Well tuition is raised once again.
It is uncanny to think of how cheap higher education used to be. Granted, different economies lead to different figures. (I distinctly remember an “All in the Family” episode where Archie Bunker yearned for the good ole days, wondering why the cost of bread was an unseemly number of cents these days.) Yet at the same time, the world wasn’t that much different 10 years ago than it is now? Is it?
Perhaps if you combine the economic realities of universities moving more and more away from public funding and toward private funding, with the downturn of the economy that has affected everyone, you can get closer to why education continues to get more and more expensive.
And the Hope Scholarship, with its promise of $4,000 a year for four-year schools, continues to be a convenient excuse for trustees and school administrators looking to raise tuition.
At the UT Board of Trustees meeting on Thursday afternoon, the cost of the university education, when applied with the Hope Scholarship, was called a “great deal” repeatedly. And while it may be, one cannot shake the fear of the tuition continuing to climb, year by year, until students with the Hope Scholarship end up paying whatever they would have anyway before the scholarship showed up in the mid-2000s in the state.
A college education at the Knoxville branch of the University of Tennessee cost just $3,362, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel, for the 2000-2001 academic year. That’s insane! $3,362.
In the span of just a decade, that figure has more than doubled. And it’s not the unreasonableness of tuition percentage increases that has caused such a spike. In the last decade, the highest percent increase is 13 percent (2001-2002), and there have only been three increases in the last decade that were in double digits, percentage-wise.
What’s the danger is just the continued reliance on tuition increases, the return again and again to the well of students’ and parents’ pocketbooks.
When debating whether or not to raise the tuition increase for 2010-2011 from the proposed 8.5 percent increase to 9 percent, which was eventually approved, all the trustees isolated the half-percent figure and solely focused on that.
But it’s not just the difference between an 8.5-percent increase and a 9-percent increase. While $14 a semester extra is a drop in the bucket for money that brings in $800,000 for the system to help reduce bottleneck courses and improve academic advising — two things badly needed by the university — it’s the sheer mindset of isolating each percent increase every year that is scary. It makes each increase seem insignificant, and only looking back through the years does it appear daunting.
But then as much as one would want to side with no tuition increases ever, the entire notion just seems so fictional at the moment. And finding alternatives to eliminate tuition increases for the foreseeable future — and ultimately finding the cure to the disease of the university’s budget crisis — is something that nobody quite knows the answer to.
We simply cannot take the mindset that some took in the Board of Trustees meeting, the idea that students should be lucky to have anything close to the rates they do. Because while enrollment has not taken a hit quite yet and while the university remains a good value, there’s got to be a breaking point on the horizon where this stops being true.
But thanks to the planning of Interim President Jan Simek and others, the university’s in a better situation to deal with the economic realities it now must face as stimulus funding ends in June 2011. One must commend administrators like Simek for targeting a “gentle landing” and keeping students and parents — the building blocks of the institution — in mind and not simply looking for easy answers to a hard question.
It’s just a shame that in a world where everyone seemingly needs a college degree that they are becoming increasingly difficult to achieve economically.

— Robby O’Daniel is a graduate student in communication and information. He can be reached at rodaniel@utk.edu.