No-notice tuition reductions OK’d by UH Board of Regents

Lowering tuition at University of Hawaii campuses can now be done more quickly under a revised policy approved Thursday by the Board of Regents.

Previous rules required that any increase or decrease in tuition be presented at a public meeting at least one semester in advance.

The board, which met Thursday on Maui for its monthly meeting, unanimously approved removing that requirement for tuition decreases. The regents now have the ability to drop tuition during a public board meeting at any time.

Raising tuition still requires advance notice of at least one semester.

The university is in the third year of a five-year tuition schedule, approved in 2011, that is set to ultimately raise tuition by more than 30 percent. But regents have said they plan to revisit the annual 7 percent tuition hikes built into the final two years of the schedule.

Tuition this year at the UH-Manoa campus is $4,920 per semester, or $9,840 annually, for full-time residents.

UH’s tuition has been rising much faster than the national average, according to a recent report by the Hawaii Educational Policy Center.

Nationally, resident tuition over the past five years at public four-year universities has increased 27 percent, on average, compared with a 47 percent average increase at UH’s four-year campuses.

"UH tuition and fee levels are by themselves competitive. Yet 5,000 (Hawaii public) high school graduates each year do not enroll in college. Is it the cost? Price sensitivity studies suggest that as tuition increases, preference for UH Manoa will begin to decline," the Hawaii Educational Policy Center wrote in its report "Student Costs of Living, Tuition and Debt at the University of Hawaii."

The university and other state departments are preparing budget requests for the upcoming 2015-17 biennium which the Legislature will take up in January.

UH officials have said any decision to adjust tuition up or down won’t happen until after the Legislature finalizes the state’s budget in May.

UH President David Lassner has suggested the regents wait until then to adopt a detailed operating budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1. This would represent a shift from the current practice of adopting UH’s budget request to the Legislature as its operating budget.