Trim costs before raising college tuition

So students at our three state universities are facing a $100 tuition surcharge this spring semester and then a 6 percent tuition increase for 2010-11 in order to avoid an “erosion of quality.”

One might be curious enough to ask just how that “erosion” would occur. It would be nice, instead of just being offered some vague and general reference to have some analysis or reasoned explanation of why tuition costs must necessarily continue to skyrocket as they have over the last

25 years - much faster than the rate of inflation, even in the current hard economic times.

One regent offers up the unctuous justification that without the $100 spring-semester surcharge, students will be paying a greater price over their entire lifetimes as a result of an erosion in the quality of their degrees. A more sensible and less pretentious argument would be that taking $100 out of each student's pocket this spring will result in less money being spent in downtown bars.

Regents and university presidents would apparently have us believe there is absolutely no waste or inefficiency that can be eliminated or dead wood that can be cleaned out. The overseers of higher education ought to realize that people are getting fed up with the way tuition has been increasing, and that if they don't get serious about trimming costs and seeking efficiencies, their bloated bubble might be the next to burst.

Larry Blades

Iowa City