TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - The Kansas Board of Regents has approved tuition and fee increases for all six public universities, citing a need to keep pace with rising costs and declining state support.
Full-time resident undergraduate students attending the University of Kansas in Lawrence will see a combined tuition-and-fee increase of about 3 percent. The increase will bring the total cost of tuition plus fees to nearly $5,574 per semester, the Lawrence Journal-World reported .
The fee increases were largely driven by requests from student organizations, Chancellor Douglas Girod said last month, when the increases were first proposed.
Other state universities will impose tuition and fee increases ranging from 1.2 percent at Kansas State University to 2.8 percent at Pittsburg State University.
The additional tuition alone is expected to generate $5.9 million more in revenue for the University of Kansas. But the increase comes at a time when the university is also cutting its budget for the Lawrence campus by about $20 million.
Most of the state’s universities have faced similar challenges in recent years, said Regent Dennis Mullin. He predicted more challenges will come in the future without additional state support.
“The increases in tuition have not filled the void that we need,” he said. “And as I look at the difficult decisions we’ve had to make on our campuses of not only cutting programs and cutting opportunity, but cutting staff to meet the challenges that are before us, we are not seeing the end of this, and we’ve got to do a better job of balancing the income in the state of Kansas.”
Total state funding for higher education in the upcoming year will be nearly $73 million less than it was a decade earlier.
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Information from: Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, http://www.ljworld.com
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