Tuition increases have become a spring ritual for Georgia’s colleges and this year they’re as dreaded as pollen.
Heightened attention from students, parents and lawmakers can be traced to the recent overhaul of the HOPE scholarship. For 18 years, the award covered all tuition for students with 3.0 GPAs, but the scholarships for fall will be reduced for all but the very brightest.
That’s left some students and parents, who will be paying the difference, more worried than usual about tuition hikes.
For their part, lawmakers are bristling over their lack of control over tuition. They will conduct hearings this year on a proposed constitutional amendment to limit the Board of Regents’ power to set tuition.
Tuition, they say, should increase little or none this fall, when HOPE will cover 90 percent of tuition for about 90 percent of qualifying students.
But that’s unlikely. The chancellor and the regents, who are scheduled to vote on fall tuition later this month, have warned of possible double-digit increases at some campuses. That won’t happen until the Legislature approves the university system’s 2012 allocation, which is forecast to drop from about $1.95 billion to $1.74 billion.
State budget cuts will have a greater effect on tuition than changes to HOPE, Regents Chairman Willis Potts said. Less than a third of the system’s nearly 311,000 students get HOPE scholarships, but the system lost about $1 billion in state funding in the last decade.
A student who goes to UGA in the fall with a HOPE scholarship will pay at least $707 — 10 percent of current tuition — plus $870 in fees, for two semesters. That’s with no tuition increase.
Critics say the regents have not done the belt-tightening other state agencies have to keep tuition affordable.
“You have to say something may be a little out of kilter here,” said Sen. Fran Millar, R-Dunwoody, chairman of the Senate Committee on Education and Youth. “And if everybody else is being asked to hold the line, why can’t they?”
University of Georgia President Michael Adams said the University System has a different dynamic.
Adams said UGA spends more than $1 million a month on electricity, provides about 40,000 meals a day and has staff that haven’t had raises in three years.
“The notion you can freeze one part of the economy that is 81 percent labor when there are increases everywhere else is very short-sighted,” he said. “We’ve cut everything we could cut and still provide a quality education.”
He suggested a single-digit tuition increase is enough to avoid layoffs.
Gwinnett County parent Dave Malloy, who has a daughter in college and another starting this fall, believes the regents increased tuition because they knew HOPE would cover it.
“They are going to get a lot of push-back from parents if they keep raising tuition 10 to 15 percent,” Malloy said.
Although tuition has steadily increased since fall 2002, Georgia remains a low-tuition state.
While some say the regents used HOPE as an excuse to raise tuition, researchers say they’ve found no evidence of that.
Chris Cornwell, head of the economics department at UGA and a HOPE researcher, said, in fact, the opposite is true. “There was this built-in pressure to keep tuition lower than it might otherwise would be.
“You know every dollar of increase is going to be a dollar of increase in claims on lottery revenues. And you know if this continues, it’s going to bring closer the day of reckoning,” Cornwell said.
Georgia, unlike some states, hasn’t used lottery revenue to supplant state funding, noted Joe Marks, a director with the Southern Regional Education Board, a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy group working in 16 states, including Georgia.
That may help explain why Georgia’s tuition increases have been smaller than in other states. Georgia increased in-state tuition and fees at four-year colleges by 82.3 percent from 1998 to 2008, according to the group’s data. The national average increase was 98.2 percent and the average among the 16 Southern Regional states was 127.2 percent.
The regents should be “very, very cautious” as they consider another tuition increase, warned Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, who heads the House committee that oversees college budgets.
There has long been tension between the regents and the Legislature because of Georgia’s decades-old constitutional set-up: Lawmakers give the regents a lump sum of money and have no say on how it’s spent.
Under the proposed 2012 state budget, the University System would receive $5,507 per student — not even half of the $12,900 the system says it costs to teach a full-time student. The system got $5,643 per student in the 1995 fiscal year.
The proposed budget also eliminates money the system has received annually to support increased enrollment. Potts raised the possibility that, without that $177 million, some fast-growing colleges may see larger tuition hikes.
Ali Kamran, president of the student government association at Kennesaw State University, doesn’t think students at that fast-growing college will support a larger increase than students at similar colleges.
“Why are we paying more and more for less and less,” he said.
Ehrhart and other lawmakers say the regents have refused to overhaul programs, eliminate redundancies or make other changes to keep costs down.
Potts said the system must encourage more students to take courses online or attend cheaper two-year colleges and then transfer to four-year colleges.
But he said that won’t offset cuts in state funding.
“The money has to come from somewhere,” Potts said. “It’s unfortunate, but it is a fact of life.”
How Georgia’s tuition compares
Although Georgia raised in-state tuition and fees 26.3 percent for the 2009-10 academic year, tuition and fees at Georgia’s four-year colleges remained below the regional average. Here’s a regional breakdown:
South Carolina: $8,760
Virginia: $7,281
Kentucky: $6,552
Texas: $6,308
Alabama: $6,185
Arkansas: $6,135
Tennessee: $5,769
Georgia: $5,093
West Virginia: $4,963
Mississippi: $4,605
Florida:$4,373
North Carolina: $4,330
Louisiana: $4,016
Average: $5,670
Source: Southern Regional Education Board
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