Tuition could increase by 10 percent
A meeting Tuesday with student leaders and PSU administration solidified the university’s plan to levy a tuition surcharge to fill the gaps in the university budget until state funding can increase.
The meeting, which included ASPSU President Kristen Wallace, ASPSU State Representative Miriam Gonzalez and Vice President for Finance and Administration Jay Kenton, concluded PSU will plan on charging $10 per credit hour up to a maximum of $120 for undergraduate students, and $14 per credit hour up to a maximum of $126 for graduate students. The surcharge will mean a 10 percent increase in tuition costs for full-time students.
These plans are still tentative but are expected to be approved by the Oregon State Board of Higher Education at their Nov. 18 meeting.
While a proposed ballot measure for January would alleviate the funding problems that Oregon University System (OUS) schools such as PSU face, the OUS wants to plan for now. The solution was to generate more revenue through a temporary tuition increase.
“This is nothing that anybody, myself included, wants to do,” Kenton said.
Some legislators have hinted that even if the proposed income-tax increase doesn’t pass, they would be interested in finding other ways to fund OUS schools. That hope led some institutions to flirt with the idea of taking a “wait-and-see approach,” and not assessing the tuition surcharge until after January.
If the tax increase does pass, institutions would have to refund the money to students. Involved in the refund “are a lot of administrative costs,” Kenton said.
“What we came up with is just assessing it at the beginning of January and refunding it then if the income-tax surcharge passes,” he said.
The surcharge will be split into two doses winter and spring term, at the end of which there will hopefully be other funding available. If not, the surcharge could continue into summer term. “We decided that in the case that the tax increase does not pass, we wanted it to be as affordable to students as possible,” Kenton said.
Additionally, by assessing the surcharge at the beginning of the term, it should interfere less with financial aid disbursal.
In an attempt to lessen the burden of the surcharge on students in the lowest income bracket, 10 percent of the funds from the surcharge will be set aside for financial aid.
Regardless, the surcharge is expected to have a serious impact on enrollment.
“If the surcharge continues to be added, we’re going to be losing, on average, 500 students a term,” Gonzalez said.
ASPSU intends to run a series of town-hall-type meetings in November to notify students of the tuition increase and what the passing or failing of the income-tax increase could mean.
The economic outlook is dim at this point, and Tom Potiowsky, Oregon State economist, doesn’t see an increase of higher education funding.
“I don’t know where it’s going to come from,” he said. “It’s going to come at the expense of other programs.”
Potiowsky doesn’t see that happening when 45 percent of the state budget is dedicated to K-12 education.
“Everything that I’ve been led to believe is that the state economy continues to drop $60 to $90 million every month below what was projected,” Kenton said.
Kenton doesn’t see the surcharge going away without help from the Legislature.
“We’re talking about continuing it until the budgetary situation improves,” he said.
According to Gonzalez, the timing of the tuition increase couldn’t be worse, as both the Oregon Opportunity Grant and the Child Care Block Grant are seeing funding shortfalls. And a tuition increase makes it even harder for students to make ends meet.
