Dec 26, 2014 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers around the country as compiled by the Associated Press:

Tobacco products generate huge amounts of revenue for state governments.

But how much of that money goes to smoking prevention efforts and helping smokers quit?

Far too little, a coalition of health organizations reports.

This fiscal year, states will collect $25.6 billion in revenue from tobacco taxes and the tobacco settlement agreement, which was reached in 1998 and continues to provide funds to states through 2025. But states will spend only about 2 percent of that on prevention and smoking cessation, according to a study sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and others.

In West Virginia almost 20 percent of high school students smoke and 27 percent of adults, the highest rates in the country. Kentucky is not far behind at 18 percent for students and 26 percent for adults, and Ohio is only slightly better at 15 percent and 23 percent.

Meanwhile, all three states spend less than 3 percent of their tobacco tax revenue on prevention and cessation. Florida, on the other hand, has a well-funded prevention effort and statistics that show it is working. The high school smoking rate there has dropped to 7.5 percent. If West Virginia could reduce teen smoking to that level, it would prevent 68,520 teens from becoming adult smokers and save $1.2 billion in future health care costs, the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free West Virginia projects.

The Common Core State Standards – a set of K-12 education goals for reading and math adopted by Ohio and more than 40 other states and the District of Columbia – should not be repealed by the Ohio General Assembly.

The standards enable teachers to better prepare Ohio’s students for higher education and the workplace. They provide colleges with an apples-to-apples comparison of Ohio’s students to their peers nationwide.

The standards also provide consistent performance baselines to evaluate year-to-year progress in Ohio’s public schools.

The Common Core sets the bar high, and we are confident that with the right resources, Ohio’s students will meet those goals and excel.

Loan debt is now as much a part of the college experience as frat parties and all-night study sessions, but it wasn’t always so. In fact, in the 1980s, tuition made up less than a quarter of funding for higher education. With state and federal money paying the bulk of the costs, students graduated with minimal debt, if any at all.

That has changed in the last 30-plus years, as public colleges and universities around the country began relying less and less on public funding, and more on tuition and fees from students. The trend only accelerated during the Great Recession, even as more people left the sour job market to seek degrees, forcing schools to either raise tuition or cut valuable programs.

As a system created to provide access to higher education for everyone, regardless of economic status, that is unacceptable, and unsustainable.

According to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, tuition accounted for less than 24 percent of higher education funding nationwide in 1988. By the start of the Great Recession in 2008, that number had risen to more than 35 percent. Now, it is 47 percent. This increasing reliance on tuition has helped push the cost of state universities and colleges up 230 percent since 1980.

And through this same time period, real income, especially at lower levels, has remained almost unwaveringly static.

It will take continued investment to reverse a now decades-long trend that has weakened public colleges and universities, left many graduates with stifling debt, and kept others from pursuing higher education altogether. If public higher education is going to remain a great instrument for building the middle class, that has to change.