According to the Lafayette Journal & Courier, Purdue will be increasing its tuition by 6% for each of the next two years, raising in-state tuition from $6,092 this year to $6,458 next year and $7,095 the year after that. Purdue President Martin Jischke cited the state’s financial situation and the General Assembly’s decisions as causing a need for hard decisions. Out of state tuition is at roughly $20,000 per year. The article states that IU’s tuition is going up more slowly, 4.9% but is already more expensive at $7,112 for in-state students.
According to a similar article in the Indy Star, Stan Jones, the higher education commissioner said that the General Assembly had anticipated an increase of more like 5%.
Once again, it seems like maybe we’re eating our seed corn here by forcing schools into cuts or fee hikes. Higher education doesn’t concern me quite as much as primary education — though maybe I’m wrong on that, I could see a case to be made that higher education is more important to Indiana’s future than primary education. In any event, our state and local taxes may be staying low, but we’re mortgaging our future by pricing Indiana kids out of college. (In a perfect world, we’d get rid of some huge and wasteful federal expenditures and shift the taxes over to state and local expenditures. Big Waste #1 would be the Iraqi adventure. Hugely wasteful. Increasing evidence of corruption that makes the UN Oil-for-food corruption look relatively trivial. But, I most certainly digress.)
We complain about brain drain and a sluggish economy, but we have no one to blame but ourselves if we aren’t giving Indiana kids a top flight education here in the state and if we aren’t nurturing our research universities.
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