Leadership Quote by Roy Romer

A politician’s version of a weather report: clouds are coming, so don’t blame me when it rains. Roy Romer takes a projected surge in enrollment and turns it into a seemingly natural law of finance, a chain of inevitabilities that ends where it always ends in American public policy: the bill lands on families. The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Expected to expand” borrows the authority of forecasting, as if demographics were destiny rather than a planning challenge. “Very difficult to find those additional funds” is the classic public-sector alibi, a passive construction that hides the real fight: budgets are choices, and choices have winners.

Then comes the pivot word that matters most: “Therefore.” Romer isn’t merely predicting tuition pressure; he’s laundering a political decision through logic, implying that higher tuition is the responsible, almost neutral outcome of enrollment growth. “I think you’re probably going to have” lowers the temperature further, softening agency and blunting outrage. Nobody is raising tuition; tuition is simply “increased pressure,” an impersonal force like gravity.

The context is the long pivot of state higher education from public good to cost-shifted service, where growth becomes a problem to be managed rather than a democratic success to be funded. Romer’s intent reads as preemptive inoculation: set expectations, normalize austerity, and frame tuition hikes not as ideology but as arithmetic. It’s the politics of inevitability, delivered in the calm voice of someone trying to make scarcity sound apolitical.