Opinion
 

Staff Editorial

                            Matt Dulin                             Tony Hernandez 
                Jim Parsons             Dusti Rhodes           Richard Whitrock

More intuition

Two different plans to make tuition make sense to students and administrators alike deserve a serious look from the UH administration.

At The University of Texas, an experimental system its officials have declared a success allowed students to pay a flat rate for tuition each semester. Students would pay a rate equivalent to 14 credit hours of tuition, but could enroll in more hours for no additional tuition. 

The program will expire next year, but the university is scrambling to get a permanent flat-rate tuition plan. 

The UT program encouraged students to take more hours, therefore encouraging retention and earlier graduation.

Meanwhile, Illinois is looking into ways to lock-in tuition rates for each class of students. So a freshman entering school would pay the same tuition now as he or she would in his or her senior year. Increases would affect each successive class, but once you're enrolled, your rate would be guaranteed. To make that possible, tuition could jump about 15 percent initially, though after that tuition would increase about three percent a year.

After dealing out back-to-back hikes, UH needs to give thought to new alternatives like these if it wants to appeal to both working-class Houstonians and the traditional students it is trying to attract.

Moreover, such measures would give students an incentive to take more hours, which have numerous trickle-down advantages, including improving graduation rates.

These ideas are sounder, and more responsible, than the state's last answer to university budget concerns: tuition deregulation, which set off a spree of tuition hikes around the state. Even at UH, where increases were moderate and reasonable, many students were hit hard by the hikes.

UH would be far better off now if it had the intuition to propose new ways to handle tuition instead of taking the well-worn path of increasing the cost of education.