Members of the University of Hawaii Board of Regents’ budget committee Tuesday hinted at the possibility of providing some tuition relief to students as early as next spring.

The university is completing the second year of a five-year tuition schedule that began with the 2012-13 academic year and in the end will raise tuition by more than 30 percent.

Full-time undergraduate resident tuition at the flagship Manoa campus — currently $9,144 a year — is scheduled to go up by about 7.5 percent in each of the next three years.

The tuition schedule was approved in late 2011 as UH faced drastic cuts in state funding.

But some regents, citing the financial impact on students and their families, appear poised to revisit the increases.

Regent Jan Sullivan, chairwoman of the Budget and Finance Committee, said national studies show that enrollment can start to decline once tuition hits a $9,000 threshold for a four-year degree.

"So I think the idea that the more we increase tuition, the more revenues we will get is somewhat of a fallacy," Sullivan, who voted against the tuition schedule in 2011, said at a committee meeting Tuesday. "I think the assumption that, ‘Let’s just keep increasing tuition, we’ll get more and more revenue,’ is not a straight-line argument anymore."

The university last fiscal year collected $362 million in tuition and fees across its 10 campuses — up from $349 million the year before — representing nearly 42 percent of total operating revenues.

"We should not assume that a reduction in the increase going forward would be greeted with universal pleasure, because the question would be, If you’re going to knock the tuition increase down, we’ve already got a budget approved by the Legislature and approved by the board for the upcoming year, so if you’re going to forgo some revenue, what’s going to get cut?" regent Randy Moore said. "A smaller tuition increase affects something."

When the tuition hikes were approved, the UH administration committed to review the schedule midcycle to assess its effects on students and on access to higher education.

That formal review is set to happen next year, interim UH President David Lassner said.

In the meantime, the regents last year formed a tuition task force, which regents Chairman John Holzman said at the time would do a "thorough scrub" of the tuition schedule in hopes of possibly "whittling back" the approved increases.

Moore, who heads the task force, said the group has looked at how UH’s tuition compares with that of other public state universities.

He said one of the stated objectives of raising tuition was that by the fifth year UH’s rates would be "about in the middle" of what the country’s other 49 state universities charge.

"The preliminary answer is that we’re a little below the other 49 as of last year, and this year we’re generally a little bit above the other 14" member states of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

By another measure, UH’s resident tuition and fees increased 47 percent over the five years from 2008-09 to 2013-14, more than double the national average of 21 percent for four-year public universities over the same period, according to a 2013 report by the College Board.

"I don’t think we aspire to be in the middle, to be honest," Lassner told the committee. "It’s not to make sure our tuition is up to midpoint (with the rest of the nation), but rather that it’s not above it without very good reason."

Lassner said a recent survey of students who have left UH-Manoa showed "most of the reasons why students have left — those are students who did not come back for the next semester — were financial in nature."

But he said the university needs healthy revenue streams to provide quality programs and campuses.

"I think pretty much all of us would take pride in having very low tuition for the University of Hawaii if a whole bunch of things were true, such as good legislative support, our buildings were fixed, our faculty contract was funded," he said. "There’s plenty of places to spend money to do, in general, the things that we have talked about wanting to do — preserve access, eliminate the (deferred maintenance) backlog — that the money has to come from somewhere."

The budget committee requested information from the administration by July on how the projected tuition increases would be spent in order to help inform the upcoming budget planning process and to give the board time to implement any potential tuition adjustments.

"Because of the lag between the discussion and decision-making and tuition-setting, it’s pretty clear, I believe, that it’s too late to affect tuition for definitely this fall," Sullivan said.

"I know there’s a board policy that requires the board, if it’s going to change tuition, whether it’s up or down, to have public meetings in the semester prior. So, I think that’s something we have to be mindful of. If we’re going to do anything to change the current tuition schedule, my understanding is we have to tie that in in the coming semester if we hope to do anything in the coming spring."