Perry has commitment issues with state tuition

In what amounts to one of the most hypocritical and backwards proposals ever, Gov. Perry in his eighth State of the State Address (Note: now would be a good time to enforce term limits) proposed a four year tuition freeze. Fight the urge to applaud. If it weren't for Perry, tuition wouldn't be so absolutely out of control to begin with.

The 2003 deregulation of tuition lead to yearly rapid and monumental hikes in tuition state wide. When Texas lawmakers deregulated tuition, they didn't stipulate that if the economy gets worse and the board of regents goes crazy with the tuition increases, then the Legislature can step in and start regulating again.

The way the freeze would work is that the students would start taking classes as freshman, and then when they are sophomores the cost of attending the university might go up, but the cost they paid as freshmen would be locked in. This continues on so that by the time they are in their fourth year, the school is charging incoming freshmen four years worth of increases, more than the graduating seniors. Neat.

Except, not all college students graduate in four years. According to the College Navigator website, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, less than 50% of University of Texas at Austin students graduate in four years. This means that in their fifth year students' tuition will jump up to accommodate all four years of increases all at once.

Supporters of this idea keep saying that it will be a great motivator for students to finish college 'on time', which condescendingly implies that students are currently in need of motivation to graduate in four years.

College students often take longer than four years to complete their degrees because of the increasing amount of responsibilities, not to mention the skyrocketing rate of now deregulated tuition that makes taking 12-16 hour semesters financially impossible.

The reality is that the Legislature can not have its cake and eat it too. Obviously, they feel like they need control of tuition, but refuse to admit that they made a mistake and wont assert that control in any long standing legal way.

Perry's proposal, which now has majority support in the Senate, wont fix the tuition problems that students are facing, and more over lacks a sense of responsibility for those problems, which he helped create. I propose Perry fund a line of "I'm sorry I ruined the education system" license plates before he starts messing with tuition again.