In April, the Colorado House Education Committee rejected a bill that would have granted the children of undocumented state residents in-state university tuition. The issue pitted those who support educational opportunity for all young Colorado residents against those more concerned about the implications of legal citizenship for the receipt of state benefits. Both parties have valid concerns, yet are larger issues at stake.
Specifically, why does in-state tuition exist at all? Does it serve the state’s larger goals?
The subsidy of tuition for residents is supposed to facilitate state economic growth by creating incentives for the best and brightest students to stay home for college, based on the idea that high-school students and their parents choose colleges based largely on cost. But do state tuition subsidies still make sense?
No — and, in fact, they may actually be harming our institutions by contributing to the budgetary problems of universities, diminishing the academic quality of the undergraduate population and, ultimately, failing to contribute to state economic growth.
Consider, by way of comparison, university athletic programs. The best athletes get scholarships, and the best coaches can demand obscenely high salaries. But while necessary, such financial enticements are not entirely sufficient for Colorado’s athletic success. Other factors are important, too, including facilities, the university’s record of performance, and a proven ability to train athletes for future success.
We might think of the academic side of the university in the same way. Attracting the best professors and students requires competitively priced tuition. But it also requires having the best facilities (for example, research labs), the best research performance (including notable publications, support for start-ups, and participation in important public debates), and a proven ability to develop and train students for successful careers.
Instead of being known for its academics, the harsh reality is that CU-Boulder has become better known for its ranking on “party school” lists and as the home to an unauthorized cannabis festival.
There is true excellence at CU-Boulder. Nationally, it receives the most federal research money in (non-oceanic) environmental research; is home to four Nobel Prize winners; and produces research publications that are among the most referenced in the world. But I am concerned that the financial stress on the institution is reaching a breaking point and the areas of true excellence are increasingly at risk. Our faculty salaries are well below the national average. Facilities are aging and overused, affecting everything from classroom space to quality laboratories, while classes are getting larger, taught by a faculty that has for too long been asked to do more with less.
Tuition reform holds the prospect of helping to fix many of these issues.Of CU-Boulder’s 26,000 undergraduates, two-thirds are Colorado residents who will pay about $7,700 in tuition for the 2011-12 school year. The other third — out-of-state residents — will pay about $29,000 per year. The result is that almost two-thirds of the university’s total tuition revenue comes from one-third of its students. Thus, the financial viability of the institution depends upon securing a large proportion of non-residents, which creates incentives to favor their admission. That is contrary to the very purpose of in-state tuition.
The same total revenue could be raised with a flat tuition rate of about $14,000, which would instantly make Colorado extremely competitive nationally and internationally, and immediately increase the quality of the student body by increasing the size of the applicant pool. The state could still subsidize state residents by providing scholarships to individuals.
Under current law, Colorado is largely powerless to remedy the institution’s fiscal situation because of a constitutional amendment that drastically limited the ability of the state to increase its spending, while other legislation required increases in areas other than higher education. The result has been a serious squeeze on university budgets.
Perhaps the legislature should recognize that higher education takes place in a national and global market, consider allowing the university to capitalize on its merits, and turn a vicious cycle of decline into a circle of excellence. It could do that by eliminating the outdated distinction between in-state and out-of-state tuition and allow the university to charge what the market will bear.
Roger Pielke Jr. is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A longer version of this commentary was originally published last month by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
