator who didn't promise better funding for higher education, including community colleges, during the just-completed campaign. This time around, with an improved economy producing more revenue for the state, the politicians need to quit talking and start producing results.

We hope, too, that SOU and higher education officials can tread water until they get a clear message from the Legislature about funding. It is much harder, and more expensive, to put a program back on track once it's shut down. News of program closures also would add to the difficulty of increasing enrollments.

If cuts must be made, they should be focused, rather than across the board. The school, like the entire university system, cannot sustain excellence in any of its programs if they all continue to be slowly whittled away. It's better to let some smaller programs go dark than to cast a deepening shadow over the entire school.

Agreed.  Not much can improve significantly until the university is put on a more sound financial footing, be that at its current size or smaller.  The K-12 system directly impacts more people, so those schools will obviously get more attention during the next legislative session.  However, the budgetary issues facing our university system are more severe.