Most students will pay more for their education at Montana's public universities in the coming academic year. Tuition will increase 3 percent at the Montana State University Bozeman campus and at the University of Montana in Missoula. Other campuses, including Montana State University Billings, will continue a tuition freeze but raise some student fees and impose new fees that may outstrip tuition increases.

Altogether, many students will be looking at bills for the academic year being hundreds of dollars higher than they were this year. The price increases will pose a financial hardship for some, and many will increase their student loans to cover their costs. Higher student debt load is an especially heavy burden in Montana. With relatively low average incomes, many Montana families and students struggle to afford education. And because starting salaries for jobs in Montana tend to be low, students with big debts find it harder to go to work here. It's a vicious cycle of debt and brain drain.

Hiking costs in recession

The higher-education price increases will hit harder because they come at a time when many workers won't be seeing any annual raises and others have lost their jobs in the economic downturn. The recession will boost interest in college enrollment because good jobs are harder to find and more require post-secondary education. Those facts figured into Regent Todd Buchanan's recent votes against raising tuition or fees over the next two years.

"It is not a good thing that our students have to borrow more," Buchanan said in an interview last week.

The Board of Regents proved that it's not a rubber stamp, with intense and passionate discussions about fiscal policy during budget meetings in May and June.

Maintaining quality

"We're willing to pick up the load in the hopes that it can help our communities, our campus communities to survive," Student Regent Mitch Jessen said after voting for tuition and fee increases.

Jensen and leaders of campus student governments supported the tuition and fee hikes to sustain quality educational programs. A long list of new fees for MSU in Bozeman, for example, was supported by the student government, including a $5-per-credit-hour fee for all undergraduate math classes and numerous charges for science lab classes. That fee would fund student math help centers. At MSU Billings, new fees include charges ranging from $35 to $125 for some nursing and welding classes.

Montana is hardly alone in its dilemma about holding the line on costs and maintaining educational programs. According to Stateline.org, 28 states have proposed cutting taxpayer support for state colleges and universities for the upcoming school year.

"Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Washington are among the states that have cut or are considering double-digit cuts to higher education," according to a June 11 Stateline.org report. "Universities are freezing salaries and cutting classes and degree programs to cope."

In Florida, tuition will go up 15 percent this year. In California, a tuition increase may be accompanied by the elimination of the state's main financial aid program.

The system "absolutely cannot expect more funding," Buchanan, an MSU alumnus, cautioned last week. "I'm not anti-quality. I see a large void in addressing economic realities."

The big fiscal concerns that he raises won't go away. During the session, we asked the governor, lawmakers and university leadership to come together to continue the College Affordability Plan. That partnership didn't materialize. Regents should direct the commissioner of higher education to explore new options for future fiscal policy.

Historical trend

Will the system continue the historic trend - interrupted only by the two-year tuition freeze that just ended - of passing on higher and higher costs to students? Will programs be prioritized and then funded accordingly? Will the system have to stop doing some things in order to keep doing the most important things well? Will the Schweitzer administration sit down with Montana University System leadership before the 2011 Legislature and devise a workable state funding plan, as was done in 2006? Or will the governor keep criticizing the system from a distance while university leadership plays defense?

Noting that federal stimulus money will last just two years, Board of Regents Chairman Stephen Barrett last month told the Associated Press: "We are going to have to envision some type of systemic changes beyond what we do. We are going to gave to find a different way of doing things."

As Barrett and Buchanan have said, the status quo in higher education can't continue.