As Fort Lewis College prepares its 2016-17 budget, rising expenses are likely to lead to a tuition increase.
On Friday, the FLC Department of Finance and Administration suggested an 8.61 percent hike for Colorado residents’ tuition at the Business Affairs Committee meeting with the Board of Trustees.
An increase at that level is necessary to balance the college’s budget, said Michele Peterson, associate vice president for finance and administration. The increase would raise in-state tuition to just over $6,000, while out-of-state tuition would hold steady at just over $16,000 for the eighth consecutive year.
“Analyses we’ve done showed that compared to everyone else in the state, we would remain the second lowest in cost, even if they only raise their tuition 5 percent,” Peterson said. “And we’re the lowest in the state for nonresident students.”
Raising out-of-state tuition could be a can of worms, and the reason is the Native American tuition waiver. The state reimburses the college for qualifying Native American students’ tuition, including out-of-state students, who are reimbursed at the nonresident rate. If out-of-state tuition increases, so does the state’s responsibility.
“We requested an increase in the amount of nonresident Native American reimbursement (for the tuition waiver) by $1.2 million for next year,” said Steve Schwartz, Fort Lewis College’s vice president for finance and administration, “and the state says ‘Because that is FLC’s mission, we’re going to fund it.’ But every year, we request an increase as that population grows at the school, and the JBC (Joint Budget Committee) analyst wants to control that.”
Nonresident students make up about 45 percent of the college’s student body, he said, and it continues to grow, perhaps because the out-of-state tuition has remained stable.
“They are essentially subsidizing in-state students as the state keeps cutting back funding,” Peterson said. “Colorado residents are the ones who voted for TABOR (the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights), and they’re paying less taxes, but they have to pay more for their children to go to college.”
Several members of the Board of Trustees were not comfortable with the idea of only resident students getting a tuition increase. “If the cost of education is rising,” Thomas Schilling said, “we’d be putting that increase entirely on residents’ backs. One hundred percent of students should contribute to that, not just 55 percent.”
The finance department will prepare several different proposals, including some with both resident and nonresident increases, to be discussed during a Board of Trustees teleconference in May. One model will include a 5 percent increase for resident students and a 2 percent increase for nonresidents. “I can pretty much guarantee that if we raise nonresident tuition next year, the following year there will be a note in the Long Bill that we can’t raise it then,” Schwartz said.
The JBC did not accept the governor’s proposed cut of $20 million to higher education in the draft Long Bill, keeping the higher education amount flat compared to the 2015-16 budget. That would lead to a loss of more than $340,000 for FLC because of a performance-funding model the state uses, Schwartz said.
“It just seems like a little bit in a $60-million budget,” he said, “but it’s not the only pressure on the budget.”
Also on the horizon is a potential overtime payroll requirement that may come out of the Department of Labor as early as July and be implemented after Labor Day.
The labor department calculates who is eligible to be exempt from being paid time-and-a-half over 40 hours per week by evaluating who is salaried, whether the salary meets a specified minimum and analyzing whether the employee’s job responsibilities are primarily executive, administrative or professional. The department is considering raising the minimum salary level from $23,000 to almost $51,000, FLC Human Resources Director Darren Mathews said.
“This would hit higher education a lot harder,” Schwartz said. “In most industries, about 20 percent of employees are exempt, but in higher ed, it’s the opposite, about 80 percent.”
Mathews estimated that of the 300 employees who are currently exempt, about 140 would no longer qualify under the revised salary level. That number could go up significantly if adjunct professors, instructors and coaches were thrown into the mix.
Not only would the change require significantly more supervision, it would require major changes in payroll management. And 26 employees – those in admissions counseling, Outdoor Pursuits and Student Union programming personnel – would accrue significant overtime during certain parts of the year.
“This could be a substantial hit for us,” Schwartz said. “We would have to address incorporating the overtime expense into tuition or from cuts in other areas.”
abutler@durangoherald.com