Out of the 16 states that are part of the Southern Regional Education Board, Georgia has the seventh lowest tuition and fees for four-year institutions.
John Brown on April 14th, 2015
Students heading off to the state’s 30 colleges and universities this fall will be paying tuition that’s up 2.5 percent to 9 percent.
Full-time, in-state students attending Georgia Perimeter College, Clayton State University in metro Atlanta and 18 other colleges and universities will take the smallest hit.
Their tuition is going up 2.5 percent — $33 to $64 per semester for a full-time in-state student, depending on the specific institution.
Tuition hikes at the 10 other colleges and universities are varying, according to a vote by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia on April 14.
The lowest of those will be 3 percent at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, while the highest — 9 percent — is going to hit students at Georgia Tech, Atlanta Metropolitan State College, University of Georgia in Athens and Middle Georgia State University in Macon.
John Brown, the university system’s vice chancellor for fiscal affairs, said Georgia still has “some of the lowest tuition rates among our peer state public higher education systems.“
“For example, out of the 16 states that make up the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), our university system is the seventh lowest in tuition and fees for four-year institutions,” Brown said April 14.
That claim caught our eye. PolitiFact decided to do a little digging on behalf of all those parents and students who soon will be gulping, then pulling out their checkbooks and credit cards or filling out student loan papers.
First, a little background about SREB, a nonprofit created by the Southern governors and legislatures in the 1940s. Their focus is on improving education at all levels across the region.
SREB is headquartered in Atlanta and partly funded by its member states — Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Hank Huckaby, chancellor of the University System of Georgia is one of five SREB board members from Georgia.
The organization gathers, analyzes and publishes education data from the 16 states each year, including median annual tuition and fees for full-time, in-state undergraduate students at \public, four-year institutes.
We reached out to Beth Day, spokesperson for SREB, who provided us the latest data available, from 2013-2014.
When we ranked the states, based on highest to lowest annual tuition/fees, South Carolina was highest with $10,064, followed by Virginia at $9,724. Georgia, as Brown said, had the seventh lowest tuition/fees at $6,622. The state with the lowest tuition/fees, $5,315, was Oklahoma.
Higher education officials in South Carolina and Virginia confirmed the accuracy of their data.
To understand why South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia fell where they did in the ranking, consider this:
In 2013-2014, state dollars covered 33 percent of the costs of higher education in South Carolina, 39 percent in Virginia and 54.3 percent in Georgia. That left tuition and fees to cover all other costs. (One exception: South Carolina also had local funds to cover 2.3 percent, per the report.)
It should be noted that Brown said in April that, with the tuition hikes effective this fall, Georgia’s higher education costs are about evenly split between state funding and tuition/fees
Nationally, the cost of attaining a college degree has increased dramatically, even as the need for education beyond high school grows ever more essential, most experts say.
The costs of all public, four-year colleges have risen more than 30 percent in the last decade — more so in Georgia.
In 2014-2015, average published tuition and fee prices for in-state students at public four-year institutions ranged from $4,646 in Wyoming to $14,712 in New Hampshire. Georgia’s tuition and fees for in-state students averaged $8,094, up 46 percent in five years, according to The College Board, Annual Survey of Colleges.
Our conclusion
Tuition is rising again this fall for Georgia college and university students between 2.5 percent and 9 percent. This follows five years in which Georgia tuition increased by 46 percent, higher than the high national average.
John Brown, vice chancellor, said Georgia’s tuition is seventh lowest among 16 states stretching from Texas to Virginia that for decades have joined the state as members of the Southern Regional Education Board.
He based his statement on an SREB report looking at 2013-2014 median annual tuition and fees for full-time, in-state undergraduate students at public, four-year colleges and universities in the 16 states.
Tuition increases since then may have changed the landscape. But the report provided tuition in Georgia in comparison to its peer states, and Brown quoted it accurately.
We rate the statement True.
About the Author
