WEEKLY EDITORIAL RECAP

Tuition hikes will benefit system

Wednesday

Tuition increases at colleges and universities, usually greeted with a mixture of outrage and worry, would be good news for Nevada's higher education system.

Nevada students have long had some of the lowest resident tuition rates in the country. For the current academic year, UNLV and UNR students are paying $116.75 per credit hour. With mandatory fees included, a typical full-time student pays about $4,000 a year. Community college students pay less than half that amount.

But tuition covers only 20 percent of the higher education system's budget -- hundreds of millions of dollars in state subsidies cover most of the expenses. Factor in the cost of the Millennium Scholarship, which awards free rides to Nevada high school graduates who earn average grades, and taxpayers have reason to question whether bachelor's degrees are becoming a new entitlement.

A proposal heard by the Board of Regents this week seeks not only to shift more costs from taxpayers to students through increased tuition, but to alter the state's current funding formula, which sends tuition dollars through a maze of red tape into the general fund, then returns only 60 to 70 percent of student contributions back to the institutions. ...

These are good ideas. There's something to be said for giving students greater ownership of their education. Prospective undergraduates will take their college preparation more seriously, and better apply themselves to their studies, if they have a bigger financial stake in the work required to receive a degree. ...

Higher tuition also gives the system the responsibility of providing students with an educational experience worth the increased costs.