When the Olympic break ended a few weeks ago, U students found themselves confronting the usual hum drum concerns: Midterms, neglected reading, imminent term papers. They also found a slightly more disturbing problem: A 9.3 percent tuition hike.
The increase, announced a few weeks ago by President Bernie Machen, will mean that average U students will pay $284 more per year than before. Though it may not sound like much, for some, the extra costs will feel like a swift kick in the financial keister. “It’s going to hurt,” Leah Eddington, a junior communication student said.
The U isn’t alone. Every publicly funded higher education institution in the state got hit this year when the Utah State Board of Regents announced a basic 3 percent tuition increase. All of the state’s colleges and universities added an even greater increase on top of that. Utah Valley State College was the worst offender, announcing a wallet-busting 16 percent tuition hike, down from a previously suggested 28 percent.
U students looking for bad guys to blame will inevitably take aim at U President Bernie Machen, the State Board of Regents and even the Utah State Legislature. It is tempting to believe Utah’s higher education power brokers were too lazy or too unwilling to do what it took to keep tuition down.
In reality, however, the invisible hand of economics may have had more to do with this year’s tuition hike than anything else. Though the leaders of Utah’s colleges and universities must bear some of the responsibility for increasing costs, students must also recognize that sometimes?particularly this year?tuition raises just can’t be helped.
Utah was just one of dozens of states around the country announcing mammoth tuition increases. The L.A. Times recently reported that tuition at state-sponsored colleges around the country is climbing by an average of 7.7 percent this year, with some institutions seeing far larger increases. Southwest Missouri State University announced a 15.4 percent hike. The University of Wisconsin will lay off 500 to 600 employees system-wide and fund the $40.5 million budget cut at the Madison campus by raising non resident tuition 10 percent. Kansas University’s decision to double tuition over the next five years even sparked a student takeover of the provost’s office. Private universities have also been hit by the crunch.
This year’s rise in tuition can be fairly easily explained. The hikes at publicly funded colleges mainly result from the massive budget crunch facing state governments. Like Utah, many states were financially unprepared for the sudden drop in tax revenue that came from last year’s economic slowdown. Sluggish economic growth means less income to tax and lower funding.
That all seems pretty reasonable, but it doesn’t explain why tuition has risen so steadily over the last decade. Administrators didn’t just drop the hatchet this semester. They also raised tuition in 2000 and 1999?years of government surplus! What’s the deal?
One possible reason for rising tuition rates is inflation. According to this line of thinking, the cost of education simply rises along with everything else. But there are some problems with the theory. According to Labor Department statistics, consumer prices rose by 1.6 percent in 2001 and 3.4 percent in 2000. That only explains a tiny fraction of this year’s 9.3 percent tuition increase and last year’s 6.8 percent. In a 1995 Salt Lake Tribune article, Lee Wright, a former campus affairs director for ASUU, claimed that tuition increases have steadily outstripped inflation by nearly 3 percent.
The real explanation for the consistent rise in tuition over the years, therefore, may be a mix of steadily declining state funding and what economists refer to as the “cost disease” of personal services.
Though the shortfalls in this year’s state budget made higher education cuts especially acute, state funding has consistently slid for the last decade. Since 1992, higher education’s chunk of the state budget dropped from 17.7 percent to 15.4 percent. University administrators claim declining state funding is the real culprit.
A more general explanation is the “cost disease” theory. The argument goes something like this: Improvements in technology make workers in manufacturing and other sectors more productive. Thanks to new gizmos, they can produce more stuff in the same amount of time. As a result of increasing productivity, wages go up as well. Businesses and institutions that deal primarily in personal services (such as universities), however, are unaffected by changes in technology. Regardless of how good machines become, professors can only teach so many students.
In order to compete for workers with manufacturing industries, therefore, universities and other personal service-related businesses have to continually raise salaries, despite not experiencing a corresponding increase in productivity and revenue. This means that the cost of such services just keeps on going up.
Many economists disagree with the theory. They argue that changes in technology do indeed affect education. Internet-based classes, for example, allow professors to teach more students than they would without computers. They also argue that increasing demand for higher education and pressure to improve quality may be more important factors than manufacturing sector wages in driving up costs.
Whatever the explanation for rising tuition, everyone seems to agree that there isn’t much we can do about it. President Machen and his pals at the Legislature may seem like good scapegoats, but may really be just victims of circumstance. Like the end of Spring Break and the coming of midterms, rising tuition may simply be another inevitable rite of spring.
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