State college tuition hikes 2nd-steepest in nation

Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 23, 2007 at midnight

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Colorado four-year colleges had the second-steepest tuition rise of the 50 states this fall, and the state's higher-education chief says it's a problem that isn't going away.

The College Board reported Monday that Colorado's average tuition increase for four-year schools was 16 percent, topped only by Hawaii's 19 percent — although Puerto Rico, at 25 percent, and the District of Columbia, at 17 percent, also were higher.

David Skaggs, executive director of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, noted that even with the steep tuition increases, Colorado now ranks only in the middle among states in actual tuition prices.

He said the rise reflects a deliberate strategy by state lawmakers and the governor last year.

For several years, when the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights put a cap on spending, dollars flowed to K-12 education and other departments that had built-in revenue safeguards, while higher education took the brunt of the cuts. Lawmakers capped average tuition increases some years as low as 1.1 percent.

Finally, things loosened up. In 2005, Colorado voters approved Referendum C, which allowed the state government to spend more of the tax dollars collected. And colleges were allowed to declare themselves "enterprises," dependent so little on state money that they should be able to set their own tuition, within limits.

Last year, a compromise was worked out, whereby research universities could opt to raise their tuition revenues overall by 7 percent, provided that they mitigate the pain for low- and medium-income families by increasing need-based grant money.

Also, colleges such as University of Colorado and Colorado State University could boost tuition revenues even more by declaring that a full-time student would have to pay the per-credit-hour rate for 12 hours each semester. Prior to that change, nine credit hours constituted a full load, and students could take 12, 15 or 18 hours without paying any more.

Skaggs thinks the College Board's 16 percent figure is a little high, but says it could have gotten to that figure by counting the steep tuition of out-of-state students in the mix.

"This is all against a backdrop of Colorado being way down in its state support for higher education relative to the rest of the county," Skaggs said.

A CCHE report last year found that Colorado's public colleges are so underfunded that they're at just 63 percent of average, and would need an extra $832 million to rise to the middle of the pack among states.

The choices are more state support of the universities, an erosion of quality at the universities, or higher tuition, said Skaggs.

"It's a vexing question that we faced last spring, and we'll face again," said Skaggs, a former U.S. Congressman from Colorado's 2nd District.

"Do we want to provide sufficient resources to our public institutions even if we can't find that much more state support?

"It's a hard choice to make. But my view is that it does a better service for the students to keep the institutional quality up and preserve the value of their degrees by, reluctantly, relying on more tuition revenue than ideally we'd like to have to do."

Skaggs added that the college community was encouraged by Gov. Ritter's statement last week that higher education was going to get top consideration in the 2009 budget.

Meanwhile, Colorado's two-year colleges had a much gentler tuition increase — 4 percent, which landed it just below the middle among the states, according to the non-profit College Board. Colorado's two-year colleges' actual average tuition of $2,464 was 30th highest in the nation.

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