Arriving as UMass trustees finalized their decision to raise tuition and fees at most campuses for the first time in three academic years, a study by the Hildreth Institute found that declining government support for higher education over the past two decades has made it increasingly difficult for the state’s low-income students to attain a four-year college degree.
We’d suggest that barrier applies to middle-class applicants as well.
The Hildreth study revealed that while state funding for public higher education declined 20% per full-time student from 2001 to 2020, tuition and fees at four-year institutions rose an average of 59%.
Financial aid also hasn’t kept up with rising costs; it fell 35% for full-time students during a time when median household earnings have climbed 13%, the report found.
Meanwhile, signaling the ending of a pandemic-era freeze, tuition across all University of Massachusetts campuses will increase this fall.
UMass trustees voted 12-2 last week to approve tuition and fee hikes. Two student trustees, Derek Houle of UMass Lowell and Narcisse Kunda of UMass Dartmouth, cast the only dissenting votes.
In-state undergraduate UMass students will see a 2.5% jump in tuition in the 2022-2023 academic year.
Out-of-state undergraduates face similar tuition increases, as do all graduate students at the Amherst, Boston and Lowell campuses.
UMass had suspended annual tuition increases on its four nonmedical campuses for the past two years to help offset the effects of COVID-19, a decision UMass President Marty Meehan said cost the system about $32 million in revenue.
Meehan said seeking another tuition freeze would not be “sustainable” in the current economic climate.
“Here is the challenge we are facing: the annual inflation rate in the United States has now accelerated to a four-decade high of 8.5%. That’s the highest increase since December of 1981,” Meehan said at the board of trustees’ meeting.
For in-state undergraduates, combined annual tuition and mandatory fees will increase in fiscal 2023 to $16,952 at UMass Amherst, $15,172 at UMass Boston, $14,854 at UMass Dartmouth and $16,182 at UMass Lowell.
Meehan said students will share nearly $1 billion in financial aid from federal, state and UMass sources, with the university system providing $373 million of that support; Meehan said that’s an 8% increase over the previous year and a more than 15% since he took over in 2015.
Education advocates have long pressed Massachusetts lawmakers to rethink the degree to which they fund higher education.
House Democratic leadership last week disclosed their fiscal 2023 state budget proposal, which would boost state funding for the UMass system to $653 million. That’s significantly more than the roughly $580 million Gov. Charlie Baker recommended.
Despite significant academic strides made over the past several years, the UMass system still seems to operate in the shadow of the state’s longstanding coterie of highly selective private universities. It’s led to a lack of financial commitment found in states where public universities form the bedrock of the higher-education system.
All of this puts increasing pressure on graduating high-school students, who might conclude the cost of a four-year public college education just doesn’t add up.
A community college offers a viable option, either as a means of obtaining an employable skill, or a less expensive route to that four-year degree.
In either case, we’re at a crossroads with escalating college costs.
Left unchecked, a four-year college degree will soon become a luxury that few can afford.
