LA CROSSE, Wis.
As a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Carmen Wilson likes the idea of sharply raising tuition to hire more professors and recruit more poor and minority students.
But as the middle-class parent of a college student, she’s not so sure about the public university’s plan to increase tuition by $220 per semester to pay for the expansion.
“I ask myself, ‘Would I be willing to donate that much to the university for those causes?’” Wilson says. “It’s absolutely a private school way of looking at it.”
UW-La Crosse has unleashed a wave of debate over its plan to expand without a dime of new state money. The experiment, if approved by the governor and lawmakers next year, could be copied by schools around the country looking for a creative way to find revenue, university officials predict.
The debate here is not about whether diversity and quality are worthwhile goals for a university, but about the price that’s worth paying for them.
The plan calls for an increase in tuition of $1,320 on top of any annual statewide tuition hikes for inflation over three years. The increases would be grandfathered so they would only affect new students starting in fall 2008.
