If Lawmakers Won't Fund Opportunity Scholarships, They Shouldn't Be Expanding This One.
Nevada has a habit of launching “free” programs with somebody else's money, then quietly handing taxpayers the bill once that money runs dry.
We've watched it happen before.
The Guinn Millennium Scholarship was sold to Nevadans in 1999 as a program that wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime. It was going to run on tobacco settlement money forever.
That was the pitch. Governor Kenny Guinn said it himself: no taxpayer dollars needed.
Fast forward two decades.
Tobacco revenue dried up, because fewer people smoke, which is a good thing for public health and a bad thing for a scholarship fund built on cigarette sales.
So the Legislature started transferring money in from other accounts to keep it alive.
By 2021, the general fund was kicking in $42 million a year. By 2023, that number hit $75 million.
And the program is still projected to run out of money by 2027 unless lawmakers pour in even more.
That's not a scholarship funded by tobacco settlements anymore. That's a taxpayer-funded entitlement wearing a tobacco settlement's name tag.
Now we're watching the same movie play out with Nevada's Native American tuition waiver, and it's moving even faster.
A program growing faster than its funding
The waiver covers full tuition and fees for members or descendants of federally recognized tribes, at any level, for as many degrees as a student wants, with no funding cap and no sunset date.
When it launched in 2021, it cost the state under $500,000. By the 2024-25 school year, it cost $3.9 million.
That's a sevenfold increase in four years.
State and one-time federal money covered only about 35 percent of that cost. Nevada's colleges and universities absorbed the rest, more than $4.7 million and counting.
NSHE Chancellor Matt McNair told lawmakers in February that the waiver program “is putting a strain” on the system.
That's not a talking point from a think tank. That's the man in charge of the system saying it out loud.
Now NSHE wants $13.4 million from the next state budget to prop this up. That's on top of everything else already stretched thin in Carson City.
Nevadans should ask a simple question: where does that money come from?
It doesn't fall from the sky. It comes from higher taxes, from cuts elsewhere in the budget, or from tuition hikes that hit every other Nevada student, Native and non-Native alike.
NSHE's own leadership has said the strain is real. Lawmakers now have to decide whether to feed it or fix it.
Sovereignty cuts both ways
Nevada's tribes are recognized as sovereign governments, and that status deserves real respect.
But sovereignty is a two-way street.
Sovereign governments generally fund their own core services. Many Nevada tribes operate gaming enterprises, land leases, and other revenue streams of their own.
If tribal sovereignty is the reason Nevada must fund this waiver, that same sovereignty is a reason tribal governments have resources of their own to invest in their members' education.
Nevada taxpayers shouldn't be told they're on the hook for a program because of a sovereignty argument that, taken to its logical end, points the other direction.
Making this worse, the 2023 expansion opened the waiver to descendants of tribes based outside Nevada, not just Nevada's own 20 federally recognized tribes.
Even with residency requirements attached, that means Nevada taxpayers are being asked to fund a benefit with a weaker and weaker connection to Nevada itself.
That expansion is exactly when the cost curve took off.
Where's the fairness for Nevada's other kids?
Here's what really should bother every Nevadan, regardless of party.
While this waiver has grown with no cap and no limit, the Legislature has refused, year after year, to lift the funding cap on Opportunity Scholarships, the tax-credit program that helps low-income and minority Nevada families send their kids to a school that actually works for them.
Opportunity Scholarships serve families under 300 percent of the federal poverty level.
These are Nevada's most financially strained families, disproportionately minority, disproportionately from communities the system has failed.
And that program is capped. Rationed. Turned away year after year while lawmakers debate whether there's room in the budget.
Meanwhile, a program with no income test, no cap, and no sunset gets a request for $13.4 million in new money?
Nobody's saying Native Nevada students don't face real challenges. The waiver's own backers point out that Native students still graduate below the statewide rate. That's a legitimate concern worth Nevada's attention.
But a low-income non-Native student in rural Nevada, or a minority student stuck on an Opportunity Scholarship waiting list, faces the exact same wall: no money, no seat, no path forward.
Nevada shouldn't be in the business of deciding whose need counts and whose doesn't based on ancestry rather than actual financial hardship.
If the state wants to help kids who are struggling, means-tested aid open to every Nevada family in need is the fair way to do it.
A program that hands out an unlimited, uncapped benefit to one group while capping help for other needy Nevada kids isn't equity. It's picking winners.
The bill always comes due
We've been down this road with the Millennium Scholarship.
A program promised to run on someone else's money that, within a few years, became yet another line item taxpayers had to backfill, with no end in sight.
Nevada lawmakers now have a choice.
They can keep expanding an uncapped waiver program and quietly shift the tab to taxpayers and other students, the same way they did with Millennium.
Or they can hold the line, put real limits on cost growth, and finally give Nevada's other low-income kids, the ones stuck behind an Opportunity Scholarship funding cap, a fair shot too.
History says we know which path Democrats in Carson City will choose. It's up to Nevada taxpayers to make sure this time is different.
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