A new benefit for University of Idaho employees would reduce the tuition and fees of their dependents by 50 percent.
But there are stipulations — the family of a UI employee can only utilize one waiver at a time for a maximum of eight semesters, and if accepted, the dependent must forfeit all institutional scholarships.
Paul Joyce, interim dean for the UI College of Science, said the waiver is meant to help recruit and retain quality faculty.
“Especially when we are always worried about losing staff to WSU, to have this added benefit would be a way to keep staff here because they’d have to consider that as part of their compensation packet if they were to move,” Joyce said.
The tuition waiver is worth $3,106 for the year, which equals half of resident tuition and fees.
UI Executive Director of Planning and Budget Keith Ickes said dependents have two choices.
“If they’re already getting more financial aid than $3,106, they should keep the financial aid,” Ickes said. ” … If their scholarship was less … choose the waiver.”
Students can still claim any scholarships from outside organizations, including the UI foundation, in combination with the waiver.
“The explanation’s fairly simple,” Ickes said. “That’s all new money that comes from an outside donor and it really does help us pay the bills. An internal scholarship, however, does not. It represents one of our discounts that we have to figure out how to pay out of our own cash.”
Joyce, who served as the UI faculty senate chair for 2011-2012, said the Employee Dependent Tuition Waiver was initially proposed in 2010, but didn’t pass the faculty senate due to a lack of information about its financial implications. Joyce said as faculty senate chair, he worked with the staff affairs committee to resurface the waiver. He said in order for a policy to come about, it must go through a fairly rigorous process.
The waiver was first filtered through the faculty affairs committee, where changes were made, and passed up to the senate leadership. The faculty secretary’s office then sent the waiver out to university lawyers, human resources and the financial aid office — each vetted the waiver and made suggestions to improve it. It was sent back to the faculty affairs committee, which chose to accept or deny certain changes, and then off to the senate.
Current Faculty Senate Chair Kenton Bird said before the waiver went to the senate, there were several meetings with UI Provost Doug Baker and Ickes to try and estimate its financial impact.
“Paul (Joyce) is a mathematician, so numbers come easily to him,” Bird said. “His goal was to first try and estimate how much it would cost (the university) and second, how many students would likely take advantage of it.”
Joyce said his cost
analysis was three-fold. He looked up the enrollment at Moscow High School, as well as the fraction of students there who are dependents of UI employees. Joyce said he then made an educated guess about the percentage of those students who were likely to attend the university.
“So the idea was that if we could increase enrollment among Moscow faculty and staff dependents by between 20 and 40 — then because they’re in-state students and the state pays a portion of that tuition — that added amount of students would increase the revenue enough to pay for the benefit,” Joyce said. “That’s assuming that you could absorb 20 to 40 students without too much cost.”
Joyce said the state pays about $8,000 of an in-state student’s tuition, while the student pays about $6,000. With the waiver, dependents of UI faculty would only pay about $3,000.
“So those students would be generating $11,000 to the university versus $14,000,” Joyce said. “So the university would lose on those students, but if we were able to attract 20 to 40 more students, we could make that up.”
Joyce said he did the worst-case and best-case scenarios for the cost analysis.
“We also did the cost analysis under the assumption that we couldn’t make it up, and we figured it would run around $200,000 out of the budget,” Joyce said.
Ickes said before the waiver could become policy, it was signed by UI President M. Duane Nellis on May 30 and approved by the Idaho State Board of Education during its mid-August meeting.
Ickes said the financial analysis given to the SBOE made the assumption that the state would pay the university for increased enrollment, which isn’t always the case.
“It does not appear necessarily that it will be the case this year,” he said. “The enrollment numbers that we saw this fall are lower than was used in the model. I don’t have the final numbers yet, but they clearly seem to suggest that we’re well below the numbers that were talked about in the model.”
Ickes said this means there will be fewer students who would have potentially been an increase.
“It’s not clear at this point in time because we’re waiting for final (enrollment) numbers … it may very well be that we don’t have an increase, in which case the state won’t fund anything at all,” he said.
Ickes said he speculates the resulting loss in tuition, based on initial estimates, could be anywhere between $100-$125,000.
“I don’t think we’re going to get the support from the state, but I also don’t think there have been as many students involved as they expected,” Ickes said. “So I think the final reduction in tuition will be somewhat less (than the original estimate).”
After the waiver became policy, university administration decided how to implement it.
Joyce said the senate never intended to couple institutional scholarships with the waiver.
“The policy is built by the senate in a fairly general way, and it’s up to the administration to implement the policy,” Joyce said. ” … So there’s nothing in the policy that says (dependents) have to either take the benefit or the scholarships.”
He said the senate discussed and voted on the waiver independent of any other sources of funding.
“We viewed the waiver as a benefit, and if your kid is a good student and gets scholarships, then that’s an entirely separate issue,” Joyce said. “That was our view.”
Ickes said the policy, as it is written, states no intent about financial aid.
“It’s not that there was intent — it just completely ignores the whole question,” Ickes said. “So there is no stated intent in the written policy that this was to be above and beyond any other financial aid.”
Bird said the senate expects to hear a report regarding the status of the waiver after official enrollment numbers are released on Oct. 15.
“The student accounts office is going to track for us the number of people using it,” Bird said. “We’ll never know how big a factor this was in a student’s decision to come here, but we’ll at least know how many students are utilizing it.”
Bird said he knows several families of UI employees already receiving internal tuition discounts felt short-changed and that they didn’t receive all they were entitled to.
“Realistically, we had to balance our desire to provide this benefit with being fiscally responsible,” Bird said. “Since we didn’t know how many people would be eligible, we wanted to be somewhat restrictive.”
Bird said there wasn’t ample time to implement the policy, but the administration thought it would be better to go forward on a limited basis, so some students could take advantage of it in the fall.
Since this is the first year the waiver has been offered, it’s essentially a pilot year, Bird said.
“If there need to be changes to clarify the eligibility or to make it possible for other families to take advantage of it, we’re certainly willing to consider them,” Bird said.
He said the student financial aid committee will closely monitor the waiver and keep the faculty informed.
“If it looks like we need to tinker around the edges with the policy, we’d be receptive to do that probably in the spring,” Bird said. “We’d like to see two semesters of data on how many people are taking advantage of it, and how much it’s costing the university.”
Bird said if students are concerned about how the waiver is being implemented, he encourages them to contact the two senate ASUI representatives, Mark Goddard and Connor Kennelly. He said staff members should direct their concerns to Staff Affairs Committee Chair Ana Burton.
Britt Kiser can be reached at [email protected]