The Northern Light

Issue date: 9/19/06 Section: Opinion

In case you missed it, tuition is probably going to increase.

Again.

The board of regents will be considering on Sept. 21 and 22 a 7-percent tuition increase, coupled with the possibility of up to an additional three percent to supplement the tuition of students that are considered for need-based financial aid.

Don't even get us started on the 7-percent increase, which is on top of the 50-percent tuition increases we've seen since 1999. And there is another 8-percent increase proposed for the fall of 2008.

But from our view, having some students pay for others' tuition seems plain wrong, like robbing the poor to feed the poorer.

Even though we attend a government-operated university, we were under the impression that we were immune from welfare-based policies.

But we were wrong.

It might be otherwise if the circumstances of the proposal were different, but the fact that President Mark Hamilton and the board of regents are acting in a purely reactionary fashion leads us to believe they really aren't concerned with helping students, but rather with easing the pressure they are facing after a series of embarrassing reports concerning UA's affordability.

For the second consecutive time, Alaska higher-education institutions have received an F in affordability, according to an Aug. 29 report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Of course, 43 other states received an F as well, but Alaska has one thing that most other states don't: oil. We are a rich state by any standard-last year Alaska finished up with more than a $1-billion surplus. That's billion with a B.

But just because Alaska has the money doesn't mean it is passed onto Alaskans.

So our universities continue to get an F in affordability.

Because of concerns about that affordability raised by the last report issued in 2004, legislators and university officials met in February to discuss means of reparation for the problem - the obvious solution being to increase tuition further.

Instead of demanding the allocation more general funds to the university, Hamilton has proposed a 1-3 percent tuition add-on that would go toward financial aid for need-based students. Administrators say that for every one percent increase, UA could generate $750,000 in aid - an impressive amount by any standard.

But what this accomplishes, aside from making school more expensive for most, is that the rest of us will subsidize students from lower-income households. Because their tuition costs will be lowered against the ratio of their household income, affordability for the poor will increase, while it decreases for everyone else.

This will have the effect of increasing affordability as a whole for Alaska, because most middle-class households won't be significantly affected by an increase in only a few percent.

But if we allow this policy to take effect this year, we could be setting a dangerous precedent.

When Alaska is experiencing good times, as it has been recently with the high price of oil, there is no reason the cost of our peers' education should be placed in our laps. We have a government and a budget that is capable of increasing the affordability of higher education, even though it routinely shortchanges the university.

But when the oil industry bottoms out, as it will someday, students will continue paying for the education of their peers, even when it may not be affordable to do so.

Every resident of this state gets an Alaska Permanent Fund dividend. By the time a child reaches the age of 18, he or she has already accumulated more than enough money to attend UA for four years.

When the state is already paying residents to live here, along with the fact that there are numerous scholarships and grants available to most students, it seems ridiculous that students would be pitted against one another and forced to pay for others' shortcomings.

Even though UA might be cheaper than many other comparable schools in the western U.S., as administrators like to point out when trying to rationalize the increases, it won't continue to be with these increases in tuition every year.

This situation seems eerily familiar to the half-cocked idea administrators came up with last spring that would have had all students, whether they owned a vehicle or not, pay a fee for parking.

Surprisingly, that proposal died a sorry death, as should this one.

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