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Editorial: State should focus on U's quality

Tuition's sticker price is climbing, but so is financial aid.

Last update: June 24, 2009 - 8:06 PM

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U'S BUDGET CHALLENGE

President Robert Bruininks on Wednesday summarized the university's budget challenge to the Board of Regents with these points:

• Our state budget base is being cut substantially.

• This is not a short-term problem.

• Federal stimulus funds are a temporary bridge to the future.

• Tuition provides essential operating revenue.

• We can maintain affordability. We must continue fundraising and increase financial aid to Minnesota students.

• The next two years are critical.

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The graduate and professional schools at the University of Minnesota function as a giant talent magnet, drawing people of promise to learn and often to live and work in this state for years to come.

That's why the sharp hike in the tuition the schools will charge next year, approved by the Board of Regents Wednesday, caused a ripple of concern. Most of those programs will see a one-year boost of about 7.5 percent for both resident and nonresident students in 2009-10. Regent John Frobenius, the lone vote against the increase, argued that tuition increases that large could detract from the university's drawing power, at a time when Minnesota needs as much human capital as it can amass.

But the increase approved Wednesday refers only to the sticker price of a university graduate education. And increasingly at the University of Minnesota, notes President Robert Bruininks, the sticker price is not the whole student cost story.

Recent years have brought a growing array of discounts -- grants, loans, campus employment and, in the case of graduate students, teaching and research assistantships -- to bear on the actual cost that university students pay. A fundraising campaign for scholarships for middle-income students, spearheaded by Bruininks, raised an impressive $270 million between 2003 and 2008.

Tuition discounts have grown to such an extent that the University of Minnesota's pricing policy now resembles that of private colleges and universities -- or, to choose a more familiar parallel, auto dealers. The sticker price is but a starting point in determining actual cost.

What's more, the graduate and professional school tuition rate approved Wednesday will only raise prices to about the midpoint of that charged by the competition.

When undergrad tuition rose dramatically earlier this decade in the wake of a $180 million 2004-05 state aid cut, graduate tuition increases were more moderate, in order to keep pricing in line with other public research universities. As a result, Minnesota's graduate school tuition for out-of-state students is among the lowest in the Big Ten, and most of its professional schools charge a rate at or near the middle of the range set by comparable institutions.

Now, with the Legislature insisting that federal stimulus money be used to hold undergrad tuition increases to 3.1 percent next year, despite an $82 million one-year state funding cut, it's graduate tuition's turn to rise. If the Legislature were to seek to clamp graduate tuition, as it did this year for undergraduates, "you'd create a big problem keeping the university strong going forward," Bruininks said. Even with the graduate tuition boost, the university will cut $96 million in operating expenses next year, and eliminate more than 1,200 jobs.

That points to the larger issue on which state policymakers should focus. The more important question for the next few years is not how low tuition can be held: It's how high can Minnesota boost its university's reputation for academic and research excellence, so that it can be this state's spawning ground for the new knowledge-based industries that will emerge as this recession ends. "If you lose the quality and the competitiveness of the Twin Cities campus, you've pretty much lost the game," Bruininks said this week. He's right.

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