Iowa House bill would freeze university tuition for 5 years

DES MOINES — With significant bipartisan support, the Iowa House on Tuesday passed a bill prohibiting Iowa’s public universities from raising resident undergraduate tuition for the next five years — a move that, if signed into law, could amount to a loss of $186.3 million in revenue across the three campuses.

House File 2242 — which passed by a wide 86-5 margin — would ban tuition increases for resident undergraduates through 2031, while still allowing rate hikes for out-of-state students and those at the graduate level.

The bipartisan message from lawmakers seeking to rein in the rising cost of higher education comes the same week that Iowa’s Board of Regents is holding its first reading of a proposed 3 percent tuition hike for resident undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa.

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“My Democratic colleagues try to blame Republicans for tuition increases, when, in reality, it’s their party that owns the largest tuition increases in the last 25 years,” Rep. Taylor Collins, R-Mediapolis, said Tuesday during his closing remarks on his bill.

“During the 2001 fiscal year, tuition increased by 7.2 percent; during the 2002 fiscal year, tuition increased by 18.5 percent; during the 2003 fiscal year, tuition increased by 17.6 percent; and then finally during the 2004 fiscal year, tuition increased by another 8.3 percent,” he said. “Those were 50 percent tuition increases during the Democratic leadership of Gov. Tom Vilsack. It is, again, Democrats that own tuition increases in this state.”

Because the tuition-freeze bill doesn’t have a companion bill in the Senate, the legislation seems unlikely to pass both chambers.

But the Senate Education Committee did pass a companion to House File 2362, which would require each of Iowa’s public universities to establish a policy freezing tuition for resident undergraduates at the rate charged their freshmen year for up for four consecutive years.

Neither the full House or Senate have taken up those bills yet — although Collins told reporters Tuesday he believes that proposal is more likely to advance this session.

“I’m obviously expecting the tuition guarantee bill to move forward because there is a companion to both sides,” he said, highlighting an amendment the House has prepared to address concerns the universities would front-load tuition costs.

The amendment, according to Collins, would codify a Board of Regents policy capping annual tuition increases at the three-year rolling average of the Higher Education Price Index — about 3.4 percent this year — making the concerns “moot.”

‘Starved our universities’

Although every present House Democrat but one voted for the tuition-freeze bill Tuesday — the exception was Rep. Dave Jacoby, D-Coralville — several spoke during debate about the need to backfill the lost tuition revenue with state appropriations.

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“In the year 2000, about a third of the university's funding came from tuition, and two-thirds was covered by the state appropriation,” Rep. Adam Zabner, D-Iowa City, said. “Nowadays, because the Legislature has starved our universities, that mix has flipped. About a third of the funding comes from the state, and two-thirds is paid by tuition.”

Acknowledging tuition is more than four times higher than in 2000, Zabner described college costs for instate students as “extremely challenging.”

“Folks, it's time for us to take on the rising cost of tuition,” he said. “But we have to do more. If we want to take on tuition, if we want higher education to be accessible to students in our state, we have to get back to funding our universities. We have to get back to the days when most of the funding for our regents universities came from the state.

“This is a good first step. It is important to freeze tuition. But that has to be backed up with funding that ensures Iowa students have access to world class regents universities.”

‘Be more efficient’

But Collins, the Mediapolis Republican, said the tuition freeze measures reflect a broader push by lawmakers to rein in university spending.

"We appropriate over $600 million a year to regent institutions, and we have to find ways to be more efficient," he told reporters after floor debate. "Only about a third of those expenditures at this point really relates to academic instruction.“

The Legislative Services Agency this week issued an analysis of the fiscal impact of the tuition-freeze bill — predicting a loss of $186.3 million total across the three campuses over five years, or $73.3 million for just the University of Iowa.

Acknowledging the fiscal impact, Collins said lawmakers will address higher education funding later in the appropriations process. And he pushed back on criticism the bills amount to underfunding higher education, arguing Republicans are continuing to support universities while demanding greater efficiency.

"I think we're at a point when it comes to higher education that we can't just keep giving them more money and hoping and praying they don't raise tuition," he said. "And so that's one of the reasons why we move forward this tuition freeze is to make sure that we are drawing a line in the sand.

“We have to find other ways to cut expenditures to be more efficient. It's not just a matter of the state sends them more money in a blank check."

Tom Barton with The Gazette contributed to this report.

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com