Valley View vs. Greenville
Cars and Parts Springfield Swap Meet
Carroll Commencement
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > May > 29 > Entry
Editorial: Tuition hikes can have tax-like effects
It comes as no surprise to anybody that Ohio’s public colleges are talking about tuition increases. With the state budget under duress and the governor refusing tax increases, this had to happen.
School leaders at Wright State University are looking for a 3.5- percent increase, the limit proposed by the state. That would bring tuition to just over $8,000. Grad students and medical students would see increases of 4.5 percent and 5 percent, respectively, and there’d be increases for housing, meals and fees.
Meanwhile, Sinclair Community College is joining with other community colleges in seeking an exception to the cap, because 3.5 percent would bring in much less per student for them than for higher-tuition places. They want a $200 cap.
Higher education Chancellor Jim Petro favors giving them that option. It makes sense given the problems the state budget is causing. (Sinclair faces the double whammy of being dependent on shrinking real estate taxes.)
But the community colleges need to be very careful about making use of the option, given that hard times have sent people who don’t have much money back to those schools.
As for the state universities, Ohio already ranks relatively high in tuition levels. It’s also low in state support and low in percentage of people with college degrees.
And Gov. John Kasich wants to do a trade-off: reduce regulations governing them while also reducing their dependence on state money. That clearly raises the prospect of still higher tuition.
Meanwhile he doesn’t want to raise taxes. Certainly that is understandable. But tuition increases can have an effect much like the effects of a tax. The governor is fond of noting that raising the price of anything is not the way to sell more of it.
And yet, shouldn’t Ohio be trying to sell more education? Might not the state be better off to spread the burden of paying for higher education, so that not so much of it falls on students and their families, so as to make college more affordable?
The administration of Gov. Ted Strickland saw high tuition rates as a problem for the state. Eric Fingerhut, then chancellor of higher ed, bragged that, because of a tuition freeze, tuition rates actually dropped on his watch, when adjusted for inflation.
Meanwhile, he said, enrollment in the state’s public schools grew by 15 percent. But even under Strickland, Ohio’s spending per student was below average.
The proposed Kasich budget for higher education is not as hard on the colleges as some school officials had feared. State appropriations would drop by 11.4 percent in the first year of the budget and rise by 3.5 percent in the second.
But this would be happening as federal stimulus money disappears. The stimulus money was designed to partially make up for the loss of revenue resulting from the collapse of the economy in 2008. Now there’s nothing to do that.
There’s no painless way to face up to the budgetary problems of higher ed, any more than the problems of K-12 education or local governments.
Moreover, the universities should be thankful that, unlike lower-level schools, they don’t have to ask permission from taxpayers. They can raise their rates and see how their customers respond.
But the state has an interest in encouraging people to go to college. Keeping down tuition is a way to do that, a way that needs more attention than it’s getting.
TweetGo to our facebook page and Like us to comment.
