Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

A proposed 5 percent tuition increase at the University of Texas at Arlington looks positively diminutive compared to some recent gargantuan increases at other area state universities, but it's nevertheless a trend that seems to be without end or remedy.

At UT-Arlington alone, most students would pay about $9 more per semester credit hour if the increase is approved by regents as expected, bumping tuition and fees to $2,785 per semester for
students who take five classes.

In one important respect, university tuition and medical costs share a common component: Both are increasing far faster than the
rate of inflation.

Long underfunded, state universities like UT-Arlington or the
University of North Texas have found a way in the past to manage with an admirable frugality. But when the Legislature in the last
session gave those and other state universities the latitude to set their own rates, the floodgates opened.

Did public universities need more money? Most experts would say
"yes."

Yet could it be that this onslaught of higher tuition and fees will price many would-be students out of the public education arena? The laws of economics say that it must.

There's a direct correlation between future earnings and
education, so in the long run those would-be students who are priced out of college degrees will earn far fewer dollars and thus pay far less in taxes.

And there's yet another problem with the Legislature's giving
four-year universities so much tuition leeway: lack of
accountability. Cities, school and junior college districts, counties, state and
federal government all have elected representation, and local governments are subject to various petition and rollback requirements.
Not so for higher education. Though it could be argued that
tuition is a fee as opposed to a tax, what's happening is
equivalent to taxation without representation.

In this, lawmakers abdicated their responsibility.
It's an issue that the Legislature needs to revisit in the coming session. The obvious solution is for the state to fully fund higher education. But if legislators are unwilling to do that, they
should at least place some controls on the increases in tuition.

The big tuition hikes across the state show that power without accountability is dangerously tempting.