HB 331 drives funds, students away from USU
Efforts to amend House Bill 331 failed.
In March, the Utah State Legislature passed the bill, which requires out-of-state college students to earn 60 credits in a Utah higher education institution before being granted in-state tuition.
The bill was put into effect in May without the inclusion of a “grandfather clause,” which Steve Palmer, former president of Associated Students of Utah State University, and current President Celestial Starr Bybee had fought for, along with many university officials and student representatives across Utah. The clause would have allowed out-of-state students to receive in-state tuition during the 2002-03 school year.
Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies Joyce Kinkead said the bill is believed to have kept approximately 700 students from enrolling at USU this semester, though the exact numbers of impact are not known.
“We won’t know until the actual official enrollment day [Sept. 15] the official numbers of students that didn’t re-enroll,” she said.
Legislators expected the bill to raise approximately $5 million for the new budget.
“They really felt this would help the financial crisis,” Kinkead said.
With nearly 700 out-of-state students not enrolling, however, tuition losses will near $3 million.
There was a chance the bill could have been vetoed over the summer.
Bybee said, “The Governor could have chosen to sign it or not sign it.”
Gov. Mike Leavitt sent a letter to Speaker Martin R. Stephens, stating HB331 needed to be reconsidered with students already in the system in mind.
“Myself, [Executive Vice President] Mike Waggoner and [President’s Leadership Council President] Justin Hamilton teamed up with other student body presidents from around the state and met with most of the House leadership in the majority and minority party and most of the House leadership in the Senate. We met with them and talked about grandfathering and lowering the credit requirement,” she said.
These arguments were made to the Legislature, because there were many students who had met the previous residency requirements, but would not meet the new requirements.
Rep. Jeff Alexander responded to the student’s propositions by telling them they were learning a lesson that laws can, and will, change, Bybee said.
Most representatives agreed with the students on the grandfathering, but didn’t pay much attention to the issue of lowering credit requirements, she said.
“They were going to grandfather and make the school make up the money that they would have lost,” Bybee said in regards to March legislative sessions.
The Board of Regents decided it wanted to pull the grandfather modifications from consideration, and they were pulled, she said.
Bybee and her colleagues went to a special legislative session in May.
“We were sitting there, looking at each other, and realized that it wasn’t going to come up. And I realized at that very moment that if it didn’t pass that day, it wasn’t going to pass at all,” she said.
The Legislature met again in June and July, but by that time, the bill was no longer an issue. The Legislature had already worked the new law into the new budget.
“They told us that if we could find the money in the budget, they would look and see about [modifying HB331],” she said.
Bybee said she and her colleagues made attempts at finding money in the budget to modify HB331. She compared the situation to a child asking a parent for a dollar and the parent requiring the child to find the money in their household budget.
“I think that on any other year they would have fixed the problem,” she said.
The government later discovered the budget had an additional $171 million shortfall.
“This next year is going to be even worse,” Bybee said. “We [USU] were almost going to get cut, over the summer, 9 percent more.”
A 9 percent cut at USU equals about $10 million to $12 million, she said.
“Now they’re working with a new budget, and since President [Kermit L.] Hall has been great enough to show them the money that they’ve actually lost, we’re hoping that will help us make our argument,” Bybee said.
Attempts are going to be made in the near future to lower the credit requirements for in-state tuition from 60 to 48, she said.
For students like Tagg Archibald, a junior majoring in political science, the damage has already been done.
“I can’t afford it right now,” he said. “I might not be able to pay my tuition in my last year.”
He said if an organized rally took place for the next legislative session, he would take part.
Kinkead said one of the worst effects of HB331 is the discontinuance of Aggie tradition in families.
“There are families that have been Aggies for generations and had expectations that their children would be Aggies and now that has been cut off,” she said.
Students who are not aware of how they can be involved in the decision-making process should view the Utah Student Association’s Web site at http://utahstudents.org.
Bybee said students should register to vote.
“We have 18,000 students on the USU campus,” she said. “I would say 14,000 of those students are in-state residents and could vote. That is 14,000 people the Legislature would have to work for.”
Out-of-state students were not required to pay out-of-state tuition this year if they had qualified as residents under the old requirements. Kinkead said retention awards were issued to students to ease the financial burden.
“The president and provost were very keen to protect the students as much as possible,” she said.
Bybee said students need to get involved and contact their legislators as much as possible. Lowering the credit requirement is a possibility for the 2003 legislative session.
“Representative Jeff Alexander said, ‘Let this be a lesson to you that you can never count on laws and that they can change anytime,’ but it’s really, ‘Let this be a lesson to be involved in the political process,'” Bybee said.
-str@cc.usu.edu