Even Wall Street agrees Florida shortchanges higher ed

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/28/2772816/even-wall-street-agrees-florida.html

The Bond Buyer is normally not a publication that grabs my interest. But there’s something particularly disturbing about seeing the risk facing Florida’s universities assessed in the dry and dispassionate language of the financial markets.

Nothing about the faltering aspirations of college students or the moral obligation to provide young Floridians a path to a university degree. None of that stuff. Just a cold, hard warning about the potential damage the Florida Legislature has chanced by forcing the state’s 11 universities to pilfer their respective reserve funds.

“A clear credit negative,” warned Dennis Gephardt, an analyst with Moody’s Investors Service. “This legislation effectively punishes those universities that built reserves and we view the reduction of these reserves as credit negative.”

The Legislature cut some $300 million from the budgets of the 11 universities, deciding that $150 million of the losses should be replenished by reaching into the universities’ so-called rainy day funds. When it rains, in Florida, it storms like a hurricane.