Senator Dan Seum has sponsored Senate Bill 75 to freeze tuition for four years for all Kentucky public universities. Here is his justification, “Since 2008, we, the state, have cut the general fund appropriation by $165 million for all eight universities. Since 2008, the universities have increased tuition by $572 million.” His insinuation is that there is pot of money out there that university presidents are sitting on and that a freeze will skunk out those extra bucks.
Read the article cited below and make sure you study the infographic to see the political grandstanding that Seum is guilty of. He publicly moans about how much his grandchild has borrowed to become a teacher while at the same time being a member of the legislature that helped to cut the same dollars that might have made that grandaughter’s debt less burdensome. Idiot or liar, your call.
With the steep increases in tuition at Kentucky’s public universities and community colleges in recent years, a state mandated tuition freeze as proposed in SB 75 might sound like a good idea. But even with past tuition increases, the state’s higher education institutions are facing significant funding shortfalls once the growth in fixed costs like health insurance and utilities, on top of General Fund cuts, are taken into consideration. Even while additional state cuts to higher education are being proposed, proponents of a tuition freeze
