The Oregon University System’s Board of Directors unanimously approved a statewide increase in summer tuition at its meeting on Jan. 7. This will mean a 5.6 percent increase in the cost of summer tuition and fees for undergraduate students at Portland State, and is part of a continuing trend representing a 22.6 percent total tuition increase since 2008.
According to the OUS Director of Communication Diane Saunders, the rise in tuition is collateral damage resulting from the battle between Oregon’s public universities and the state legislators that approve their funding.
“Basically, what we’re seeing here is a continuing trend in the reduction of state funding, which is leading to students becoming responsible for a greater share of their educational costs,” she said.
The state university system is subject to expenditure limits based on budgets set each biennium. In the event that an OUS university requires funding beyond this biennial budget, it must first seek the approval of the state legislature by making a request for emergency funding.
The terminology is misleading, however, as the emergency funds that a university requests actually come from funds already in its coffers, according to Saunders. Though students who attend OUS universities pay tuition, the state legislature can not only prevent the institution from spending it on education, but can also appropriate tuition revenue for use by other state agencies, Saunders said. This has led to a funding problem which is now self-perpetuating.
“It’s difficult to know how to plan ahead from year to year if you don’t know what your budget is going to be,” Saunders said. “Every biennium we get a budget, but without fail there are budget cuts.”
With each round of budget cuts, OUS must go before the legislature to request the emergency funds, as they did in December. According to figures provided by OUS, expenditure limit increases in the amount of $19,572,869 were requested last month in an attempt to cover the general fund budget reduction that it was forced to take in September 2010.
Only $2,174,285 of this was approved, leaving a shortfall of approximately $17.3 million of student-paid tuition dollars that cannot be spent on higher education.
“It sounds crazy, but this is money that the students have already paid, which is sitting in our bank accounts, which the state won’t allow us to spend,” Saunders said, adding that the rise in summer tuition costs does not account for the shortfall.
This creates a major problem for a university system that has seen steadily increasing enrollment. With many universities unable to hire additional staff to meet such demands, this means larger class sizes and less course options for students who are paying more for tuition than ever before.
“Unfortunately, the state’s disinvestment in higher education has meant larger class sizes and less course options,” Saunders said. “If a class isn’t offered one term, students may need to stay an extra term in order to graduate…It’s really altered students’ path to their education.”
In fact, students in the university system receive fewer subsidies than those of any other western state, according to a draft of a 2011 Legislative Issue Brief compiled by OUS.
According to the report, Oregon’s investment in higher education is among the lowest, leading to what OUS claims is a doubling of the student’s share of educational costs over the past 20 years. Figures from the 2008–09 academic year indicate that OUS students, on average, paid for 60 percent of the total cost of their education and had higher student loan debt upon graduation than any other western state. This is a stark contrast from Nevada and Idaho, where students paid for 36 percent of their higher education, or California where the figure was 37 percent.
In a recent article for the Statesmen Journal, Hannah Fisher, a PSU student and Oregon State Board of Higher Education board member, expressed concern that that current system benefits the state of Oregon far more than its universities or the students who attend them.
For instance, Fisher said that interest earned on tuition that Oregon students pay goes directly to the state, rather than to improve educational facilities or functions. Additionally, this amounts to a hidden tax on higher education, one that a struggling university system cannot afford to pay.
Saunders added that, in spite of all of this, Oregon tuition has still increased at a slower rate than many other states.?