Patricia Kilday Hart
(Much) Higher Education
Does tuition deregulation mean that UT and A&M cost too much? It’s all a matter of degrees.
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While Duncan’s and Shapleigh’s laments resonate with someone like me, I realize that Texas’s artificially low tuition rates built inefficiency into the system. Under the old system, a billionaire’s kid and a pauper’s paid the exact same rate. And because it was so cheap to go to school, many students began taking up to six years to earn an undergraduate degree. Under the new law, regents can adopt “flat rate” tuition, which UT plans to do, encouraging students to take heavier course loads and graduate in four years. “We were in danger of becoming like the Russian grocery store,” says Yudof. “Artificially low prices but long lines and very little to serve.”
Thirty other states have deregulated tuition at their public institutions. Like Texas, many states adopted the new policy after years of declining appropriations. The Texas Legislature, which back in the seventies picked up three fourths of the cost of higher education, currently pays for less than 20 percent. In other states, the figure is even lower: Virginia and Michigan universities can count on public funds to provide a maximum of 10 percent of their budgets, and Texas is surely headed in that direction.
With regents controlling tuition, Texas, like most other states, is operating its colleges in a much more “entrepreneurial environment,” as Yudof describes it. “Instead of being run like the trucking industry in the fifties, with spheres of influence and public subsidies, you will have more competition. The idea is that universities will compete with each other for the best students and for the best faculty.”
Proponents of the new law argue that Texas needs first-tier research institutions to ensure the state’s economic future. Top research scientists bring with them federal grants, which in turn can be parlayed into successful commercial ventures. Handcuffed by diminishing legislative appropriations, UT-Austin has had problems competing with top schools like Stanford for cutting-edge faculty. “We were hard-pressed because of the competition,” says Yudof. “We have to pay full freight for a molecular biologist, because we can’t get first-rate people to work in second-rate laboratories.”
When UT raised tuition rates, it also put in place a financial aid plan that held “harmless” students whose families earn $40,000 or less each year and charged only a percentage of the increase to families who earned up to $80,000. In the UT System, 59 percent of the students receive grants and scholarships. Yudof talks about the “sticker price” differing from the actual cost of tuition for many students: Once grants, loans, and tax credits are counted, qualifying students pay far less than the posted price.
Reaction to the tuition hikes on campus has been surprisingly mild. The student body presidents of all UT campuses endorsed the increases; the UT System reported receiving only six negative letters from its 180,000 students and their families. And yet there’s plenty of evidence that Texas students are struggling financially through their college years. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board estimated last year that even before deregulation took effect, the average public college student borrowed $6,439 annually to cover tuition, books, and living expenses; the same study estimated that the average student taking five years to graduate from a public university would leave school with $27,275 in debt. That is a big hole for a new wage earner to climb out of.
The tuition deregulation bill received a lukewarm reception in 2003 until Craddick forced the issue through the House and then outlasted the Senate in budget negotiations at the end of the session. “The House wanted it and held the budget hostage until they got it,” says Senator Royce West, of Dallas, the chair of the Senate subcommittee on higher education. Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst insisted on an additional $500 million in the budget for higher education in return for Senate acceptance of tuition deregulation. “I shudder to think how high the increases might have been without that $500 million,” West says.
Some senators are still angry. “The question becomes whether the boards of regents will listen to the Legislature anymore when it comes to tuition,” West says. It is only fair to say, however, that the Legislature did not listen to the universities’ pleas for more state support in recent years, which ultimately caused UT to decide that deregulation was the only alternative. “I loved the tradition [of low college costs], but the reality is this Legislature will not vote for Texas to strive for excellence,” says Democratic senator Judith Zaffirini, of Laredo. Republican senator Florence Shapiro, of Plano, echoes that theme: “We had a ten-billion-dollar shortfall. We didn’t have the money to fund them appropriately. We wanted these schools to be competitive and dollars were so scarce. It’s simple math.”
The result of college tuition deregulation may be that UT-Austin and Texas A&M evolve into first-class research institutions, but they will also be more elitist, catering to a wealthy student population and a smaller group of academically able low-income students. Texas college students in the middle, whose grades are good but not outstanding and whose parents’ income is a little too high for scholarship awards, will have to choose between going into debt or settling for something less than the best education the state has to offer. Yudof acknowledges that he worries about such outcomes, but he asks, “What is your alternative? What is your plan? If it’s to let the quality of higher education erode, then I am not on your bandwagon.”
Okay, here is my plan: responsible political stewardship. The state’s leaders and the Legislature are to blame for allowing the universities to pursue excellence on the backs of middle-class students. Tuition deregulation ended the longstanding tradition of affordable, excellent higher education for all Texans. If that’s not worth a tax increase, what is? But the politicians chose expediency over access to education. The consequence is that Texas’s best universities will have the money they need to offer a first-class education, but kids from families like the one I grew up in will not be able to afford it.
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