Hailing from a middle-class background and attending the
University of Wisconsin with only the help of scholarships and loans, I — along
with many fellow students looking out for their wallets — have always
considered tuition hikes the bane of my academic career.

Despite UW administrative rhetoric constantly touting low
tuition as a primary goal, raises in the sticker price for a UW education have
been the reality in biennium budgets for many years. As much as the UW Board of
Regents seeks to ensure all academically qualified residents have equal access
to UW and that financial barriers are reduced for low-income students to allow
them to complete their degrees, legislative cutbacks to UW's funding have made
tuition increases necessary.

That reality is unlikely to change, and it might be time for
UW to consider a new model of tuition and financial assistance.

In the late 1960s, two researchers, W. Lee Hansen and Burton
Weisbrod, published a story in the Journal of Human Resources that examined state
higher education systems and found that students from affluent families
represented a disproportionately large percentage of student bodies at flagship
universities, which receive the most state funding appropriations. This
finding, as Mr. Hansen and Mr. Weisbrod pointed out, is inequitable, as the
"subsidy" low tuition offers was distributed mostly among the wealthy and
inefficient because those students would likely attend the selective public
colleges even if tuition were higher.

That continues to be the case, and although there is
something to be said for UW maintaining low tuition rates in comparison to Big
Ten schools and other comparable institutions, continual UW tuition hikes make
attendance increasingly difficult for the state's lower-income applicants. A
possible solution to this problem would be a shift to a high-tuition, high-aid model
that would raise tuition fees for all students in order to make more financial
aid available to lower-income students.

This model would be a strategic way to remedy the problem by
taking advantage of student demand. Students will continue to seek a UW
education, and if those families most able to pay a higher price for that
education do so, excess tuition revenue translated into financial aid would
make university attendance more possible for students from less wealthy
families.

The
idea is definitely not foreign to UW. In a presentation to the Board of Regents
two years ago, Freda Harris, the associate vice president for budget and
planning at UW, said a one-percent tuition increase — $40 to $60 per year per student
— would generate $5.5 million in overall additional tuition revenue. While that
shift seems more than possible, UW has not yet opted for any kind of
intentional high-tuition model.

That
is not to say, though, that a high-tuition, high-aid model does not have its
supporters. Former Regent President David Walsh has long been a champion of the
change — his support being even more relevant considering his children have and
do attend UW.

"There
is no reason why I shouldn't pay a huge amount to educate my kids at these
great schools," he told me. "I can afford it. I should pay for it. Absolutely.
And my neighbor wants his kids to go — I want him to pay for it, too."

Of course this model would depend on a fairly inelastic
demand for university admittance, but current trends at both UW and in higher
education as a whole indicate that is not likely to be a huge glitch. For
example, when considering the adoption of a high-tuition, high-aid model, the
University of Virginia examined its enrollment demand following an 11-percent
tuition increase in 2003 and saw no impact in application numbers.

Another point critics have argued in regard to the high-tuition,
high-aid model is that the more academically prepared students from higher
economic brackets will opt for a private education if the sticker prices of
state public institutions become comparable to those of private colleges. A
legitimate concern, yes, but UW's prowess as a top-notch research institution –one
of the many benefits to a UW education — offers just one reason why
academically gifted potential applicants would still choose Madison.

Finally, opponents of a purposeful shift to higher tuition
for the sake of a higher availability of financial aid say this model is a
slippery slope to privatization of state universities. Indeed, the model would
likely be unsuccessful if not coupled with continued state funding, but
preventing the loss of state money is a realistic tenet of any policy that
would raise tuition in order to increase aid.

The University of Virginia, for example, clearly outlined
this in its 2005 "Restructured Higher Education
Financial and Administrative Operations Act," which establishes a high-tuition
model. There is an explicit expectation of continued resources from the state
along with an agreement that the "Commonwealth [agrees to] continue funding the
College at the level the College would receive if this Charter Agreement had
not been put in place."

Even with this type of
safeguard and assuming the number of applicants to UW would not be
significantly affected, the high-tuition, high-aid model could only be
successful if the excess revenue from tuition was explicitly streamlined into
financial aid increases.

Done correctly, this model could provide huge relief to
lower-income UW students who are currently out-priced by UW tuition. To be
sure, some students would face a higher net cost of attendance, but that could
simply be the solution to the current system that tries to provide a blanket
subsidy — by way of low tuition — to all students, including those who don't
need it.

Kate Maternowski ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in
English.