The CSU Board of Trustees will make an important decision next week that might affect the cost of education for future CSU students.

The board will decide on Oct. 28 on a long-term student fee policy that could potentially cap annual fee increases as they inch upwards, to the point where students are paying one third of the total cost of their education.

The proposed policy expands upon an existing 1993 fee policy, which mandated that students eventually take on the cost of one-third of the total cost of education, with the state paying the rest of the cost.

Currently, CSU students pay only 21 percent of the cost of their educations.

According to CSU spokesperson Clara Potes-Fellow, the state currently pays
$7,496 dollars of the total cost for each student’s education--which adds up to over $11,000.

The proposed policy, which was introduced at the Sept. 14 board of trustees meeting in Long Beach, would set guidelines for how much the fees could advance in any year, as students go from paying 21 to 33 percent of the cost of their educations. Under the proposal, student fees would be prohibited from increasing more than 10 percent a year.

Currently, there are no state guidelines for how much schools can raise their fees from year to year.

“What the long-term fee policy intends to do is set a standard of how much to increase (tuition) per year, to avoid any huge increases that students are faced with,” said Eric Guerra, member of the CSU Board of Trustees and a student at Sacramento State University. “If it’s gradual, predictable, and moderate, then parents and students can plan accordingly how much it’s going to cost to get through their education.”

According to Guerra, the only fee-raising guideline currently in place “is that the cost of education should be a third (of the total cost to the state) and that the board of trustees will take necessary action to adjust fee revenue to accommodate for the budget for that year. So what the long-term fee policy intends to do is say, OK, understanding that there’s state fiscal austerity—tough budget times—we’re going to set guidelines that so that people can plan.”

Student fees will be adjusted until students are eventually paying for a third of the cost of their education, after which fees will be raised as needed while at the same keeping in accordance with per-capita income in the state.

The new fee increase schedule was proposed as a response to the widely fluctuating fees over the past couple of years.

According to a CSU press release, “Since (1993), the instability of the state budget created a series of unpredictable changes in student fees. Reductions were implemented in good economic times, and sudden increases were adopted
to help cope with the state fiscal crisis in the last three years.”

Fee increase jumps have been particularly severe in the past couple of years.

For the 2004-2005 academic year, the cost of CSU system wide fees rose to $2,334 from $2,046, representing an increase of about 14 percent over the previous year.

However, this fee jump pales in comparison to the fee jump between the 2002-2003 school year and the 2003-2004 school year, when the cost of CSU system fees jumped from $1,572 to $2,046—nearly 30 percent.

Such increases would be not be possible under the new proposal.

The proposal has drawn some mixed reactions from officials, as had the 1993 proposal to up the proportion of the cost of education paid by students.

Jack O’Connell, state superintendent of public instruction and a member of the CSU Board of Trustees, has voiced his concerns.

“He’s opposed to raising student fees because he thinks there ought to be more state support for student fees and to avoid having to raise them,” said
O’Connell spokesperson, Rick Miller. “That’s his general position. Having said that, he does endorse a long-term fee policy, but he thinks there ought to be a greater state investment in students.”

State Speaker Fabio Nuñez, also member of the Board of Trustees, also warns against continued fee increases.

“The speaker is opposed to any effort that would exclude qualified students from admission to California’s public universities,” said spokesperson Nick Velazquez.

According to Velazquez, while reasonable student fee increases may be necessary, Nuñez wishes to ensure that they do not “exclude middle class students from receiving quality education in our state’s public universities.”