Tuition increase cap would go up if bill OK'd

By Michelle Dupler, Herald staff writer

OLYMPIA -- Advocates for low-income families are worried about access to higher education as the state Legislature weighs how much colleges and universities should be able to raise tuition in the coming biennium.

A House Ways & Means Committee on Tuesday considered a bill that would remove the 7 percent annual cap on tuition increases for the next two years.

House budget writers proposed allowing public universities to raise tuition 10 percent per year for the 2009-11 biennium to help curb the effects of $683 million in cuts made to higher education in their operating budget.

The Senate, which cut $513 million from higher education, kept the cap at 7 percent in its operating budget.

Gov. Chris Gregoire on April 7 urged the Legislature to allow universities to raise tuition up to 14 percent per year to prevent academic programs from being slashed and enrollments from being cut.

But the Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute subsequently released a report saying that kind of tuition increase would mean fewer low-income students would go to college, even with proposed increases in financial aid.

Institute spokesman Aaron Keating said the report looked at large public research institutions that would be comparable to the University of Washington, and found that enrollment of low-income and minority students declined with high tuition because of "sticker shock" and families' lack of knowledge about financial aid sources.

In particular, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor saw a 10 percent drop in lower- and middle-income families, and an 8.4 percent drop in black students from 1997 to 2007. At the same time, the number of students from families earning $200,000 or more went up 8 percent. The report attributes the numbers to higher tuition.

"When tuition goes up, even if aid is available, many students and families will look at the price tag and decide, 'I can't afford that,' " Keating said. "So what's happened is applications from lower-income students tend to drop and applications from out-of-state students go up, and we won't be serving our own students born and bred here in Washington as we could because of that."

According to the report, every $1,000 increase in tuition at top research universities leads to a 6 percent decrease in enrollment.

The report also said public universities became less competitive with private schools as the gap in their tuitions lessen.

Some of Washington's public university presidents, and the Higher Education Coordinating Board, have asked the Legislature to temporarily lift the 7 percent cap, arguing that otherwise cuts will have drastic detrimental effects on public higher education.

"Cuts of the magnitude proposed by the House and Senate would negatively impact the quality of education for Washington citizens for years to come," Ann Daley, executive director of the Higher Education Coordinating Board, said in an April 2 letter to lawmakers. "The immediate impact will be clear: thousands of students denied access to higher education; thousands of faculty and staff laid off; and the likely constriction or wholesale elimination of programs that are vital for our state's future."

"More insidious is the longer-term impact these cuts promise: a long, steady bleed of talent and innovation from the economic and social vitality of the state," Daley said.

Daley urged lawmakers to lift the tuition cap, but to proportionally raise financial aid to maintain access to higher education for lower- and middle-income students.

Keating argued this approach sounds good in theory, but doesn't work in practice because it results in students taking on more debt to pay for school, which means choosing between financial and more intangible rewards when seeking employment later.

"When students graduate with loans like this, they make economic choices such as jobs that pay more instead of going into teaching or social services or becoming a police officer," he said. "It's fine if they want to choose a higher-paying job, but we want the kind of community, the kind of society where they don't have to make that kind of choice."

The Legislature is scheduled to adopt a final budget, which would include the tuition cap for the next biennium, by April 26.

* Michelle Dupler: 360-753-0862; mdupler@tricityherald.com

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Wednesday, Apr. 15, 2009

Tuition increase cap would go up if bill OK'd

By Michelle Dupler, Herald staff writer