State Rep. Ed DeLaney suggests he knows the problem facing Indiana’s institutions of higher learning.
“I understand math,” the Indianapolis Democrat told a recent meeting of the state budget committee. “We lost about 25,000 students from our public higher education in the last five or six years.”
According to a recent report from the Indiana Capital Chronicle, data released last year showed that only half of Indiana’s 2020 high school graduates pursued some form of education beyond high school. The rate had dropped for five consecutive years, and the 2020 rate was the lowest in recent history.
What’s worse, the numbers showed only two thirds of the high school graduates who went on to college were on track to complete a degree.
Legislators took steps in their most recent session to improve the statistics, mandating automatic enrollment for eligible students in the 21st Century Scholars program and requiring all high school seniors to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid to determine their eligibility for grants and scholarships.
State Sen. Fady Qaddoura, another Indianapolis Democrat, thinks the Indiana Commission for Higher Education should be doing more to find out why so many Hoosier students aren’t getting college degrees.
“If you ask me about the one major policy that keeps me up at night,” he said, “it would be the state’s difficulty of not being able to improve these statistics, because our economy is dependent on those students graduating.”
DeLaney has a suggestion.
“In normal market thoughts, we would be lowering the tuition,” he said.
He’s talking about Economics 101: When demand drops, so should the price.
Instead, nearly all of the state’s publicly supported colleges and universities are actually raising tuition.
Those costs at Indiana University, Ball State University, Indiana State University, the University of Southern Indiana, Vincennes University and Ivy Tech Community College are all set to go up the next two years.
Conspicuously missing from that list is Purdue University, which plans to continue a decade-long freeze on tuition and fees at $9,992 a year. The cost of attending Purdue, a school that has earned national recognition for its academics, is already cheaper than the cost of attending IU and Ball State, and it’ll soon be cheaper than Indiana State as well.
During the recent budget committee meeting, the commission discussed financial incentives it had developed for colleges to boost enrollment. DeLaney wasn’t impressed.
“So what’s wrong with lowering tuition?” he asked. “I think we have great schools, and our customers aren’t showing up.”
They are showing up at Purdue, where enrollment reached an all-time high of 50,884 last fall.
That might suggest that one step in solving the enrollment challenge would be a visit to West Lafayette to learn what the folks at Purdue have figured out that the state’s other institutions of higher learning could replicate.
Keeping a lid on tuition would be one suggestion, but it might not be the only one. We’re not suggesting that Purdue has all of the answers, but from outward appearances, it would seem to have at least a few.
Anderson Herald Bulletin
