Editorial: Board of Trustees will likely vote this week to raise tuition


On Friday in the President’s Conference Room, the Central Michigan University Board of Trustees will likely vote to raise the price of tuition per credit hour.

It’s a decision that has been guaranteed to repeat each year, dating back to before most undergraduate students were born. In 1993, undergraduate tuition for Michigan residents cost $85.50 per credit hour. Another increase will likely make tuition more than $400 per credit hour next year.

We encourage you to attend the board meeting on Friday and express your concerns about the price of tuition to board members directly.

After news of another increase is delivered each spring, students express outrage that slowly fades over the course of a few days. By then it is too late.

We should be angry — each time tuition is raised, more Michigan residents are priced out of an education and returning next year becomes harder for those who are already enrolled. But determining who we should be angry at is complicated, especially since state legislators and university leaders have played a very effective game of “pass the blame.”

Administrators frequently point their fingers toward the state government. However the university is not blameless either. CMU has not done enough to reduce expenses paid for by students.

When the university sets its budget each year, it determines a tuition increase that can cover its costs. When Gov. Rick Snyder cut funding to higher education by 15 percent in 2011, tuition dollars became responsible for covering more of CMU’s expenses than ever before.

Tuition comprised almost 60 percent of the operating budget this year, while state appropriations funded only 16 percent. There was a time not long ago when those figures were reversed.

Snyder’s 2017 budget proposal recommends restoring higher education funding for Michigan’s 15 public universities to what it was the year before he took office and cut it. He proposed investing an additional 4.3 percent, or $61.2 million, to support state university operations.

This is encouraging. It’s the least Lansing can do — CMU’s appropriation in 2011 is significantly less valuable in 2016, even if it is more than what it receives now. There remains a $400 million difference between what the state dedicated to Michigan’s universities in 2001 and today. University administrators have repeatedly said if CMU received the same amount of state appropriations as it did in 2001, it would reduce tuition by $100 per credit hour.

President George Ross has consistently said that the university’s tuition increases are responsible compared to its peers. Indeed, CMU’s 11.2 percent cumulative five-year tuition increase is the lowest among Michigan public universities. Wayne State is the highest, increasing tuition 26.9 percent since 2011.

From 2005-2006 though the 2007-2008 academic year, CMU implemented the “CMU Promise,” whereby undergraduate students were guaranteed an unchanging tuition rate for five years.

What this lead to is skyrocketing tuition; each year new freshmen were given a large tuition increase to pay for the frozen tuition rates of their predecessors. Tuition increased 110 percent from the year before the CMU Promise began to when it was ended. You can thank President Mike Rao for that — as well as further taxing the university’s resources by launching CMED.

The university needs to reduce costs to stay affordable. Instead, university spending has almost doubled in 15 years.

During the same five-year period Ross cites, spending outpaced tuition, increasing 16 percent. Compensation spending for university employees — CMU’s largest budgetary responsibility —increased by 50 percent.

While employee compensation in the academic colleges has increased either at, or below, the rate of inflation since 2005, salaries of CMU’s decision-makers have increased at a rapid rate.

Funding for collegiate athletic programs has been increasing for decades.

Because it is rare for all but the largest universities to balance athletics budgets on revenue alone, schools like CMU have had to compensate by using subsidies from the general fund — money created by academic programs and tuition dollars. The athletics subsidy has exploded from $12 million to $21 million in 10 years.

Compensation for staff in the Athletics Department alone totals $10 million this year .

At CMU, University President George Ross and Director of Athletics Dave Heeke have said they are committed to keeping up with our competitors’ with no maximum spending limit established.

This is not sustainable.

Part of the blame also lies on paying for basic university functions. Services like counseling, advising, access to functional libraries and clean weight facilities are an essential part of the college experience and life at a university. When we demand more from our university — justified or not — that also requires more staff and more money.

Students are caught in the middle of a great hypocrisy — between legislators who talk of the importance of higher education and then cut budgets, and administrators who demand the state to ante up for frivolous expenses.

Meanwhile, we have to ink our signature on the check again this year.

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