Outsiders can't subsidize the state's universities

Florida has lost one more gimmick from the state's attempt to not pay for higher education.

The phony windfall from out-of-state tuition is yielding the latest of diminishing returns from the disinvestment in Florida's public universities. For a decade, the Legislature has inflated tuition for graduate and nonresident students to subsidize below-market in-state tuition. That's how no-new-taxes legislators paid for tax cuts while appropriating an inadequate portion of what the 11 universities needed for new students and faculty. Legislators even had billions in extra revenue this year that they could have invested in higher education but didn't.

Obviously, Florida's tuition-bailout trick couldn't continue indefinitely. Yet as The Post reported, despite what by last year was the highest nonresident tuition in the nation, the Legislature has kept counting on the mirage of its usual out-of-state enrollment growth. But nonresident costs have skyrocketed to five times those of residents -- $15,540 in undergraduate tuition and fees for a full year's course load, vs. $3,111 in in-state costs -- and students have become astute enough to go elsewhere.

An $18.6 million drop in expected revenue is the result of 13 percent fewer out-of-state students enrolling in 2004-05. University presidents have asked that in the 2006 session, the Florida Board of Governors asks the Legislature to make up the difference. Even that wouldn't address the unfinanced 8 percent growth from in-state students, whose tuition is eighth-lowest. The national average is $4,545. Nor would it address the tuition implications for the Bright Futures Scholarship Program, financed by the Florida Lottery, or Florida's Prepaid College Plan. Those, too, are issues demanding attention from a Legislature that has provided none.

Instead, despite voters' 2002 creation by constitutional amendment of the Board of Governors to "operate, regulate, control and be fully responsible for the management of the whole university system," legislators this year reserved for themselves the right to set resident and undergraduate student tuition and fees. The legislators basically defined the Board of Governors' role as limited to approving new programs. Ending the lawmakers' overreach may require a lawsuit. Fortunately, one filed by a citizens group, the Floridians for Constitutional Integrity, is pending.

For now, the beneficent Legislature at least has bestowed upon universities the power to set graduate and out-of-state tuition. But it needs to go down, not up. That gimmick has cost the state enough.