» Proposal to rein in college tuition hi kes fails,

Senate plan would have capped higher rates via performance metrics.

Time and again some state lawmakers have sought to scale back, in whole or in large part, the tuition-setting authority they ceded to public university governing boards in 2003. This time, an unorthodox approach linking tuition increases and graduation rates passed the Senate but failed to advance to the House floor by a key deadline.

Although it is theoretically possible that Senate Bill 778 might be tacked onto some other measure before the legislative session ends on Monday, the chances appear to be vanishingly slim. But it’s a certainty that proponents of tighter limits on tuition will renew their efforts for the next regular legislative session, in 2017.

“I think awareness of this issue has been dramatically heightened this session,” Republican Sen. Charles Schwertner of Georgetown, an advocate of such limits, said Wednesday. He blames “ever-increasing tuition and fees” for driving more and more middle-class students to saddle themselves with debt that can limit their ability to buy a home or start a business after they graduate.

But tuition and fee increases predate deregulation, as the 2003 action is known. Indeed, an American-Statesman analysis of data compiled by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board shows that academic charges rose at a faster rate before 2003, when law- makers controlled pricing, than after deregulation.

From 1994 to 2003, a nineyear period, tuition and fees at public universities increased on average 134 percent to $1,934 per semester. From 2003 to 2014, a span of 11 years, charges rose 112 percent to $4,091.

“We limit our debate too much sometimes to tuition,” said Sen. Kel Seliger, a Republican from Amarillo who chairs the Senate Higher Ed- ucation Committee. Seliger, who authored SB 778, noted that overall higher education appropriations, including financial aid outlays by the Legislature, can help reduce the need for tuition increases.

Under Seliger’s measure, boards of regents would have been barred from raising tuition beyond the rate of inflation unless the university had met certain benchmarks on students’ course-completion rates, graduation rates and other performance metrics.

Looked at one way, the bill would have required universities to “earn” the ability to increase tuition beyond inflation. Viewed another way, students’ “reward” for good performance would have been higher tuition.

“I’m realistic,” Seliger said of the measure’s apparent demise. “Novel ideas sometimes take time to settle in.”

The measure passed the Senate by a 29-2 vote April 30 and cleared the House Higher Education Committee last week. It did not emerge from the House Calendars Committee in time to be considered by the full House.