Tuition to increase $6 per credit hour

Students at Northwest College and other Wyoming community colleges will pay higher tuition next year.

The Wyoming Community College Commission voted 5-2 Monday to increase tuition at the state’s seven community college districts by $6 per credit hour for in-state students.

Commission Director Jim Rose said Tuesday the increase will be effective for only one academic year to allow the commission time to develop a longer-term tuition policy.

Rose said he recommended a $5 increase per credit hour, but the commission chose to up that by an additional dollar.

Commissioners Wendy Sweeny of Worland and Sherri Lovercheck of LaGrange voted not to increase tuition. Sweeny supported the $5 per-credit hike, while Lovercheck noted that a recent increase in unemployment could mean higher enrollment.

Systemwide, the increase will raise an estimated $598,029 in additional funding for community colleges in the state.

Mark Kitchen, vice president for public relations at Northwest College, said the tuition hike will increase revenue there by roughly $247,000, according to statistics from Lisa Watson, vice president for adminsitrative services.

However, Kitchen said the tuition hike won’t make much difference in projections showing a $2 million shortfall in the Northwest College’s general fund next year, as most of that money already was included in those calculations.

“We were already estimating a $5 increase,” he said.

The increase will raise the cost of tuition to $89 per credit hour for Wyoming residents, $124 for Western Undergraduate Exchange students (students from a 15-state region who attend under a lower-tuition agreement) and $267 for other out-of-state students, Kitchen said.

Rose said the commission plans to rework the way it sets tuition for Wyoming’s community colleges.

“We’ve been using two ways to determine our position with respect to 15 comparative states: Using tuition in those states vs. our tuition, as well as the representative percentage of median family income in those states ... and comparing that percentage here in Wyoming,” Rose said.

That method is “not particularly informative in arriving at a decision” about how to set tuition at Wyoming community colleges, he said.

Rose said the commission now has data that will be more helpful in making that decision, including costs of instruction and overall costs of operation at the colleges that is “a little more based on Wyoming conditions.”

Rose said he hopes tuition eventually can be set on a biennial basis, alongside the Wyoming state budget, to provide more stable and predictable revenue for the colleges over a two-year period.

The commission will meet next at Casper College on June 1 to review “a lot of material information that we’ve accumulated and collected” in an effort to develop a tuition policy, Rose said. The aim of that policy is to be responsive to current conditions while taking a look at the future, and to provide flexibility to make adjustments, he said.

Rose said he expects the commission to vote on a new policy at its October meeting.

“That is the reason for my recommendation ... to not lock ourselves into something longer range” for this tuition increase, he said.