Tuition is poised to go up again at the state’s public colleges next fall.
Trustees of the Vermont State Colleges last week approved tuition hikes averaging 2.9% system-wide for the 2020-21 school year.
The increases aren’t final — college presidents still could announce lower rates. The trustees’ actions only set a ceiling. But in most programs, for Vermonters and out-of-staters alike, tuition could climb by nearly 3%.
There are some exceptions: officials at the Community College of Vermont have asked to only be allowed to go as high as a 1.4% increase. Graduate tuition at Castleton University and Vermont Technical College will be frozen. And at Northern Vermont University, which has campuses in Lyndon and Johnson, graduate tuition could go up as much at 4%.
VSCS officials had initially intended to increase tuition by an average of 2.9% between the 2017-18 school year and the current one. But that hike was rolled back to 1% after the Legislature agreed to increase the system’s base appropriation by $2.5 million.
Churchill Hindes, the board’s chairman and a longtime VSCS trustee, said the calculus for picking a tuition rate has changed dramatically. Colleges are increasingly offering steep discounts as they compete for students, and the gulf between a school’s sticker price and what students actually pay is widening. At the VSCS, Hindes said, the system spent $12.6 million on scholarships and grants in 2018. That number jumped to $17.3 million the following year.
“So for many, many students, it’ll depend on what happens on the scholarship side,” he said.
Vermont perennially ranks in the bottom nationally for state funding, per student, to higher education. Its public colleges charge some of the highest tuition rates in the country.
“Affordability is always a big issue,” Hindes said. But without additional help from the General Assembly, he said there’s little flexibility.
“If 80% of our revenue comes from students, that’s kind of the box that we’re in. We have to increase tuition. And hope that after discounting, it’s still a net positive,” he said.
The University of Vermont, the state’s flagship public college, is governed separately from the VSCS, and its trustees won’t set tuition rates for this upcoming fall until the spring. But tuition for in-state undergrads climbed 8% between 2015 and 2019.
UVM too has aggressively increased its efforts to discount its sticker price. The college spent about $72.2 million on scholarships and grants in 2009. That number nearly doubled, to $137.2 million, by 2018.