For rising University of Florida sophomore Carlos Garcia, the news is sobering: His tuition bill will be 15 percent higher this fall.
“This very much affects me,” says Garcia, 18, who is majoring in pre-med and biology.
Going to school partly with money he earned from a retail job, Garcia has hardly been a spendthrift. But now, confronting a tuition bill that could exceed $6,000, Garcia is even more concerned about his immediate financial fortunes.
“It means that everything is going to be tougher for me than I thought when I first got here,” says Garcia.
The tuition increase at UF—one of 11 public universities in Florida to win the approval of the state’s Board of Governors to tack a “tuition differential” of 7 percent onto an 8 percent increase already approved by the state legislature—comes in response to an unprecedented reduction of some $340 million in state spending for higher education.
“We’ve seen other cuts in the past,” observes Michael Brawer, CEO of the Association of Florida Colleges. “But this one has been particularly tough.” Continues Brawer: “We are now in an environment where everything is being viewed with a jaundiced eye and every single dollar is closely scrutinized.”
The total state education cut, including K-12 spending, proposed by Republican Gov. Rick Scott amounted to more than $4.6 billion. The governor has argued that the funding reductions were necessary in the face of a more than $4 billion budget deficit he inherited.
