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Nicholls State University officials say they are exploring a variety of options for how tuition or fees would be increased in the event of expected state budget cuts.
Among them is a plan that would see some students paying more – or less – than others depending on the cost to the university of their course of study.
“Differential tuition is also in the mix,” university president Bruce Murphy said.
Some programs that Nicholls offers are more expensive than others, Murphy said, using the cost differences between the school’s culinary program and a course of study in English as an example.
Murphy compared the culinary program Nicholls offers to its English program. The culinary program needs knives, ingredients, and equipment for aspiring chefs, but the overhead at the English Department is low.
“So that’s expensive compared to, like, an English major … you buy the book, and Shakespeare hasn’t written anything new lately,” Murphy said. “And so when you look at that from a provider standpoint, there’s a very big cost difference there.”
Differential tuition means that culinary students would pay a higher rate than English majors.
Murphy said nothing has been decided yet and that any plans to shift to a differential tuition model are hypothetical at the moment.
Any changes to the tuition rate must first be approved by the Louisiana University System Board of Supervisors, said Nicholls’ Vice President for University Advancement Neal Weaver.
Murphy said that the one cure for all of Nicholls’ money problems would be to increase enrollment to 8,000 students. As of last year, Nicholls’ total enrollment was 5,734 students.
In order to accomplish that, continually rising tuition must be stopped, Murphy said. So another possible solution would be to charge a fixed tuition rate, meaning new students would pay the same tuition through their four years at Nicholls.
Tuition would still gradually rise, but only for the incoming freshmen, Murphy said. Also, there would be limitations imposed on students who take longer to graduate.
Weaver said the university must wait until the legislative session, which began on Monday, ends and the state budget is released before decisions on how to deal with cuts to state funding are made.
Since the state legislative session ends in June, university officials will have one month to put their university budget together, Weaver said.
Until then, the involvement of university officials in the budgetary process is limited to discussions with local representatives and providing information when legislators ask or “sometimes when they don’t ask,” Weaver said.
“Under the governor’s proposed executive budget, higher education would receive a $608 million cut,” said Nicholls spokeswoman Stephanie Verdin.
According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, those cuts should amount to $141 million.
Sandra Woodley, president of the University of Louisiana System, says the state legislature has cut $700 million from higher education spending since 2009. About $293 million of those cuts were to the University of Lafayette system, of which Nicholls is a part.
In 2009, tuition amounted for 38 percent of UL’s revenue, but now tuition pays for 69 percent, Woodley said in a webinar on higher education funding in Louisiana.
