Md. Keeps a Lid on Tuition

For 3rd Straight Year, In-State Cost Stays the Same

At a time when every other state is raising tuition, Maryland froze in-state tuition for the third straight year yesterday for undergraduates entering its public institutions this fall.

Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) and university leaders announced the news outside the main library of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, declaring that affordable higher education is a priority in his administration. A 4 percent tuition increase had been planned but was scrapped.

The three-year freeze follows several years of spiraling tuition prices. For school years that began in 2002, 2003 and 2004, the university system raised tuition by as much as 33 percent because the system was faced with a budget deficit and received less funding from the state. O'Malley, when he was mayor of Baltimore, had been critical of the increases.

"In order to have a better future, you have to invest in a better future," O'Malley said at a news conference also attended by the university system's chancellor, William E. Kirwan. O'Malley joked about how the issue has become "near and dear to my heart" because his two daughters are 16 and 17.

"The confluence of interests here should be very obvious to all," he said.

The decision, made yesterday by the University System of Maryland Board of Regents, followed efforts by O'Malley to maintain state funding for higher education. Maryland lawmakers have increased public higher-education funding by 9.7 percent, Kirwan said, making the freeze possible.

In Virginia, lawmakers cut higher-education funding, and schools followed with announcements of tuition increases of 5 to 10 percent.

Several public university systems have announced plans to increase tuition rates for 2008-09, including the state university system of Florida, 6 percent; University of Washington campuses, 7 percent; and University of California campuses, 7.4 percent.

"We haven't found anyone else who has done it this way," said Peter McPherson, president of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. "An agreement between the state of Maryland and the university system of Maryland to work together is just excellent."

And higher-education costs are going to keep rising, experts said.

"It doesn't seem to stop, but I think the issue is, 'Are there going to be ways that we find to produce education more at a lower cost,' " said Sandy Baum, senior policy analyst for the nonprofit College Board and an economics professor at Skidmore College.

The decision by Maryland's regents stood out all the more, experts said, because tuition at four-year, state universities nationwide rose more rapidly over a 10-year period from 1997-98 to 2007-08, up an average of 4.4 percent annually, than it did in the previous decade. The College Board also said the average tuition increase at four-year public universities was 6.6 percent this past school year, compared with the previous year.

Tuition for in-state undergraduates at Maryland public colleges will remain as it was since 2006, averaging about $5,081 at the system's 11 degree-granting universities. At the University of Maryland at College Park, tuition is almost $8,000 for in-state undergraduate students.

Kirwan said tuition will increase for out-of-state students. At College Park, for example, spokesman Millree Williams said tuition would increase by about 4 percent for out-of-state undergraduates, who this past year paid about $22,000, and out-of-state fees for full-time undergraduate students would rise 2.6 percent. Fees will rise at other institutions, too.

Kirwan said that with yesterday's action, an in-state student who enrolled in a Maryland system campus in the fall of 2005 and graduates in spring 2009 will have paid the same tuition for all four years.

"You find me another state in the union that can make that claim," he said. When he discusses the tuition freeze with leaders of other university systems, he said, "Their mouths drop open."

Staff writer Susan Kinzie contributed to this report.