UNIVERSITY WORKS TO HOLD DOWN COSTS

Thank you, Southeast Missourian, for your editorial of March 11 in which you remind the administration and Board of Regents of Southeast Missouri State University that tuition should be kept as low as possible.

The university is in complete agreement with this position. That is why we have internally cut $700,000 this year from our base budget, and $600,000 last year, using such measures as position control and hiring freezes in order to avoid raising fees by another $6.50 per credit hour. That is why, in order to provide students and faculty with today's technology, we have internally reallocated $1 million last year and $1.5 million this year for computerization and avoided raising fees by another $13.50 per credit hour or imposing a computing fee as many institutions have done. That is why we remain one of the very few institutions in the nation which maintain a textbook rental system for our students, saving the average student some $300 or $400 per year, the equivalent of $10 to $13 per credit hour.

We also agree with you that, where possible, higher education should adopt management principles from the world of business. One of those principles is benchmarking -- comparing what we do with what the competition is doing. When we benchmark, we find that our costs, even with the $4-per-credit-hour increase proposed for next year, remain near the midpoint for institutions like Southeast.

The cost of attendance is important to us and to our students, but it isn't the only consideration. Maintaining academic quality is absolutely essential, precisely because Southeast is the only institution many Southeast Missouri students feel they could possibly attend. That is why we have made a concerted effort to improve the academic preparation of our incoming students and to obtain national accreditation for many of our programs: nursing, industrial technology, business, recreation, social work, music, dietetics, teacher education and others. In most instances, enhancing the quality of programs to the level of national accreditation has meant that additional financial resources are required.

When we benchmark, we find the staffing patterns the university has adopted to fulfill its mission are very reasonable in comparison with other institutions. We have previously provided the Southeast Missourian with a detailed explanation of the growth in non-faculty positions over the past decade, as reported on our annual summary of employees. Your editorial ignored that explanation. Our staffing pattern has not been an escalations in the number of people required to do the same old jobs, as your editorial would imply, but has come about with the addition of new services, many of which brought with them their own funding: grants of many kinds, university studies, the Bootheel education Center, the Small Business Development Center, the Show Me Center, the Student Recreation Center, the University Foundation, KRCU-FM and many others.

Space doesn't permit a detailed discussion of the reasons for the historic rise in tuition costs since the early 1980s, as cited in your editorial. The basic reason, however, is that in making the decision to be a low-tax state, Missouri has decided to place a much higher share of the cost of going to college on the user -- our students and their families -- than was the case in 1980. Higher education's share of the state budget shrank throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. In several of these years, new state dollars weren't enough to keep up with high inflation rates, and many essential expenditures were deferred, positions were eliminated and educational quality suffered in Missouri.

In this climate, institutions learned the lesson that it is absolutely necessary for tuition rates to reflect the cost of inflation, just as the business adjusts for inflation the prices of automobiles, newspaper advertising and other commodities. The proposed fee increase for fiscal 1996 merely compensates for a part of the university's increased cost of operation due to such inflationary factors as postage, paper, library acquisitions, utilities, health insurance premiums and retirement benefits. For example, Southeast payments to MOSERS, the state retirement system, a cost over which the university has no control, will rise by some $500,000 nest year. The university will be making a number of internal reallocations, but increase in these necessary overhead costs must be covered by increased revenue, or they would have to come out of academic quality and services to students -- an unacceptable option.

Your editorial implies that the decline in Southeast enrollment since the mid-1980s has come about primarily because students from this region cannot afford the higher tuition. Although there may be isolated instances in which a qualified student has been priced out of higher education (and I must repeat that state policy is responsible for most of the rapid raise in tuition at all Missouri colleges and universities, not just at Southeast), the statistics indicate that our enrollment from the outstate portion of our service area remains as high as always. The university had about 4,700 undergraduates from the 24-county service area in 1980, and it had about 4,700 from those counties in 1993, despite a drop of over 1,400 high school graduates in the last decade, a 15.5 percent decrease (1992 compared to 1982). Almost all of the university's decrease in enrollment has come from St. Louis County, where families have relatively high income and where students have many choices of colleges. In marketing the university to the St. Louis County student, quality, not price, is the key factor. Reversal of the university's downward enrollment pattern cannot be achieved by cutting costs and services to the point that quality is harmed. That is shy tuition must, at least, reflect the cost of inflation.

Finally, I must also point out that, as in business, our board of directors has the last word on any proposed price increase. The president and the board of regents haven't yet acted on the Budget Review Committee recommendation for fiscal 1996 tuition and other charges. The board is extremely sensitive to issues of affordability and is insistent that the university be managed frugally, while maintaining academic quality at a level which will permit our graduates to compete with those who have attended other institutions. I can assure you that recommendations for fees and the university budget will undergo careful consideration by the board and that maintaining access for the people of this region through affordable fees will be one of the regents' primary considerations.

Art L. Wallhausen is assistant to the president of Southeast Missouri State University.