Ellington

While students and staff at the UW await news of layoffs and tuition increases, Olympia has become a high-intensity arena of discussion, with all eyes on the recent budget proposals released earlier this week. On Monday, the state Senate proposed a budget that would cut $189 million from the UW. The next day, the House released a proposal that would cut $230 million.

Numbers and ideas are changing so rapidly that ideas presented only a week ago are now considered ancient history as far as policy decisions go. An example is Gov. Chris Gregoire’s recent proposal of a tuition surcharge, which would set a temporary 7 percent increase in tuition over the next biennium.

“[The surcharge idea] came out several weeks ago,” said Randy Hodgins, director of state relations for the UW. “It’s still on the table, but most of the action is reacting to these two budget proposals. The House and the Senate don’t like the idea of a surcharge because it implies ‘temporary.’”

The mindset of the Senate and the House, Hodgins said, is that if they need to raise tuition, they’ll raise it permanently.

For UW students, this means there are new ideas in the air regarding how tuition will be set. The Senate’s budget proposal stayed true to the 7 percent tuition cap that has been in place for the past few years. On the other hand, the House budget proposal included a tuition increase of 10 percent.

In the coming weeks, the Senate and the House will convene to negotiate a final budget and determine whether tuition will be increased beyond the existing 7 percent cap.

To Rep. Deb Wallace, D-17th District, who is chair of the House Higher Education Committee in Olympia, the idea of raising tuition beyond the 7 percent cap is questionable.

“I have deep concerns about anything above [the 7 percent cap],” she said.

Wallace is concerned that increasing the tuition cap will put some students in a difficult position. She cited the notion that certain students, or students’ families, make just enough money to not qualify for financial aid, yet not enough to easily cover an increase in tuition beyond the 7 percent cap.

However, UW President Mark Emmert and the UW Office of Planning and Budgeting have stated that because the federal stimulus package included increases in financial aid and an expanded educational tax credit, most students at the UW would be unaffected by a 14 percent — or $875 per year — increase in tuition, which is how much university officials say they will need to counteract the effects of the budget cuts.

“Our analysis is that most students receiving financial aid would not be adversely affected by higher tuition,” Emmert wrote in an e-mail to the university community.

According to a chart released by the Office of Planning and Budgeting, families making less than $160,000 a year would not feel the impact of the 14 percent raise because it would be balanced by a tax credit and increase in available financial aid.

On Tuesday, a House Education Appropriations Committee meeting was held at which representatives from all state universities discussed the need for the tuition cap to increase to 14 percent. Wallace said only one student came to the hearing to discuss the need to keep the tuition cap at 7 percent.

“Every school came up,” Wallace said. “But it is disturbing that only one student representative came to the committee hearing.”

GPSS President Jake Faleschini has been urging students to share their voice with lawmakers. Faleschini noted that it was because of UW student lobby efforts that tuition has not increased beyond the 7 percent cap while the budget was in the Higher Education Committee. His past efforts to rally student voices included mass e-mail “blasts” to UW students.

“We’re sending out [another] e-mail blast . . . to all UW undergraduate and graduate students that will include information on the current budget proposals as well as how to contact their representatives and voice their concerns,” Faleschini said.

However, UW spokesperson Norm Arkans said that students would be doing themselves a disservice to fight against a tuition raise.

“I think arguing to keep tuition low given the facts is only harming students’ educations,” Arkans said. “If we’re not able to mitigate [the cuts] and students can’t get courses that they need to graduate on time, it would be way more expensive in the long run.”

Reach reporter Eric Staples at news@dailyuw.com.