State schools considering tuition discounts

Texas' public universities are copying a page from the marketing handbook of the nation's airlines.\nUniversity officials, freed up by the same new law that allows them to raise tuition, are rolling out bargains and discounts aimed toward changing students' habits. As with the airlines, certain conditions will apply.\nAt the University of Texas at Austin, students could get a price cut by taking more classes or going to summer school. At UT-Arlington, they could get a break by paying their bills on time. And at UT-Permian Basin, students who take a full load every year could earn up to $1,200 their senior year.\nLawmakers last spring gave universities the right to set tuition as high as they wanted; UT-Austin has provoked the ire of some lawmakers with proposed increases of up to 29 percent. \nSome schools plan to offset increases with new pricing schemes they couldn't use before deregulation. Officials also hope the bargains will further goals they've wanted to meet for years, including getting students to graduate sooner.\n"We couldn't do it before because we had rigid, fixed rates," said Charles Miller, chairman of UT System Board of Regents. "The kind of incentive that can speed up a student toward graduation is a big one."\nUT regents will vote on the system schools' tuition proposals Tuesday. Other universities are starting to discuss how they might tinker with tuition rates to change student behavior.\nUT Chancellor Mark Yudof urged all system branches to create incentives.\n"It reflects my philosophy that the biggest problem in this country is time to graduation," Yudof said. "If we can reduce that, we could reduce the cost to parents and students. We also could increase capacity."\nBut while some university officials and students endorse tuition deals, others express reservations. Some worry that students, already confused by the financial-aid application, may get more confused.\nOthers wonder whether the ideas will cost universities too much or whether the discounts are merely gimmicks to camouflage rising tuition. Part of the revenue from tuition hikes will be used to pay for the student discounts or rebates.\n"Maybe I'm just a little pessimistic," said Joshua Warren, UT-Arlington's student government president. "I think the average student won't even know the discount exists."\nRebates should soften the blow of tuition hikes for some students, said Luis Galvan, president of the Student Senate at UT-Permian Basin. He doesn't think the new pricing will be too complicated.\n"We can't hold any students' hands," Galvan said. "They need to be aware, look through their handbooks."\nPublic universities nationally are just starting to toss around the notion of incentives, said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose, Calif. The nonprofit group studies public policies on higher education. \nPrivate universities, he and others noted, don't tend to offer financial incentives to get students to finish sooner; their tuition typically is high enough that students don't dawdle.\n"We ought to be careful that we don't make the system so complicated so there's 50 different ways of paying," Callan said. "It's like getting on an airplane, and everybody's paying a different price."\nUT, the state's largest and most selective public university, will try something it has experimented with before -- a flat rate for students who take 12 or more hours per semester. UT's proposed 29 percent increase for next fall also is the highest increase of any state school so far.\nStudents in the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences have been able to pay a flat rate since 2002-03; they pay the same price whether they take 12 or 18 hours.\nThe rate is based on what it costs for 14 hours, so students don't reap the benefits unless they take at least 14. The experiment in its first year changed students' habits; the average course load grew by about four-tenths of a credit hour. The change seems small, but it represents the habits of 25,000 students, UT officials said.\nIn its tuition proposal, UT says it wants to apply a form of the flat rate for all students -- the tuition hike would be lessened for students who take more than 12 hours next spring and fall.\n"We don't want to tell people there's a fantastically good deal here, because it's only a small benefit," UT President Larry Faulkner said. \nThe goal would be to expand the flat rate to the full tuition bill in the future, he said.\n"You can add classes for nothing when you're in a true flat-rate tuition situation," Faulkner said. \nThat, coupled with cheaper rates in the summer, could get students to finish sooner, he said.\nAt UT-Permian Basin, students would get up to $1,200 back their senior year if they take 30 credit hours per year for three years in a row. The tuition increase, starting next fall, will be $210 for students taking a 15-hour load. Overall, the rebate and the increase are nearly equivalent.\nStill, if students take advantage of the rebate and finish school sooner than they would now, they save, said Patricio Jaramillo, the university's vice president for student services.\n"We get a lot of students who just start going to school and are not completing across the state," Jaramillo said. "It's a general problem. It really is a burden on them not to finish and get on with their lives."\nIn the interest of simplicity, other universities shy away from incentives. \nTroy Johnson, dean of enrollment management at West Texas A&M, said he isn't interested in offering incentives to get students to finish faster. The state already has a $1,000 rebate for students who finish their degrees on time, he said. \n"What we know is people walk in, they get ready to graduate, and say, 'Oh, wow, I qualify for that,'" Johnson said. \nUT-Dallas considered flat-rate tuition and other discounts but shelved the ideas because its computer system couldn't handle the changes.\n"There are a lot of reasons to try to motivate people," said Hobson Wildenthal, UTD's provost. "Then, when you put it into your price structure, what is already a mess becomes a bigger mess."\nTexas A&M, Texas Tech and the University of North Texas also are discussing flat rates and other discounts, but none is close to making a decision, officials said.\n"Any kind of discounted tuition is going to affect the bottom line," said Mark Weichold, Texas A&M's dean of undergraduate programs. "One has to be very cautious."\nFlat-rate tuition might reward full-time students and motivate others to take more hours, said Suzanne LaBrecque, chair of UNT's tuition task force and the vice provost. But it also could force some students to drop courses because their loads became too heavy, she said.\n"We don't want our tuition plan to leave out various groups of students because we're too costly," she said. \nBefore four-year universities began experimenting with cost breaks, Texas community colleges tried it. Various community colleges, including those in the Dallas County Community College District, offered half-price tuition for classes taken at off-peak times during 2001-02.\nEnrollment grew, but Dallas County colleges also lost about $4 million, said Robb Dean, the district's director of finance. The state, facing budget problems, didn't provide funding to cover the enrollment spike, he said.\n"They will go where you put the bait. But the question is, economically, is it viable?" he said. "It was not a good economic decision."\nDavid Breneman, an economist and dean of the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, said more universities would experiment with pricing as tuition keeps rising. \nBut, he said, many of the proposed ideas sound too complex.\n"Who can read their telephone bill? No one knows what they're getting charged on their telephone bill," he said. "I hate to see college pricing on that path"