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Officials stress quality amid rising costs

By Nikie Johnson
Senior Staff Writer

The rising cost of a college education may be distressing to students and their parents, but UH officials say itis the only way to preserve the quality of education being offered.

"Quality in a university takes decades to build but can be torn down quickly," UH President Arthur K. Smith told the Board of Regents in February. It is a theme he and other administrators return to often when talking about tuition and fee increases.

UH has traditionally been a school for Houstonis working class. In recent years, its leadership has been making efforts to increase UHis national prominence, especially with its push for Tier I research status. Despite raising the quality of education, many officials say, UH did not raise its price tag accordingly.

"We have tried to add all those things without actually getting the money for them," Provost Edward Sheridan said.

With the current budget crisis Texas is facing, agencies that get money from the state are trying to figure out what to do if their funding gets cut. Add to that what Smith and others call a shift in the public perception of higher education, and UH is finding itself unable to fund its initiatives without passing the costs along to students.

"There is a real life event occurring nationwide," Sheridan said. "Legislatures in most states (are) cutting the higher education budget."

When faced with fiscal crises, which many states are dealing with this year, he said, the general public will always put higher education on the chopping block before it cuts funding to things like medical care, child welfare or public education. "You get the least distress from the citizens of a state when you cut higher education," Sheridan said.

Smith often notes that people are starting to view a college education "as a private benefit rather than a public good."

Since the mid-1900s, the public was generally willing to support higher education because they felt it helped society, Smith has said. But in recent years, they have been less willing to do so, and more of the burden is shifting to the individual student.

The dilemma UH officials now face is whether to preserve UHis affordability or its quality. They have chosen quality, although they stress that UH is still a bargain compared with most other universities.

"Access and affordability can be rebuilt quickly," Smith has said, but if you stop funding things like research and technology, "you may never have the ability to make up that ground."

This is what led to the $26.6 million fee increase UH students will be paying next year. Fees go up every year, but this increase is more than twice what increases have been in recent years.

Most of the fee increases or additional fees will pay for advising, new technology and other student support services. Some of the most significant changes are:

• a new $240 per semester fee for architecture students

• an increase in the graduate business service fee to $360 from $120 and in the undergraduate business service fee to $140 from $95

• a new $80 per semester fee for undergrad education majors and $60 per semester fee for graduate education majors, plus a $95 per course advising fee for all education majors

• a new $150 per semester fee for undergrad engineering students

• a new $70 per semester fee for Honors College students

• an increase in the academic services fee for hotel and restaurant management students, to $350 per semester from $10 per semester

• a new $250 per semester fee for law students and an increase in the law library fee, to $210 from $80

• a new $36 per semester credit hour fee for natural sciences and mathematics students

• various fee increases for the departments within the College of Technology.
 

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