Rising Tuition Worries School Leaders
By Bill Graves, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
Jun. 9–The State Board of Higher Education approved an average 3.3 percent increase in tuition for the state’s seven public universities, even as members expressed concerns about whether Oregon was pricing itself out of the market.
The board also approved the appointment of Michael Reardon, former provost and professor at Portland State University, as interim PSU president while it searches for a replacement for outgoing President Daniel Bernstine. The board met at Oregon Institute of Technology’s metro center in Southeast Portland.
Board members and university presidents agree they need to study how rising tuition is affecting enrollment. Board president Henry Lorenzen said a third to half of students winning scholarships at a high school graduation in Pendleton were choosing to go to college in Idaho.
“Something is wrong,” he said, when schools outside the state are “siphoning off our best students.”
Washington State University has opened a new branch campus in the Tri-Cities on the Oregon border and offers students in neighboring Oregon counties in-state tuition, said Khosrow Fatemi, president of Eastern Oregon University. “We get roughly one-third of our students from” those counties, he said. “It has had a negative impact on our enrollment.”
The increase in tuition and fees, which will take effect in September, ranges from 2.9 percent at Oregon Institute of Technology to 15.8 percent at Western Oregon University. Western’s increase is highest because it is promising incoming freshmen no more increases for the next four years — a promise that has lured a dramatic jump in applicants, President John Minahan said.
Universities say the tuition increase is necessary — even with an 18 percent spending increase recently approved by lawmakers — to sustain quality and to keep pace with inflation and wage increases.
The spending boost “is not enough to make up for all of the years of disinvestment,” said Diane Saunders, spokeswoman for the Oregon University System. “It is a great first step, but not enough to freeze tuition at this point.”
The board has adopted a policy, supported by Gov. Ted Kulongoski, of raising tuition no more than the annual growth in median family income, projected to be 3.4 percent in the 2007-08 school year.
Annual tuition and fees for a resident undergraduate taking 15 credit hours per term will range from $5,502 at Southern Oregon University to $6,168 at the University of Oregon. UO tuition is among the highest of major public universities in Western states.
The Oregon Student Association also opposes a trend among Oregon universities to move away from a tuition plateau to charges per credit, said Megan Driver, outgoing board chairwoman of the group, which represents college students statewide. A plateau allows students with a full 15-credit load to take additional credits at no cost.
“While students are being forced to take on staggering amounts of debt to get their degree,” Driver said, “we should create a policy that encourages students to take an increased course load to graduate sooner, not the current policy which encourages students to take less courses to save money.”
She and several board members also questioned the use of fees, which vary from one program of study to another. Board Vice President Kirby Dyess of Portland, for example, asked why a $50 fee for instruction charged by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon and a $2-a-credit fee charged by the College of Liberal Arts and Science at Portland State University were not part of tuition.
All Oregon universities have resorted to fees as a way around people’s aversion to higher tuition, Bernstine said.
James Francesconi of Portland, a newly appointed board member, said that practice has to stop. “Including a fee that is really tuition is not right, not fair and bad policy,” he said.
A committee of students and university officials is working to reform the fee structures at Oregon universities.
In other action, the board approved the appointment of David Woodall as acting president at the Oregon Institute of Technology, while President Martha Anne Dow undergoes treatment for breast cancer. She is expected back at the helm as early as July.
Woodall, a nuclear engineer, is OIT provost and vice president of academic affairs. He previously worked as dean of science and engineering at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, associate dean at the University of Idaho and professor and chairman of the chemical and nuclear engineering department at the University of New Mexico.
Reardon will become interim president at a university where he has worked for four decades. He still teaches part time in PSU’s honors program and has served as history professor, provost and other leadership positions during his tenure at the school.
Bernstine will leave PSU later this month to become president and chief executive officer of the Law School Admission Council, the Pennsylvania-based organization that administers the entrance exam for U.S. law schools.
The board passed a resolution granting Bernstine president emeritus status.
Francesconi will head a search committee to find a permanent president, who probably won’t be selected until next year, said George Pernsteiner, chancellor of the Oregon University System.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
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