With a $3 million budget deficit, $3.4 million in critical expenses and a proposed 5.9 percent tuition increase, the University of Idaho is experiencing some dire financial difficulties.
Seventy-six percent of the budget deficit is the result from a drop in full-time student enrollment. The budget projections for the coming fiscal year are based on previous enrollment numbers, which assume UI won’t experience a decrease. Although overall enrollment increased — a fact President M. Duane Nellis regularly touts — the number of students paying full-time tuition and fees has dropped, contributing to the deficit.
UI is requesting a 5.9 percent tuition increase at the Idaho State Board of Education meeting Wednesday, and if the enrollment of full-time students remains the same, the university will receive revenue of $3.8 million in addition to an increase of $2.6 million in state funding. However, this additional money isn’t going to be used to hire new faculty, give current faculty and staff a pay raise or build new facilities — UI already has $228 million in deferred maintenance costs from the past 10 years. The tuition and state funding increases will only cover the bare minimum.
While UI is one of the most affordable flagship institutions in the nation, tuition has increased 128 percent since 2002. And if UI continues on this path, the cost of education will grow even more.
When projections fall short, despite the president’s assurance of university growth, and when the state spends only a pittance on higher education, students are the ones who take the fallback for the budgetary shortfalls.
Access to and paying for higher education is difficult enough as it is, even at one of the most affordable institutions in the nation. But if we keep going down this road, Idaho’s universities are going to see a large drop in the quality of their education and in the number of students who can afford to pay for college.
It’s a message that by now should be hammered home: Idaho needs to make education a state funding priority.
— KM