Essentially, the proposal would increase tuition up front for a class of incoming students, and wouldn’t raise it again for that group. Currently, the university spreads out tuition hikes over small, incremental increases during a student’s four years of attendance.
Families could better plan for the overall cost if they know the fixed rate of tuition upfront, said Michael Kabbaz, Miami’s vice president for enrollment.
“Parents and students make their decision on how they’re going to pay for the first year of college,” Kabbaz told trustees Thursday. “The middle- and lower-income families often struggle. I think this is about being able to go to the marketplace and say, ‘This will be the price.’ You give families predictability.”
No action was taken on the plan during a regularly scheduled finance committee meeting Thursday.
But if the proposal took hold next year, for example, the incoming freshmen class would face a tuition hike of 5.1 percent from the start and not see another increase for the next four years. In comparison, right now, the university raises tuition roughly 2 percent every year. Either way, the student pays the same amount of money overall if they get a degree in four years.
The change also could ease the backlash university officials hear from families and student when tuition increases, said David Creamer, the university’s vice president of finance.
“They don’t understand why it keeps going up,” Creamer said of tuition increases. “The guaranteed tuition, however, would bank on one large increase upfront.”
The change could also protect some students from bigger price increases.
Since 2011, tuition increases have floated between 1.5 percent and 3.5 percent yearly at Miami University — which is also the nation’s most expensive public university to attend, according to federal data. An Ohio student has to pay $13,533 in tuition and other fees to take full-time classes at the college.
Hundreds of schools across the country offer guaranteed tuition, but the option is fairly rare at most of Ohio’s public higher education institutions.
Only two other community colleges, in Lorain and Cuyahoga counties, currently do guaranteed tuition in the state, according to Ohio Board of Regents spokesman Jeff Robinson
Ohio University — a competitor of the college in Oxford — will start offering a guaranteed tuition program for transfer and freshmen students enrolling in the school next fall. The program promises tuition, fees as well as room and board, will stay at the rate the student starts paying his or her first year at the school, for a total of four years.
Robinson said there’s no push at the state level for universities to lock in rates for incoming students, but the move could result in lower student debt for graduates and motivate them to get a diploma faster.
“(The guarantee) is supportive of a lot of our other initiatives to complete degrees in less time and with less money,” Robinson said.
Trustees said they will consider the proposal, which would need approval from the state, at a later time.
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