Utah tuition faces one or more hikes

Utah students will be shelling out more for their education next year with proposed tuition hikes that could climb even higher if legislative funding falls through.

Each of Utah's nine public universities and colleges is planning to raise tuition rates for the 2006-07 school year, with most schools looking at a minimum of a 7 percent hike and Dixie State College pushing a 31 percent increase for some students.

Students are already facing an estimated 3 to 5 percent increase to pay for faculty salaries but will also be seeing school-specific increases on top of that amount.

While the hike to fund salaries will not be set by the Board of Regents until March, most schools anticipate an additional 4 percent jump in tuition for individual school projects.

School officials statewide are holding public hearings on the expected increases and eyeing the waning days of the Legislature to see if those rates will inch up even higher.

A request for $2.2 million in fuel and energy funding could make the difference between a 4 percent increase at the University of Utah and a 7 percent jump, said Paul Brinkman, vice president for budgeting.

"It's looking pretty grim right now. We're trying to drive it down toward 4 percent; meanwhile, we're getting these vibrations that maybe the Legislature can't fund fuel and power," Brinkman said. "We're suddenly in for $2.2 million. Where do we get that from?"

Those mandatory expenses will have to be absorbed into individual institutions' budgets, Brinkman added, with most of that burden shifting to students.

Brinkman said school officials are wary of upping student tuition, a trend that peaked across the state in 2003 with an average 11 percent increase. Since then, rate hikes have slowed down with single-digit increases annually.

Dixie State College's proposed 31 percent increase stands out this year amid those single-digit hikes. The abnormal surge is due mostly to a change in pay structure to level tuition for underclassmen with upper-level students. The two groups will now pay the same $2,100 figure per year, which equates to a 31 percent increase for lower-division students and an 11 percent decrease for juniors and seniors.

Systemwide, tuition has continued to climb at all of Utah's institutions since 2000. In six years, tuition at the U. has increased roughly 50 percent.