Dare to declare unfair tuition at IU

Most of you probably know IU recently announced it would cut tuition by 25 percent for the summer session.

What you might not know is that this didn’t come out of the blue.

Angry that — like five of the six other state universities — IU raised its tuition above the Indiana Commission on Higher Education’s recommendations this year, the Indiana Senate Appropriations Committee turned its guns on the universities at a September hearing.

Reports have suggested the state legislature is serious about capping tuition increases next year by tying them to cost-of-living increases. This frightened universities enough to gall them into action, which accounts for IU’s emergency Board of Trustees meeting last Friday in which they approved the decreases.

This seems to have quieted the statehouse. Sen. Luke Kenley, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the idea “a great concept” and “very creative thinking,” which I think is politician-speak for “hold your fire.”

That said, don’t be satisfied with this just yet.

In Terre Haute, Indiana State University President Daniel Bradley announced ISU will reduce its tuition increase from 3.5 percent to 1.5 percent next year to keep costs down for all undergraduates. In addition, Bradley created a task force on affordability to look at other rising student costs, such as housing and textbooks.

Placed side by side, it’s pretty clear that we as IU students got the short end of the stick.

The proposal to reduce summer tuition and move to “year-long education” doesn’t work for people who have to work a full-time job or do an internship during the summer.

It doesn’t work for people who have already run through the limited catalog of summer classes offered. And since there’s a smaller number of faculty available to teach summer classes, it couldn’t handle the full undergraduate population anyway.

I have to admit I’m confused as to why President Michael McRobbie and the trustees would choose this course of action.

For the approximate 60 percent of students who don’t take summer classes, this proposal doesn’t do anything to reduce debt, which is what concerned the state legislature in the first place.

Even if this proposal manages to raise summer enrollment, which has been dropping in recent years due to mostly unrelated reasons, then rising summer living costs will probably cut into the tuition discount. This seems like an $11 million recipe to get us back to square one in a few years, and that’s scary.

After watching the Zionsville school district get cut down at the knees by legislated property tax caps, poor urban planning and voters who don’t value education, I think absolute legislative caps are bad news. The trustees should be working as hard as possible to avoid this.

With that in mind, the smart thing would have been to do as ISU did and announce a voluntary promise to keep tuition in line with cost-of-living increases — with some wiggle room. This would’ve required tough budget decisions but also would’ve been the fairest solution for both students and the University.

On second thought, this isn’t a “would-have, could-have” issue. It’s not too late to get this changed.

All that it would take is us as students daring to declare we want fair tuition.

­— sidfletc@indiana.edu