Tuition

INQUIRER STAFF WRITER Penn State University will raise tuition 4.9 percent for in-state students and 2.9 percent for out-of-state students for the upcoming school year, Penn State President Graham Spanier announced at the Board of Trustees meeting Friday. Last year, the University increased tuition 5.9 and 4.5 percent respectively for in-state and out-of-state students. The meeting is taking place at Penn State Lehigh Valley Campus, according to the Daily Collegian, which is covering the event.

As the government spends increasingly less on student financial aid, many leading colleges and universities are using a greater percentage of tuition revenues for scholarships. Just as tax breaks are given for charitable contributions, this portion of tuition should be tax deductible. Statistics compiled by the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, which does research and analysis for 32 member colleges, show the growing importance of tuition income for supporting scholarships.

Temple University's continued financial problems may force the school to increase tuition by $402 this year, university sources said yesterday. The university's 36-member board of trustees is expected to approve the proposed 9.5 percent increase this afternoon, after it votes to adopt the school's $708 million operating budget, the sources said. Tuition has already been raised by 7 percent for the second summer semester, which begins July 8, according to the sources. The increase will raise next year's tuition from $4,234 to $4,636.

Beginning next fall, Temple University will allow students to pay tuition and dormitory charges in 10 monthly installments each year, with no interest or finance charges other than an annual $40 fee to cover administrative costs. Temple President Peter J. Liacouras said the new program - the Temple University Installment Payment Plan, or TIPP - would provide the school's 31,100 full- and part-time students with "a convenience in budgeting cash flow," rather than direct financial aid. "TIPP is an option that our working students and their parents can use to help pay for an education at Temple," Liacouras said.

Students at Montgomery County Community College will pay an additional $7 per credit hour starting with the college's first summer session in May. The school's board of trustees voted Monday, 11-1, to raise tuition from $50 to $57 per credit hour. Trustee Jean Stefanowicz voted against the proposal. Board members Muriel B. Pancoast, Peter J. Korsan and Delores Rotello were absent. It is the first time the college has raised tuition since 1988, when tuition was increased from $45 to $50 per credit hour.

IT'S NOT NEWS that the cost of a college degree has risen significantly over the last couple of decades. Since 1990, tuition and fees have risen by nearly 225 percent at four-year public colleges and by 154 percent at private four-year colleges. The real story is that tuition growth rates often fluctuate wildly from year to year - which makes it hard for families to plan ahead and budget enough to cover the costs. Last year, students at Villanova faced an unexpected tuition and fee increase that was double the previous year's.

Peter Ciotoli is glad to be moving his family back into the area, but he didn't exactly get the welcome he had hoped for from the Downingtown school board. Five years ago, Ciotoli's job with a local environmental consulting firm transferred him to Virginia. Now, that job has transferred him back. As the Ciotoli family awaited completion of a house being built in West Bradford, the only home Ciotoli could find to lease in the interim was in Exton, which lies within the West Chester Area School District.

Higher education, private and public, is too expensive. The costs are prohibitively high, having risen 4.4 percent faster than inflation over a decade. Last year a public outcry forced universities to slash budgets and lay off staff members. Far from cutting tuition bills, however, these steps have only slowed the rate of increase of costs, but not much. At most schools this year's tuition increases are still well above the rate of inflation. Next year's increases are unlikely to be smaller, because further budget reductions would threaten basic functions.

For decades, American politicians have waxed passionate about the need to put college within every family's reach. They showered us with hundreds of billions of dollars in student aid of all kinds — grants and loans, subsidized work-study jobs, tax credits, deductions. Today, that shower has become a monsoon. As Neal McCluskey points out in a Cato Institute white paper, government outlays intended to hold down the price of a college degree have ballooned, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $29.6 billion in 1985 to $139.7 billion in 2010, an increase of 372 percent.

OAKLAND, Calif. - A man suspected of killing seven people at a California college grew very angry during one of three long meetings with officials over a financial dispute, a school executive said. Suspect One Goh, 43, became upset because officials would not fully refund his tuition for the nursing program, Jaehoon Moon, chief operating officer of Oikos University, told KGO-TV. The amount in dispute was $4,000 to $6,000, according to Moon, who said officials had offered partial reimbursement.

THEY CARRIED banners, beat drums and shouted slogans. They snaked down Broad Street yesterday, from their dorms and dining halls to the Hyatt at the Bellevue, where Gov. Corbett keeps his local office. They were students from Temple University, Penn, Drexel and other schools, and they're mad as hell and aren't taking Corbett's budget cuts anymore. Hundreds participated, part of Occupy Education's National Day of Action rebellion against rising college tuition. "People everywhere need to realize that the quality of and access to education is diminishing," said Ethan Jury, a Temple senior and a coordinator of Philly's branch of the protest.

HARTFORD, Conn. - Four years of tuition at the University of New Haven's business school? About $120,000. A chance to get it free? Priceless. UNH's new business school dean, a former MasterCard executive responsible for its "Priceless" advertising campaign, has issued a challenge to the university's incoming freshmen: Bowl me over with your entrepreneurial idea and win free tuition for your undergraduate degree. Larry Flanagan calls it an opportunity to draw the kind of creative students that the University of New Haven wants and to help carve out the small private school's niche in higher education as an incubator for innovative business education.

Gov. Corbett toured a Malvern factory powered by state-of-the-art robotics Tuesday, then hit the automatic-reset button on a replay of the state university tuition wars that dominated the battle over his first budget proposal last year. Corbett insisted to reporters during his tour of the high-tech Siemens Medical Solutions plant that his 2012-13 plan for a steep new cuts in state aid to higher education - including 30 percent less money to state-backed schools such as Pennsylvania State and Temple Universities - could be dealt with by reducing campus operating costs, not by raising tuition.

Evolving problems with pipelines Hats off to The Inquirer for investigating pipelines in Pennsylvania ("Loophole limiting pipe inspections," Sunday)! Problems with unregulated and unmapped pipelines in rural areas of our commonwealth are complex and evolving. Rural areas will become residential and suburban. What will happen when you want to dig a foundation, drill a well for water, or build a road, and you hit something unknown? Remote areas are great recreational sites.

Everyone at Pennsylvania's public colleges is asking the question, although they're terrified of the answer: What happens if Gov. Corbett continues to slash funding for higher education? A nearly 20 percent cut last year, and now a proposal for a reduction of up to 30 percent this year - keep it up, and all funding could quickly disappear. "Everyone is worried," said Larry Catá Backer, an international-affairs professor at Pennsylvania State University and incoming president of the faculty senate.