UC proposes yearly tuition hikes for new students only

In its latest effort to find a fair way to raise tuition — and avoid student protests every time it happens — the University of California wants yearly price hikes, but only for incoming freshmen and transfer students.

The UC regents don’t yet have a plan to do that. But at the regents’ midsummer meeting in San Francisco on Thursday, university officials will float a trial balloon to see what the governing board thinks.

Under that pricing system, tuition would remain flat as long as students are enrolled, perhaps up to six years. It’s called cohortbased tuition because prices would rise only for each group of new students.

In making their case to the regents, university officials will say that when families are un

certain about whether tuition will rise or by how much, they can’t plan well. And neither can the university if it can’t raise tuition, UC will argue.

Excluding mandatory fees, UC charges California undergraduates $11,502 in annual tuition — twice as much as it cost in 2007, and more than triple the cost in 2000. Yet since 2011, tuition rose only once, in 2017, by $282.

Students have protested each time tuition was raised or considered, with protests often turning violent during the height of the recession — sometimes prompted by police.

As a result, university officials have long argued that they’d like to find a way to raise tuition in steady, bitesized pieces that would make it easier for everyone to plan, and that would avoid student acrimony.

“A cohortbased approach, if successfully implemented at the University of California, could provide greater financial predictability for students, families, and UC campuses while also improving UC affordability,” UC argues in its written presentation to the regents.

To reach that conclusion, UC staff studied similar programs at seven universities.

The University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign has had cohortbased tuition the longest, since 2004. Kent State has had it since last year. And the University of Arizona and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill adopted it in 2014 and 2016, respectively.

But three other universities — in Georgia, Kansas and Oregon — canceled their programs after state funding cuts.

For that reason, UC says “a cohortbased tuition model is unsustainable” without stable funding from Sacramento. In the event of a funding cut, the university says, it could raise everyone’s tuition.

The California Student Aid Commission, which administers Cal Grants, would also need to reconfigure the financial aid program to match the new tuition system.

Overall, however, UC is enthusiastic about cohort-based tuition, crediting it with providing “increased predictability for students and families,” and its own planning efforts.

UC also says that by charging only the newcomers, tuition becomes more affordable for most students — in part because money from the increased tuition would still be available for needbased grants to lowincome students.

UC’s idea would be to raise tuition roughly by the cost of inflation — except in the first four years, when tuition would get more expensive. UC says it would do that to avoid losing money from the shift to flat tuition for sophomores, juniors and seniors.

Would a cohortbased tuition system also let UC avoid student protests?

Caroline SiegelSingh, an incoming senior at UC San Diego who heads the UC Student Association, said students plan to work with the regents as they consider whether and how to change UC’s tuition system.

At the same time, she said, “UCSA does not support the increase of tuition and fees for students at the UC.”