This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
The vast majority of state funding to the state’s University System is used to lower tuition for in-state students, which is as high as $15,520 this year at the UNH Durham campus.
Without that state aid and the assistance it affords students, Granite State families would inevitably be forced to pay more to attend a state four-year college, Chancellor Catherine Provencher told lawmakers.
Staring down the barrel of a roughly 30% cut from the state, the system’s leaders argued that hiking tuition to make up the difference — in a state that’s already one of the most expensive to attend college – simply isn’t an option: They’d lose students.
“Price sensitivity and elasticity show, our enrollment is going to fall off if we increase tuition,” Provencher said. The system’s board has already approved a tuition increase for next year, up to 2.5%.
Provencher said she could manage Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s proposed 4% reduction — bringing state funding down from $95 million to $91.2 million each year — but the House’s reduction would tank annual funding to $66.2 million.
She called that “unsustainable” and asked senators during a budget hearing to reverse it. If they don’t, Provencher said the savings will have to come through cuts to services and “massive restructuring.”
Even at current funding levels, the cost to attend the University of New Hampshire for in-state students is $38,000 a year, making it more expensive for Granite State families than many out-of-state colleges.
The state’s university system – which includes the University of New Hampshire, Plymouth State University, Keene State College and UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law – is one of several state entities requesting the Senate to restore funding that was cut by the House of Representatives. The community college system, on the other hand, would get more money than it did last year under proposals from both the House and Ayotte.
When Sen. Cindy Rosenwald, a Nashua Democrat, asked how much tuition for university students would rise if the House’s cuts pass, Provencher didn’t have an exact number. With financial aid factored in, New Hampshire students on average pay about $7,000 per year in tuition, and out-of-state attendees pay around $16,600, she said.
Michael Pilot, chair of the USNH Board of Trustees, said if they raised tuition, it’d backfire.
“Even if we tried to pass it through over the next three-year cycle, it would price us out of the market for available students,” Pilot said. “We would become so expensive relative to the opportunities that we would not be able to enroll our class, putting further pressure on the revenue and making the operating deficit even bigger.”
Pilot and Provencher instead tried to convey higher education’s value to the state’s economy. The system’s roughly 26,000 students — about half of whom hail from New Hampshire — are the key to building a younger workforce and a thriving economy, they said.
The Granite State’s working population is the oldest in the country, with people over age 55 accounting for 27% of the state’s workforce.
“It’s critical that we have … new, young talent, right? A pipeline to grow and attract business in the state,” Provencher said.
But like many around the country, Pilot noted, New Hampshire colleges are trying to catch up with a “tectonic shift” in industry pressures.
“We find ourselves with a structural deficit,” Pilot said. “We’ve got a system that’s built for a market that is no longer available to us.”
Senators seemed receptive to the college leaders’ request. Like Rosenwald, others echoed concerns about pushing tuition increases to students and further digging the university system into a financial hole.
“You would not be able to raise tuition on the incoming class during that same period of time that you’re having the decrease in state funding, and therefore not be able to raise that tuition until a year later,” said Sen. James Gray, a Republican from Rochester who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. “That would cause additional problems.”
Gray is the Senate’s non-voting representative to the university system’s board. The committee’s vice chair, Bradford Republican Daniel Innis, is a faculty member in the UNH business college.
In accordance with a new legislative ethics law, both disclosed their involvement but said it didn’t constitute a conflict of interest. Both said they plan to vote on higher education funding in the state budget.
