Future students need voice on UI fees

This commentary from the Lewiston Tribune is presented in place of the customary Spokesman-Review editorial.

Tuition and fees at Idaho’s colleges and universities are about to escalate at double-digit rates.

So why do student leaders go along with the idea?

At the University of Idaho, fees could rise 12.4 percent or $611 next year. Boise State University and Idaho State University want 9.9 percent more. Lewis-Clark State College is seeking an 8.75 percent increase.

“The administrators and the ASUI (Associated Students of the UI) are behind this proposal just because we’ve lost so much in state funding,” said student body President Kelby Wilson.

Nor is it all that uncommon to see student leaders support higher fees. It’s not that they’ve been co-opted. Students already in the pipeline – especially those upperclassmen who are reasonably confident of graduation – have an interest in maintaining programs with their own fees when legislators decline to do so.

For them, it’s a bargain.

Take the student who graduated from the UI in 1996. By that time, he’d spent $7,642 in fees. The final increases cost a mere 2 percent more.

But for the kid in Orofino who was just completing high school at the time and entered the Moscow campus in the fall, that new fee added $820 to the price of attending the UI for the next five years. That’s just the floor. Fees are cumulative. During his time in school, Idaho added another $1,100 in fees.

So by the time he graduated in 2001, that student had handed over $11,622 to the UI just to attend classes, to say nothing of books, lodging and food. That’s 53 percent more than the fees charged to the student who preceded him five years earlier.

And as before, the final fee increases he paid constituted only 2 percent of the total cost of his education. Why would he argue about 2 percent?

Repeat the cycle again. For the student who enrolled at the UI in 2002, that fee increase spread over five years came to $1,220. Add to that another $1,800 in new charges imposed by the time he graduated in 2006. In total, his fees came to $18,192, up 56 percent from the previous five-year period.

And that’s after the state board applied the brakes to more ambitious requests to raid student wallets. If the fees now expand at double-digit rates, a sophomore in high school today can expect to shell out more than $25,000 by the time he graduates from the UI.

For a student who isn’t confident he can perform college-level work, let alone find the money to try, that’s got to be a daunting prospect.

But who speaks for him?

Administrators are focused on preserving programs, maintaining quality and retaining faculty. Student leaders share the same concerns.

For legislators, higher education remains a piggy bank. They can cut the budget for colleges and universities, knowing students will make up the difference.

The state Board of Education takes up the matter April 5. Virtually nobody in that room will speak on behalf of the current crop of high school students who will pay these new fees.