System is under stress, regents warn

The Utah Board of Regents divvied up $4 million in money the Legislature decided not to cut from from higher education budgets, approved institutional tuition increases and told members of the Legislature's Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee that theirs is "a system under stress."

Meeting at the University of Utah, the regents hosted members of the legislative subcommittee during a noon luncheon.

Regents Chairman Nolan Karras told the legislators that regents are trying to "keep the kettle boiling" during an era of financial stress. "But there are no easy answers." He said that balancing needs among the U. and Utah State University as the leading research institutions and the smaller institutions in the system is a serious challenge. Schools cannot continue to absorb a growing number of students every year while state support is skidding, he said.

"If we want to hold higher education steady, we would have to raise tuition 15.5 percent per year for the next five years," Karras said. He based the comment on projections made by the Office of the Commissioner for Higher Education. Students already have been subjected to above-normal tuition increases for several years, he noted, "and there is a point at which you can't go any further. We can't expect our students to bear the brunt" of keeping higher education functioning while the state slogs through a prolonged economic downturn.

The education community is doing all it can to "demonstrate we're getting a bang for the buck," he said, but it is not fair to continue to raise the costs for students without asking for a greater commitment from taxpayers as well.

"Our citizenry needs to look at how we can fund education," he said. "It should be an over-arching dialogue."

Karras made an appeal for the Legislature to give regents the money allocated for higher education and let them make distribution decisions based on factors including but not limited to student numbers. That is one of the recommendations made by the Business Education Coalition, a group empaneled this year by Gov. Mike Leavitt to study education issues in the state.

In other business Friday the regents approved the distribution of $4 million in money the Legislature restored during the December 2002 special session out of a proposed $12 million cut. Legislators earlier had mustered $5 million in one-time money to reduce the cut, leaving higher education with a $3 million total chop. The Legislature had specifically told the regents not to simply dole out the $4 million to the 10 institutions in the system on a prorated basis. The exercise, Karras acknowledged, "provides a forecast of what would happen if we used our (proposed) formula" to distribute funds.