Texas Tech will limit tuition and fee increases next school year to less than 5 percent, Provost William Marcy said Thursday.

Marcy made the announcement at a meeting of Tech's Board of Regents in Lubbock. The regents will wrap up their meeting today.

Administrators, however, did not ask regents to set tuition rates Thursday, saying they won't know how much to increase tuition until the Legislature, which is currently meeting in Austin, has had more time to debate funding for higher education.

"We're not into the legislative process enough to even have a good estimate of how much funding there will be," university Chief Financial Officer Jim Brunjes told the regents. "We want to get a better handle on that first."

Regents will set tuition rates in either late March or early April, according to university spokeswoman Sally Post.

The tuition and fee increase, if it turns out to be less than 5 percent, would be much lower than last year when regents boosted the university's portion of tuition from $56 to $76 per credit hour while the state increased its portion from $46 to $48 per credit hour.

Marcy said the large tuition increase was the direct result of adding 4,000 students without commensurate boosts in funding from the state.

The Legislature in 2003 cut funding for higher education as part of its efforts to close a $10 billion budget shortfall without raising taxes.

State funding for Tech in 2005 is $135.4 million, more than $4 million less than what the university received in 2002.

"That's a big bite to absorb," Marcy said.

Proceeds from the tuition increase went toward bolstering professors' salaries, increasing the number of faculty members and setting aside funds for academics and scholarships, he said.

Tech administrators, though, want to ensure that future tuition boosts don't price middle-class families out of higher education.

To that end, the regents approved the hiring of a consulting firm that will survey applicants to the university on how tuition increases might affect their decision to enroll at Tech.

Stamats, an Iowa-based marketing firm that often works with universities, will conduct an online survey over the next 90 days to find out from prospective students the answers to questions such as, "Why did you come?" and "Would you still have come if tuition (were higher)?" according to Marcy.

Tuition increases might have helped retain faculty who might have left for better-paying institutions, but Marcy said he was worried about the "second-order effects" of tuition increases, such as students opting out of more expensive majors or simply deciding they can't afford to borrow the extra money to go to college.

"We don't want to impact first generation or minority students," he said.

Parking woes addressed

Tech regents also heard a report on the university's parking needs, which concluded that current available parking is not meeting student needs in the sections of the Tech campus with the highest demand.

The study also found that the university will face a parking shortage of 1,200 spots by 2009.

The report, created by Walker Parking Consultants, suggested charging different parking fees depending on how far away the lot was from the campus core and collecting a parking surcharge on ticketed events at the university.

The report also recommended building a 1,200-car parking garage close to the core of campus.

The philosophy, according to Walker Parking Consultants Vice President Jim Moran, is to ensure that no one gets turned away from parking on campus, "but you pay for convenience."

The study will now be discussed in a number of forums, including town hall meetings, phone surveys and focus groups, before regents make a final decision on how to address Tech's parking situation.

In other business:

• Regent Windy Sitton presented a report on the proposed new building for the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business Administration, suggesting the location of the building be moved from west of the Agricultural Education and Communications Building on 15th Street to a location on University Avenue just south of 18th Street.

Sitton said the new location would give the business school greater visibility and would allow the school to take advantage of its proximity to both the Merket Alumni Center and the Skyviews Restaurant in the Bank of America building at the corner of 19th Street and University Avenue.

The new location would boost the project's price tag to $60 million.

• The regents honored five faculty members as Horn Professors, a distinction that recognizes scholarly achievement and outstanding service to Tech.

The newly minted Horn Professors are: Vivien Allen of the Department of Plant and Soil Science, Susan Hendrick of the Department of Psychology, Greg McKenna of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Sunanda Mitra of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Marilyn Phelan of the School of Law.

Sixty-two faculty members have been named Horn Professors since 1966; 25 remain on faculty.