As had been widely expected, the University of Washington Board of Regents approved a 20 percent resident undergraduate tuition hike this morning, from $8,701 to $10,574, the largest increase in tuition and fees ever. Following two consecutive years of 14 percent increases, the in-state cost of an undergraduate education will have increased by 55 percent over three years.

Over that same period, the state legislature has cut funding for higher education by more than 50 percent. Hmm. I wonder if there’s a connection?

ASUW Government Relations Director Andrew Lewis decries the move as “another step in the direction of privatization.” Lewis complains that there wasn’t enough transparency in the process, there wasn’t enough public input, and there wasn’t enough thoughtfulness put into the final decision. According to Lewis, only three of the ten regents were actually physically present at today’s meeting, with the remaining seven joining by conference call. “They literally phoned it in,” says Lewis.

Amongst other things Lewis would like to see more public discussion about administrative costs, calling it “the huge bloated elephant in the room.” But Lewis acknowledges that given the financial constraints, the regents’ options were limited. “The state is the adversary,” says Lewis. “This is the state abdicating its responsibility.”

The good news, we’re told, is that the UW is still a couple hundred dollars cheaper than elitist WSU, and remains a relative bargain compared to public universities in some other states. But that’s little consolation to middle class families who are seeing tuition cost rise dramatically faster than financial aid. And despite an increase in financial aid money in the recently passed budget, the state is still falling far short of need, with as many as 22,000 eligible students not receiving a state need grant.

To this end the UW is increasing Husky Grant funding in order to try to make up the difference, with 50 percent of the tuition revenue increase being dedicated to financial aid, 15.6 percent of all tuition revenue. That should help the universities low income students cover much of the rising costs. But unless and until the state starts covering a bigger part of the financial aid side of the “High-Tuition/High-Financial-Aid” funding model we’re moving towards, it’s students from middle class families who will ultimately be priced out of our state’s public colleges and universities.

28 replies on “UW Hikes Tuition 20 Percent; Largest Increase <i>Ever</i>”

  1. Still cheaper than daycare which, if you’re a liberal arts major, is a comparable deal.

  2. Oh young Andrew Lewis. The state is not the enemy. Students have always been in favor of legislative control of tuition. I have been deeply involved in these issues in the past, as I was the GPSS Vice President in 2005-2006.

    And for the first time (in recent memory, and maybe ever), the UW regents are making the decisions about tuition increases behind closed doors (or rather at their vacation homes). The legislature should be setting tuition rates. Don’t believe the administration. Legislators are held responsible by the public. Explain to me how the public fires the administration?

  3. I have one year left at UW, and I’m being told I am no longer eligible for financial aid. Now, short of a miracle, I have a $50,000 bill with the federal government and no degree to show for it. Thanks UW.

  5. @2, in Andrew’s defense isn’t it accurate that the state, read: legislature, is the enemy when the legislature granted the regents unfettered tuition setting authority?

    I’m totally with you on my sentiments toward the Regents, and their vacation homes. But the legislature just handed it to them.

  7. Fuck the students. The modern Gladiator State University isn’t about students. The purpose of the University is two-fold: football greatness and basketball greatness. They should get rid of the student body entirely and recruit the athletes from the prisons instead.

  8. Over that same [two-year] period, the state legislature has cut funding for higher education by more than 50 percent

    Not according to the state, they haven’t. According to the state’s budget trends web page:

    2007-09 Higher Ed Spending: $11.68B
    2009-11 Higher Ed Spending: $10.09B

    That’s a 14% decrease. That’s quite significant, especially when one considers that in most other areas state spending continued to go up, despite the recession. (Total spending went from $68.5B to $70.9B, a 4% increase.) But it is nowhere near a 50% decrease. Care to cite a source for your 50 percent number?

  10. @9… The UW has seen its state funding cut 50% over three years. At the same time it has increased tuition 14%, 14%, and now 20%.

  12. Trevor Griffey dropped a really good comment over on Publicola the other day relating how he sees this deadening our future political landscape:

    Then there’s jobs. In the late 1990s during the dot com boom, I was working odd jobs by day so I could devote my life to activism. Others did the same for arts, or just to bum around. It was possible then, not just because of cheap housing, but because of plentiful crappy jobs. I used to work 6 weeks on, 6 weeks off, temping around town, making enough to survive in the process. Temp agencies that used to call me with four different options largely went under with the dot com bust, and by the time I enrolled in grad school around 2003 some of my activist friends were on food stamps. Now unemployment is higher for 18-24 year olds than at any time since the Great Depression. When I teach at the UW, I’ve been surprised to find students working full-time jobs at Home Depot while taking a full load of classes, or working 2 jobs, and also living at their parents’ place well into their 20s because they can’t afford to live on their own without going deep into debt.

    Which brings me to the cost of education. Student activism has long been essential to the left in this country. But when you work full time and accumulate massive debt in the process of going to school, you have much less time to form volunteer-based organizations or projects, you become more career-oriented earlier. I am inspired by the continued work of United Students Against Sweatshops at the UW, but they and a few other socialist groups are basically what remains of what had been a much broader activist youth culture around the time of the WTO. The dominant forms of student organization at the UW remain religious groups and fraternities and sororities. It’s not, I think, because UW students are conservative, or “kids these days” aren’t as cool as we were when we were young, but because many are too busy just trying to survive these mean times.

    http://publicola.com/2011/06/29/punk-is-&hellip;

  13. The masses don’t deserve subsidized education in the liberal arts. Let them pay their own way through vocational school until they build a dynasty that can afford to send its younglings to university.

  14. @11: Source on the 50% number? I don’t see how that is compatible with the budget numbers at the state budget site I linked to. 2009 to 2011 is the only period in which there is ever any decrease at all. So if you extend the window back to 2008 or forward to 2012, the decrease would be lower than 14%, not higher.

  15. @3 How is one year at UW going to set you back $50,000? I went to SU and even if I had had no financial aid at all I wouldn’t be out that much money for one year.

  16. @16, the $50k isn’t for the last year; it’s for all the years up to it. She’s saying she can’t afford to finish her degree without financial aid, but she’s still on the hook for the $50k for before that — and now with no degree.

  17. @14 Many of the kids going into debt to obtain college degrees would have better economic prospects if they were to become welders or plumbers instead, and many of them aren’t interested in getting an education anyway. They just see college as a hoop they have to jump through.

  18. @18 So what about us who aren’t?

    Honestly not sure what I’m supposed to do. My degree is becoming out of my reach financially. Shit, life and having a family is becoming out of my reach.

    I feel teary thinking about it but I have too much studying to do and don’t have time to cry.

  19. Except for the TEach for America students who get to come in for two years and get their degree for about $11k. The majority of them will come from out of state so such a deal, no?

  23. @18 “Many of the kids going into debt to obtain college degrees would have better economic prospects if…”

    That’s a crappy excuse for pricing them out of the picture. Maybe they’d like a chance at avoiding stuff as tedious as plumbing and welding. Maybe they’re talents aren’t mechanical. Maybe they’re not cut out for hanging around the rednecks often found in those lines of work.

    Why don’t you just admit your elitist attitude and suggest they pick cotton or lettuce? “Can’t afford to have goals like that, might as well learn to settle for drudgery.” Sadly, it looks as though the UW’s admins are slipping into the same elitism that ruled at colleges before the 1950s.

    Too bad if people with major math or science skills weren’t born with a silver spoon, right? You people are dragging this country back into the dark arges.

  24. This is just another economic bubble bursting; the incremental value of a generic college degree is now negative. Like a Las Vegas tract-house. In our decaying corporate kleptocracy, there’s not much need for sociology and psych majors. Anonymous Coward @1 above pretty much nails it. Fnarf is correct as well. FUCK College athletics, and public subsidies to pro sports as well.

  25. Can’t afford to go to college? Get a job, blame your parents, find some other line of pursuit, but don’t think you have a right to mooch off the taxpayer.

    Or you could join the military and eventually take advantage of post-service educational benefits. I hear the Marines are hiring. Or are you too good for that?

    Otherwise, the whining class needs to STFU.

  26. The cost of financial aid is being billed to the other students?

    It’s appalling how the older generations are willing to screw the younger one these days. The wealthier Boomers and Gen Xers won’t pay their fucking taxes when their parents and grandparents got taxed and gave them life on a silver platter.

    Like Cracker said, I hate my generation.

  27. Yeah we need to reserve education only for the likes of Scott St. Clair, flack for the Evergreen “Freedom” Foundation, and general all-around smug, condescending elitist right-wing prick, who thinks that the world belongs to the rich, and that democracy and public resources are just so quaint in today’s modern world, where the rich rule the poor and the strong rule the weak.

  28. @26 Uh, mooch? It’s the responsibility of taxpayers to invest in the future of the country by investing in its young minds.

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