By Jeff Victor
Laramie Boomerang
Via Wyoming News Exchange
LARAMIE — University of Wyoming leadership will begin hashing out tuition increases further in advance to make it easier for prospective students and their families to plan for college by offering a longer view of rising tuition costs, Trustee Macey Moore said during the May meeting of the Board of Trustees.
“I just want to give recruiting the best chance we can,” she said.
The board usually determines tuition for the following academic year in January or March. For example, the board voted this March to increase tuition by 4 percent, with that 4 percent raise taking effect at the start of the fall 2018 semester.
The administration now intends to present tuition recommendations for the 2019-2020 academic year in September and provide tuition recommendations for the 2020-2021 academic year by March.
“That would get us caught up, essentially,” President Laurie Nichols said.
The future direction of UW’s tuition rates were explored in a capacity study conducted by Huron Consulting Group and presented at the board’s January meeting.
The capacity study turned up a number of findings and recommendations related to growing enrollment at the university. While the study states UW has the ability to grow, it recommends lowering non-resident tuition to make the Laramie campus more competitive with comparable options available to non-resident students in their home states around the region.
When the administration presented its tuition recommendations for final approval in March, it suggested not raising in-state tuition or lowering out-of-state tuition for the 2018-2019 academic year. Administrators argued that because recruitment efforts for the next academic year were already wrapping up, the decreased out-of-state tuition would fail to boost enrollment and only serve as a revenue cut to UW.
Associate Vice Provost for Enrollment Management Kyle Moore and Associate Vice President for Budgeting and Fiscal Planning David Jewell said UW should hold off on tuition alterations and give administrators time to review — and in some cases, reassess — the capacity study’s findings.
“They were not yet ready to make a recommendation because they needed to do a deeper dive into the data and particularly understand … what rate we might want to recommend for out-of-state tuition in the future,” Nichols said.
Though the administration’s recommendations were rejected — out-of-state tuition was not lowered, but raised by 4 percent alongside in-state tuition — Nichols, Kyle Moore and Jewell intended to move ahead with their plan to submit recommendations earlier.
During the board’s May meeting, as the trustees discussed their annual schedule of items to address, Macey Moore raised the issue again, seeking clarification.
Jewell said shifting tuition changes to take place one year earlier than they currently do will give recruiters — but also students and their families — better and more information on which to base college decisions.
“A number of institutions tend to set tuition two years out and provide better assurance for families,” he said. “I would like to see that we’re approving at that March meeting for not the next fall, but the fall after that.”
Following the 4 percent raise approved by the board in March, for the 2018-2019 academic year, resident undergraduates will pay $134 per credit hour while non-resident undergraduates pay $537 per credit hour.