Absolutely. It's about time.

The state forced tuition freezes on Ehrlich's administration, even when economists warned against it. Now they and O'Malley continue it.

As a student, I would rather pay $500 a year (or a semester even) to get my education than to see my school's funding cut and cut and cut year after year. This year, Maryland Provost Farvardin outright admitted that some students may not graduate on time because of limited class offerings.

EXCUSE ME? Rather than pay an extra couple bucks here and there, students will be paying an additional semester or year's worth of tuition because the schools can't even handle all the students they have at present. It's downright silly.

My son was caught in the squeeze. He was not accepted at Towson and is now attending college in New York at about 5x the cost. Would've been nice to have a choice...

And please don't say Community college was a choice - it was, but - they are totally overwhelmed all over the country with some places getting 120% of last years registrations and holding midnight classes. Besides very few cc's offer much in his field.

We are very lucky to be able to afford the other option.

I liked this comment left on the column itself:

Lock-in tuition rates for four years (aka rate you start with is rate you finish with) would make more sense. Or modest tuition growth. A total freeze is ridiculous when nearly every other agency is asked to cut their budgets 20%.

VeritatisCupitor (09/25/2009, 9:11 AM )

By locking in the rate over four years for each class, students have an idea of how much it'll cost them for their whole education but the school gets a chance to increase tuition every year. It sounds like a good compromise.

Question is, when given the choice will voters choose to cut all funding to the O'Malley administration?

It seems to me that people are arguing politics, not economics here... I expect better from Mr. Hancock.

How many more students would Towson accept if tuition was raised 5%, what if it was raised 10% ? How much do they need to raise the cost in order to accommodate 1,000 more students ? Are they at capacity ? What is the capacity ? How would that increase with addition tuition dollars ? You haven't provided any real financial information in your column, just a cost, number of students, and some political notes alluding to who should be given blame. Get some real numbers and we can all talk more intelligently about the issue.

Besides that... it seems to me to violate some basic principals of econ here... wouldn't admitting more students at the going rate increase efficiency through scale ? If I sell 80 widgets at $5 each and make $40, when I sell 100 widgets at $5 I make $60... the more I sell, the more I make. Why wouldn't this apply to enrollment ? If it is upside-down, they'll have to cut costs to survive!

Finally, I know that Towson has money for new real estate projects, new construction, etc. Is their issue that they aren't raising enough cash from each student, or that they are spending unwisely in a tough economy ? We'll never know I suppose, because the only data I have is "a thousand less students" which is meaningless without some additional info.

Hi Dave: Excellent questions. 1) You're right, these institutions have enough physical assets. The capital budget comes from a different pot. What they need are funds to hire profs. 2) They are trying to freeze tuition AND maintain student/prof ratios, which they have mainly accomplished. True, they could start jamming 40 kids into each class, but that has its own drawbacks. 3) It's not just the tuition freeze that is squeezing the institutions. The state kicks in $1 billion from taxpayers on top of what students pay, and that has shrunk recently. 4) A 5 percent tuition bump brings in $25m. Only regents beancounters could tell you how many extra kids that would allow, but it would certainly star to reverse today's trend of more and more rejections. Thanks for the questions.

My daughter is attending UNC cheaper as an out-of-state student than she would have as in-state at College Park. Since we educate so many of New Jersey's children, raise tutition for out-of-state students & lower our in-state to be competitive with DE, VA, & NC.

Jay - thanks for the added detail and thanks for posting. What the article lacks is the "if we raise an extra $25M we can accommodate 12 more students" analysis. Likewise, the regents and the gov' should be asked to produce facts to support their premise that lowering tuition increases the number of students/graduates in the state. As backwards as things seems, I think I understand the argument from both sides here, what we need is more data and less politics (I don't care if Ehrlich started it or O'Malley continues it, it either makes economic sense or it doesn't)

And another way to look at it... we have an overgrown, overcrowded state school, with fewer profs and other resources at hand than are required, who is delivering education to fewer students on one hand, then asking for more money to do it with on the other. This feels like a management issue to me, not a simple money problem. Perhaps those 1,000 students are better of attending a different school after all.

I know, "different budgets" - maybe in a few years they can afford to staff it and fill it with students ?

http://insidecharmcity.com/2009/09/25/towson-to-hold-new-liberal-arts-building-open-house-today-from-3-5/

Towson to hold new liberal arts building open house today from 3-5

Liberal Arts Building Open House is Sept. 25

TOWSON, Md. (Sept. 21, 2009)—The dean, faculty and staff of the College of Liberal Arts invite all members of the TU community to celebrate the opening of Phase I of the new Liberal Arts Building, TU’s first all-new academic building in 30 years.

The open house will be held on Friday, Sept. 25 from 3–5 p.m. in room 2110 of the Liberal Arts Building. Guests will enjoy refreshments, self-guided tours and a peek at the plans for Phase II.

The first phase of the Liberal Arts Building is a 100,000-square-foot hub of innovative learning space and green technology that should earn LEED Silver certification soon. The building opened its doors in August to the departments of women’s studies, foreign languages, philosophy and psychology. Phase II of construction is slated for completion in fall 2011 and will bring the building’s finished size to 293,000 square feet.

A very legitimate topic of debate is whether Towson, or any other State University, should be expected to enroll every applicant and if not, what the threshold for admission should be.

Jay,

Thank you on your answer about raising taxes. I can't stand it when people simply say..."raise taxes!" Sheesh...people of Maryland, don't you think we pay enough in taxes! #2 in the nation in taxes just behind Massachusetts! A fact that should shame us all. Also, how did the largest tax increase in our state's history do us? Not very well. Last I heard the state is in a world of hurt in terms of tax revenue, thus the state will need to trim hundreds of millions. See...tax increases aren't always the answer...especially in times of recession. Wake up!

To Mike A...

Is your daughter on scholarship??? UNC's out of state tuition (not counting room and board) is over 17,000 last I check (actually, comparable to what MD charges NY/NJ students). In-state tuition at UMD is roughly 8,000.

Somehow I can't believe that the difference in room/board costs makes up the 9,000 tuition difference. The math doesn't work. So what's the catch?

Meanwhile, out of state tuition at UMD is obviously way more than in-state. And it has gone up in recent years - tuition freezes apply only to in-staters, generally.

Apologies, I made some mistakes - found older numbers not new numbers.

Maryland's tuition for out-of-state is a whopping 23K! In-state, as estimated is about 8k.

UNC is 11.7k, not 17k. Even so, still more expensive than UMD's 8k. And still hard to believe that room and board would make up a 3.7k difference.

Jay -

I don't know how you can say there are adequate physical facilities. I live in a neighborhood near Towson U., and while it used to be a commuter school, it no longer is. There isn't enough campus housing for the students they already have, and the neighborhoods surrounding the school are suffering. So please don't encourage expansion in numbers until they have enough housing for those additional students! The housing that is being built now is a woeful attempt at catching up to the expansion that's already happened, NOT future expansion. The real numbers of students who cannot be housed on campus grows every year (with this year being a possible anomaly).

Also, while they may have accepted 1,000 fewer students this year than were planned, that *doesn't* mean they've accepted fewer students. The university has been expanding year after year. So admitting fewer students does not mean there are fewer students on campus, it merely means that the number is holding steady for this year. (and Hallelujah for that!)

Towson University does not have the infrastructure to support additional enrollment. There have been exactly 600 new beds built on campus in the past DECADE, which does not come close to housing the additional students that have already been added, sometimes 1,000 per year, for the past 7-8 years. They have to live somewhere, and surrounding neighborhoods are being transformed from stable family-oriented communities into absentee-investor-owned rental properties full of transients who do not put down roots.

If the goal is to provide higher education for more Maryland residents, then a better approach would be to cap enrollment but limit the number of out-of-state students admitted to state institutions -- give Marylanders priority. And you wouldn't need to increase tuition!

Please do not subject old, stable communities to an additional tsunami of tenants which would surely wipe out our neighborhoods as we know them today. (See the now vacant lots full of weeds along Burke, Linden, and Willow east of York Road for "exhibit A" for what out-of-control rental houses will do to a community.)

Maybe you could do a story on working residents who have to take time off work to attend numerous zoning code enforcement hearings to testify about illegal rooming/boarding houses or hearings before the zoning commissioner to oppose requests for a rooming/boarding house permit. Or a story on repeated calls to police to shut down late-night and early-morning parties. Another story could be about the loss of green space in backyards as they are paved over to provide parking for more vehicles than the community was built to comfortably allow. How about writing about the taxpayer cost of additional police patrols? And upscale restaurants like Vin and Paolo's disappear to be replaced by hookah lounges, pizza parlors, and take-out beer emporiums. And apartment buildings are turned over to students which reduces the number of affordable rental units for families and young professionals. Lots of things to write about...

There's a lot more to the issue than simply letting more students onto campus. Please dig further.

I disagree with Jay Hancock . Over 80% of students at Towson University are Maryland residents and the school has increased enrollment by 4,000 within 5 years per the state of Maryland's request. Most who have commented on this blog post have also appropriately stated that in order for enrollment to increase the proper infrastructure needs to be in place. Anyone who has walked around Towson University within the past couple of years would know that a tremendous amount of construction is occurring to accommodate enrollment increasing to 25,000 students within the next decade.
As a hypothetical lets say that Towson's enrollment is increased by 2,000 next year with 400 of those students wanting to live on campus or nearby i.e. 20%. This figure is realistic given the fact that over 30% live on campus now. This decreases the quality of life in dorms for current students since you will almost certainly have to put three students in two person rooms since the dorms do not exist. Parking at Towson University is already an issue and this would make matters worse. Relations with neighbors are tense and they would not be thrilled with this, Class sizes would increase. Classrooms would be in limited supply and overused. Traffic within the area would increase. According to Jay's statistics this would still leave 14,000 applicants out in the cold.
It appears that Hancock wants funds for additional professors but I don't know where he thinks these will come from. He mentions that $1 billion is already paid by taxpayers for education and that Maryland has some of the highest taxes in the state. Tuition could be increased but even this would not allow a dramatic increase in enrollment. The majority of money each public institution receives within the University System of Maryland is state funds, not tuition dollars. This also takes more money out of the pockets of state residents in a bad economy. College professors salaries are being furloughed this year due to the economy. Perhaps he is suggesting that the school dip into it's own funds i.e. the endowment to accommodate this, that would be ridiculous.
I am not sure why he accuses the public college education system in Maryland as being inefficient and that Towson's responsibility is to serve as a place for students who did not get into college park. According to the 2003 U.S. census report the state of Maryland ranks in the top 5 with regards to having citizens who have bachelors degree. It is state law that if students at community colleges meet certain GPA and credit requirements, they are automatically enrolled at institutions that offer bachelors degree. Towson University has also ranked higher than College Park in Forbes college rankings for 2009 and ranked as a better value in the Princeton review for 2009. If enrollments are dramatically increased then it is reasonable to assume that class sizes increase as well.
If this blog is more geared towards the fact that our politicians in Annapolis have unfairly given most of state funds to Maryland in the past then that is reasonable.
I am curious as to how Jay thinks dramatic enrollment increases could be accomplished without putting our Universities/Colleges and taxpayers at a disadvantage.