By John Haughey
The Center Square
September 19, 2020
Gov. Ron DeSantis has ordered Florida departments and agencies to trim 8.5 percent from their fiscal year 2021 budgets and to identify 10 percent that can be cut from their proposed fiscal year 2022 spending plans.
The Florida Board of Governors (BOG), which manages the state’s public university system, will review its proposed fiscal year 2022 budget Oct. 15.
Proposals call for streamlining programs and services and possible faculty and staff layoffs, among other measures, including the first across-the-board tuition increase since 2013 for 420,000 students who attend Florida’s 12 public universities.
Citing a decrease in tax and fee collections, several BOG members said during workshops Wednesday and Thursday that tuition increases could be included in the budget request the board sends to the governor and lawmakers this fall. Florida’s general revenues will fall $3.4 billion short of projections this fiscal year and $2 billion shy of estimates next year, according to state economists.
“It’s the right conversation to have,” said BOG Vice Chairperson Brian Lamb, who chairs the board’s budget committee. “It’s just prudent to look at all the levers we have to pull to ultimately invest in the No. 1 state university system in the country. There’s a reasonable expectation – a real expectation – that revenues will be down.”
Tuition at Florida’s state universities last increased in 2013 by 1.7 percent. Florida’s average tuition of $6,352 is $4,000 below the $10,487 national average for public university tuition. It’s second only to the University of Wyoming, where the scarcely populated state’s mineral revenues allow residents who graduate from a Wyoming high school to attend its only four-year university for free.
“I look at this, and I think we’re all very proud of the fact that Florida’s got one of the lowest tuitions in the entire country, and I think that’s fantastic,” BOG member Eric Silagy said. “What it really comes down to is we’re not reducing expenses, we’re basically keeping revenue from tuition flat and basically looking at state tax dollars to make up the difference.”
With state revenues forecast to decline sharply because of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it is justified to look at tuition increases now “just for conversation sake,” Silagy said.
During the workshop, BOG staff calculated a 1% tuition increase would result in about $7 million generated for the State University System. A 1% cut to general revenue would result in a $30 million loss in university allocations.
It would take a 14% increase for the state to match tuition at North Carolina public universities, the fifth-lowest in the country, and a 65% hike to charge the national average to attend a state university, according to BOG staff calculations.
Former governor and current U.S. Sen Rick Scott pushed through legislation in 2014 to eliminate most of the discretion given to university boards on tuition and increase direct allocations to universities from the Florida Legislature.
BOG member Norman Tripp said the 2014 changes reversed a trend where “the Legislature decided that if we wanted to increase our income, we could do it by raising tuition. And every year, they lowered basically the state support, and we tried to make it up on the backs of students by raising tuition.”
While it’s easier to approve a tuition increase than to address funding shortfalls by reducing services and staffing, doing so would be a reversion to past failed policies, Tripp said.
“It’s taken us a long time to reverse that, and I think we have to be very, very careful we don’t go back to that type of scenario,” Tripp said.