UH tuition plan aims to raise enrollment

The public will get to weigh in this spring on a three-year tuition plan which aims to attract more students to the University of Hawaii system and address a half-billion-dollar maintenance backlog, mostly at its flagship school.

The proposal, presented to the Board of Regents at its regular meeting in Hilo on Thursday, will next be shown to the public at 11 community meetings — one at each of the UH system’s campuses. Three of those meetings will take place on the Big Island — at UH-Hilo, Hawaii Community College and HCC’s new Palamanui campus. Dates will be set in the coming weeks, UH spokesman Dan Meisenzahl said.

The plan, which starts in 2017-18, calls for 2 percent maximum tuition bumps systemwide, which is the lowest in years.

UH-Hilo and HCC resident and nonresident students would pay the same amount in 2017-18 as the year before and in years two and three, both would pay $72 more each year. Hikes would look the same for HCC resident and nonresidents students, who also would see no increase the first year and $72 more annually in years after.

Last year, UH-Hilo resident students forked over 4 percent more tuition to attend.

“I hope (the plan) is a welcome surprise for students,” said Risa Dickson, UH vice president for academic affairs. “We’ve gotten mostly positive feedback from students — there are always people who don’t want tuition increases — but the bottom line is, someone has to pay for education and there are two places that comes from, one is the state and the other is the student.

“If the state doesn’t provide enough funding, we have to raise tuition,” she said, noting UH is expecting about the same annual appropriation from the state over the next three years.

UH officials hope the modest hikes attract more students.

Enrollment at almost every UH campus has declined since 2011.

HCC had more than 800 fewer students this fall than in 2011, and UH-Hilo had 3,829 students enrolled — down from 4,139 in 2011. Student growth over the next three years is projected to be “modest at best” and “may even go down,” Dickson told regents.

Dickson said the tuition plan will give UH schools a more “competitive edge” with peer institutions, which, for UH-Hilo, include schools such as California State University’s Monterey Bay campus and Arkansas Tech University, according to information from the school’s website.

Tuition systemwide for residents tends to be “comparable or slightly higher” than peer schools, Dickson told regents, and overall higher for nonresidents and students in some professional schools. Under the plan, tuition for residents at UH-Hilo would align with comparable schools by 2020 and more closely align for nonresidents and grad students.

“We want to make sure we’re competitive and not pricing ourselves out of the market, and that we’re appealing enough for students to stay here or come here,” she said.

The plan would raise about $100 million to address pressing maintenance needs, mostly at the Manoa campus but also at community colleges. At UH-Hilo, money would be reserved for future maintenance projects.

“If we don’t have money for maintenance, we end up like Manoa with almost half a billion dollars of deferred maintenance,” Dickson said.

“So you want a sinking fund so that when you need the repairs, you have the money.”

Not everyone was on board with the tuition. Regent Jeffrey Portnoy said he had “serious concerns” with the strategy because it did too little to address the problem at Manoa. He called the plan “a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage.”

“We have about a $600 million maintenance backlog today,” he said. “Three years from now, it might be $800 or $900 million. We have deteriorating infrastructure, particularly at Manoa. To raise $90 million over three years is nothing.”

Public meetings will take place in April, according to information from Dickson’s presentation. Revisions are slated for May and the board will approve a final plan in June.