EDITORIAL: Despite State Funds, Tuition Still Goes Up

By Montgomery Advertiser, Ala.

Sep. 27–For the past several years, officials of Alabama’s public universities have defended annual tuition increases of double or even triple the inflation rate by pointing out that state funding for the universities has been essentially stagnant.

This year the public universities got a major percentage increase in funding from the state – a healthy 12.4 percent increase. So, based on what presidents and trustees have been saying, it would not be unreasonable for students to have expected to get a break from tuition increases this year.

Well, they did get a break, in the sense that the tuition increases this year are smaller than in years past. But virtually all students at public universities still will pay higher tuition this year, in many cases higher than the rate of inflation.

Take Auburn University as an example. Auburn’s trustees recently approved a budget that includes $664 million in spending, which represents an increase of $46 million, or 7.5 percent. Almost $27 million of that growth comes from an increase in state funding. But some of the remainder of the increase will be financed by a 4 percent increase in tuition.

While that tuition increase sounds like peanuts compared to the 9 percent increase at Auburn last year, it still is higher than the nation’s inflation rate, which was about 3 percent.

We’re not picking on Auburn; similar increases in tuition were imposed at the University of Alabama and Troy University this year, for example. And while tuition increases are much smaller this year than in past years – the average increase at a state college last year was about 11 percent – the gap between the average pay of Alabama parents and the cost of public colleges continues to widen.

That simply is not healthy. Public universities should be as affordable as possible. Tuition increases larger than the inflation rate should be rare, but in Alabama they have become far too common.

If this trend continues, two things will result, neither of them good. First, more and more students who finish college will do so only after accumulating far too much debt for them to reasonably handle. Even worse, more and more high school graduates will be priced out of attending college.

Alabama state government needs to make a much greater investment in higher education, not in the form of large one-time funding increases such as the one this year, but in regular increases that recognize the ongoing needs of public colleges.

But presidents and trustees at state-funded universities also need to realize that they have to do a much better job of controlling costs as well, even in the years when the state opens up the funding spigot.

—–

To see more of the Montgomery Advertiser, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, Montgomery Advertiser, Ala.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.