Last week, Texas Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (D-McAllen) filed a bill to implement a two-year moratorium on tuition increases at all public universities. After that, hikes would be limited to “key economic indicies,” i.e. inflation, and could only be adjusted once a year. Any increase in other university fees must be approved by the students’ majority vote.
We can certainly sympathize with Hinojosa’s intentions. According to a recently released statement from his office, “the ‘work hard and get ahead’ story has become a false promise for Texas high school seniors” because of steadily increasing tuition rates. It’s true — Texas’ schools aren’t very useful if no one can afford to attend them. Hinojosa singles out House Bill 3015, the hotly contested tuition deregulation law passed in 2003, as the culprit for staggering tuition hikes. In several interviews, he’s cites a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board statistic that tuition has jumped 53 percent on average since the bill was passed.
While Hinojosa is right to blame Texas legislators for the recent jumps in tuition at public universities, his narrow focus has left him blind to the deeper cause of this trend: State funding for higher education has not kept step with the exponentially increasing amount of Texas students, and that comes at the fault of legislators — like himself.
According to Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts Susan Combs’ Web site, from the fiscal years 2002-2007, the state budget has decreased in terms of real dollar, per-student funding for universities by 20 percent and for community colleges by 35 percent. By coupling a sagging economy with decreased per-capita funding, Texas lawmakers didn’t give universities many other options — that is, if they wanted to remain academically competitive.
Numbers aside, Hinojosa’s solution still does not hold water. While tuition isn’t the only form of income for universities by far, it is the only income over which they have any considerable amount of control. Private donations are helpful but not consistent enough to be relied on in terms of financing a whole university. Investments, such as those managed by UT and A&M’s UTIMCO, are tied to ebbs and flows of the economy, which has been equally unreliable as of late. Taking this much-needed flexibility out of the hands of those who manage the University makes it that much harder for them to do their jobs — providing students with quality educational opportunities.
