With a hot market for their skills and employers who offer top-notch salaries and benefits, should computer science students pay more for their bachelor’s degree than theater or history majors? In Washington state, the answer could soon be yes.
Historically, undergraduates in this state have paid flat tuition rates based on the number of credits they’re earning. For example, a Washington resident taking a full-time load of classes would pay $8,122 in tuition this year at the University of Washington, no matter which bachelor’s degree they’re pursuing.
Those flat rates were set under previous state law, which gave the Legislature the exclusive power to set tuition for in-state undergrads. But a new law approved this week by Gov. Chris Gregoire gives universities broad power to set tuition rates on their own for all students—opening the door for varying undergraduate tuition rates.
“I don’t expect the institutions to jump whole-hog into this model the first year. It will take a little bit of thought and study and reflection,” says state Rep. Reuven Carlyle, a Seattle Democrat who was the main sponsor of the tuition flexibility law. But he also says the old flat-rate model is “just wildly economically inefficient,” and doesn’t give policy-makers a good idea of what it will cost to improve education in particular disciplines.
“It’s extremely difficult from an efficiency point of view for us in Olympia to figure out how an institution should cross-subsidize programs,” Carlyle says. “One-size-fits-all, top-down, Olympia-centric is just not good policy anymore.”
With flat tuition rates, the less-expensive students are effectively subsidizing the education of their peers in more expensive fields. An English major, for instance, pays the same as a student studying engineering, chemistry, or computer science, which are much more expensive to teach because of higher faculty salaries, special equipment, and other costs.
Freshmen are also generally cheaper to educate than seniors, since the younger students take survey courses packed with other students, while the older ones are in smaller groups with more specialized subjects. It’s also assumed that the cost will be less of a burden for students entering higher-paid professions. Those factors already help drive the variability in tuition rates for graduate degrees in Washington.
While some university leaders have publicly discussed the issue, it doesn’t appear that any school is poised to imminently move to a “differential tuition” model for undergrads. Washington State University, for example, just announced that it was increasing next year’s resident undergradate tuition by a flat rate of 16 percent—the baseline rate assumed in the state budget.
But faced with back-to-back state budgets that were hammered by the Great Recession, it may be an attractive option to help sustain the highest-cost and highest-demand majors in the years ahead. The boards of Western Washington University and the UW are set to consider their new tuition rates later this week, although UW officials aren’t expected to make a decision until the end of June.
If Washington schools do eventually make the leap to differential tuition rates for undergrads, they would have plenty of company: One widely cited study found that more than half of U.S. public
