Tuition freeze is a temporary fix, analysts say

Last week, a House committee heard testimony for a bill, proposed by Del. Heather R. Mizeur, to fix tuition rates during a student’s four-year stay in the University System of Maryland.

That could be problematic as health insurance, facilities maintenance costs and salaries rise and students have to help foot the bill, said Julie Bell, who directs the education program for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

‘‘Tuition freezes don’t get at all the problems that cause tuitions to rise,” she said. ‘‘We don’t see long-term tuition freezes. It’s not practical. It’s not feasible. It doesn’t work.”

The state would save $16.3 million in fiscal 2009 if tuitions increase by 4 percent, according to budget estimates. If the General Assembly caps tuition increases at 3 percent, the state would save $12.2 million.

On Thursday, House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Dist. 30) of Annapolis was optimistic that the state’s tuition rates would remain stable.

‘‘I think there’s a good possibility that there will be minimal cuts in higher education that would not trigger a tuition increase, so I think we could be successful in holding the line on tuition,” he said.

Maryland currently has the 12th-highest tuition rates in the country; a freeze would drop the state down to 16th on the list, said Patrick J. Hogan, a former senator who is now the chief lobbyist for the University System of Maryland.

The three-year tuition freeze has saved each student an average of $1,618 at the University of Maryland, College Park, and $1,598 at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, according to budget documents.

At Towson, students saved an average of $1,277. At Frostburg State, they saved $1,232.

If Mizeur’s bill is passed, each school in the university system must publish the tuition rate being charged to students for four years. Once the rate is published, it cannot be increased. In 2003, Illinois passed its own Truth in Tuition Act, which required the state’s public universities to freeze tuitions for its incoming freshmen.

‘‘It’s a great thing to get us to try to freeze tuition every year that we can,” said Mizeur (D-Dist. 20) of Takoma Park. ‘‘It’s a year-to-year question mark as to whether we would be able to do that.”

If the bill is not passed, it will be forwarded to a commission — run by Del. John L. Bohanan Jr. — that looks into long-term funding solutions for Maryland’s colleges and universities. The commission would review the proposal when it meets this summer and send it to O’Malley and the General Assembly to be implemented as policy.

‘‘There’s a great attraction to students and parents to know up front what their costs are going to be,” said Bohanan (D-Dist. 29B) of California.

State lawmakers are more likely to cut funding for higher education funding during bad budget times but pour more dollars into it when the economy rebounds. And Maryland needs to devise a long-term financing strategy for its university system schools that ties tuition increases to income, she said.

California and Virginia have also frozen tuitions at one point or another, but eventually unfroze them, said Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent nonpartisan group in San Jose, Calif.

‘‘Just continuing to freeze and unfreeze tuition is not going to get us any closer to our long-term goals of educating children and establishing a long-term financing strategy,” Finney said. ‘‘What we really haven’t seen is state-level leadership on these issues. They keep putting it off and trying to balance the budget and do these short-term fixes.”